Your Employees Are Your Best Marketing Asset

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Your employees are your greatest digital marketing asset. Everyone can share content and influence online – and that includes the people who make up your workforce. Use them!

If your employees aren’t raising awareness for your business, then you’re missing out. Employees are out in the field representing your brand. That’s a powerful asset to harness.

Here are five ways to help your employees spread your brand message.

Share your brand message.

Provide employees with your brand messaging materials. This makes it easy for them to use the proper messaging and positioning to showcase your business. Make sure everything you share with employees is to the point and accurate to your brand message.

Empower employees as the ultimate insiders.

Involve employees in new business planning. Let them see what’s new first. Give them access that outsiders won’t get. Make them feel important and special.

Then let them know how they can help spread the word. Give them ideas, make it clear what will be most helpful.

Reward efforts.

Be sure to provide tangible thanks when employees engage with prospects and share important brand messages and campaigns. Figure out something meaningful. Be sure to reward consistently.

Let your employees represent!

Send your employees to conferences and events. Sending employees to targeted professional development seminars and conferences is a great way to empower your team and get in front of new audiences.

Make sure they know what outcomes will be most valuable. Let them know what success looks like. Do you want them to collect contacts? Attend particular activities? Define what makes the investment worthwhile.

Be a great employer.

Happy employees will tell positive, compelling stories about you. Make sure the daily experience of working for you is great! People who love where they work will spread the good word about you.

Before You Spend a Dime on Search Ads Focus on SEO

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It’s a tempting thought. Why not just buy a Google search ad to get to the top of search results? For long term marketing results, SEO is your better investment.

Pay Per Click advertising (PPC) advertising are the advertisements you see at the top of these search results pages. The advertiser pays whenever someone clicks on the ad. With organic SEO, your results are on the page and you do not pay each time you earn a click.

SEO Leads to Good Page Position

If your site ranks high in Google’s result pages, that’ll result in a lot of organic traffic. Overall, organic search results have a much higher click-through rate than advertisements in Google. Data from Yoast shows that organic search actually drives 53% of website traffic, while paid search drives only 27%.

Earning a Good Rank

SEO is a lot of work. Ads go away as soon as you stop paying. However, a good website with high-quality content and brand authority, will not stop ranking overnight.

You need:

  • Great content
  • Use keywords
  • Link internally and externally
  • Compliance with technical requirements for accessibility and ease of use

You’ll need to have great content in order to convince people of your product or service, even if you get your traffic through advertisements.

Google Is Getting Smarter

Google is getting more sophisticated about analyzing website content. To qualify for a search ad, you need to have demonstrated content to back up the ad. So you need to do that SEO work after all.

SEO is more work than setting up an advertising campaign. It will not get you immediate results. But in the long run, it is the most important strategy to attract traffic to your website.

People Want a Relationship Online

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A trend I have been happily reading about is the growing expectation of a relationship online. People are savvy enough about social media that it is not enough for you to push content at them. They expect you to interact, engage, and be about them as much as you are about you.

Yup, relationship building. It is the approach that always wins.

Your online strategy needs to be far less about follower count and much more about how you interact and engage with your online tribe. Social media must be about building relationships. A healthy relationship means give and take. It means that both parties have equal footing.

Here are five ways you can show appreciation, connection and concern online. Doing these things will help you build a tribe that matters.

Share their content.

Take time to see what your active followers are posting on their channels. Share the things that represent a good intersection of their interests and yours. In a relationship, both parties should have the opportunity to initiate discussion.

Say thanks.

Appreciate your network by taking time to say thanks. Thanking your network for input, or simply for being connected, is easy to do and can help strengthen connection.

Acknowledge that your followers have lots of choices and limited time. Thank them for making you part of their online engagement.

Make comments into content.

Getting comments and feedback? Use them on your social channels as content! Make a post about a review or comment. Create a meme that uses a follower’s quote.

Sharing feedback is a great way to showcase social proof. This also highlights that you do read and care about comments and other input from followers.

Let followers set the agenda.

Get your followers by giving them a vote in what you do. Be sure to ask people what they want from you online. Point out what you do to deliver.

This also helps with specific business needs. Considering a new logo or tag line? Get input from your tribe. Need to name something? Give them options to choose.

Offer exclusives.

One of the best parts of a relationship is knowing more than people that don’t take time to be connected. Share thoughts and inside information with your followers that add benefits to their relationship with you.

Tell them about your plans. Share the back story on a product or service. Share personal stories about the people behind the brand.

None of these relationship-building tactics needs to be difficult. Develop relationships in a way that is natural for you and your brand. Those connections will really help you tap into the value of social media in creating connections for your brand, now and in the future.