5 Small Steps Toward a Social Media Campaign

Congratulations! You’ve started a business. No one in town makes a widget like you do. Not only that, your widgets are excellent. In fact, as soon as you open, fans of the widget seek you out and become your first customers. Between them and the neighborhood walk-in traffic you are … barely surviving.

Time to get started marketing the widget and why it’s best to buy it from YOU. Traditional marketing campaigns are great – direct mail, advertisements, press releases, coupons, etc. – but it’s time to jump into web 2.0 and see how new media can help your widget survive and grow. Here are five steps I suggest – in the order presented:

1. Finalize your logo or type treatment and create a succinct tagline
2. Build a website consisting of four basic pages: landing/home, about the widget, about YOU (the owner) and contact/order information. The landing page is your portal to new media channels (see #3)
3. Set up social media channels including twitter, facebook, flickr, youtube, blog, etc and use them to research and communicate with your customers. (I presented an example of the “right” way to use social media  here.)
4. Design and print (hard) business cards, brochures and other relative marketing collateral for distribution
5. Upkeep (at least): 3 tweets/day; 1 facebook status update/day; 1 blog post/week. PLUS daily monitoring and responding to social media activity. It’s also nice to post flickr pictures (of people using your widget) and youtube videos (if appropriate.) Updating should happen at least twice a month.

Walking through these steps gives you an opportunity to keep the widget’s identity consistent. The logo will go on everything that comes after it; the website and new media channels will be printed on all hard collateral; actively participating in upkeep guarantees you get to know WHO your customer is and – because information about your widget is all over the internet – can easily point them to your product.

The process, as outlined above, prepares a strong foundation on which to build a tailor made social media marketing campaign specifically for your widget.