OK, a slightly tongue-in-cheek title but Maki has an interesting post over at DoshDosh discussing two more articles on Cracked.com’s template for social media success.
It’s interesting stuff but the main point sees to be understanding exactly what your potential audience will be interested in reading.
What are the hot topics of the day? What people, examples, companies and references will resonate with them?
How do you find this information? You get involved in the communities where your prospects are – online and offline.
Let’s take a nice made up example:
Assume you’re a small advertising agency in a mid-size town. You make it a priority to attend as many Chamber of Commerce events as you can (a community of prospects).
At the latest event everyone is complaining about the cancellation of a local farmer’s market that brought tourists into the town every weekend and promoted indigenous business. Without it, shoppers use the big out of town retailers instead.
A ha! Farmers market is a totem. Big retailers are a totem.
So how can you use that?
- You could start a campaign to ‘bring back the farmer’s market’ – and design posters for all the local business owners to display.
- You could write an article for the local paper about what the farmers market teaches us about marketing, or the decline of town centers or the need to specialise / differentiate.
- You could run a free workshop for small businesses on how to get more weekend trade. Call it, ‘After the Farmers Market: How to beat the big box retailers and win weekend trade in MyTown’.
Good ideas?
Who knows, but all three would help expose you to prospective customers and demonstrate your knowledge and expertise.
You’d certainly want to give them a little more thought first but by keeping in touch with what your potential customers are talking about it’s easy enough to find topics that will attract their attention.
On a related note, for any Derry-based readers, we’ll be presenting a one day workshop in early November in conjunction with Austin’s Training. The topic: “Marketing Through a Downturn”.
Drop me a line if you’re interested in attending.
