Photo courtesy of Sebastian Bergmann
There’s been a lot of talk recently about whether websites have outlived their usefulness and are merely dinosaurs left over from 1990s, like grunge music and flannel shirts.
But if you’ve looked in stores recently, baby doll dresses and combat boots are back in style. So too, websites have found new life and have moved beyond serving as online brochures.
Pete Blackshaw wrote a great article in Advertising Age about how websites can help populate your organization’s social networking sites. But I’d like to take this one step further – they can integrate your traditional and social media marketing efforts.
How? The key is to have your blog, the living, changing part of your website, serve as the heart of your marketing activities. Traditional media pumps people to content on the blog, which then pumps the same content to your social media properties.
But for this to work effectively, there are some things you need to keep in mind:
Make Your Newsroom Social: Think outside of the box and don’t stick to the notion that blogs are just a place to post online columns or commentaries. Instead, think of it as a social media newsroom. You can post links to press releases, videos, news stories, informational articles and commentaries.
Don’t Hide Your Light Under a Bushel: The call-to-action for social media efforts (and most ads) is to drive people to your website. So it’s important to make sure that your blog, where you post the most up-to-date information, is located on your home page. Don’t hide it away or make people look for it.
Clean-Up the Marketing Mess: Marketing efforts often operate in silos. But by using your blog differently, you can tie traditional and social media together. For example, if you’re hospital is running ads to promote your orthopedics program, your direct marketing materials or community newsletter should also highlight the program. You can then post these stories on your blog and Facebook page, and use Twitter to post factoids from the articles and link back to your blog. The same is true for videos, which can be posted on your blog, Facebook page and YouTube. Then use Twitter to tell people about the videos and link to the videos.
Timing is Everything: This might seem pretty simple, but it has far-reaching effects. For example, is your hospital promoting your cardiac service line by running ads the local newspaper or TV? Make sure to post articles about the program on your blog and issue posts about the topic on your Twitter feed and Facebook page. If your organization publishes a community newsletter, make sure that cardiac articles appear around the same time. All of a sudden, you’ve got an integrated marketing program.
No Man is An Island: And the Same Holds True for Twitter. Advertising campaigns promote programs and services. Facebook is used to post videos and engage the community. But Twitter is often out on its own, retweeting others and posting interesting news stories. While these are great uses of Twitter, you should also use it to tweet out facts and links to articles that appear on your blog, so you’re directing people to information that supports your marketing efforts.
Go Where the People Are: The goal of marketing efforts is to reach people wherever they are. It’s not enough to post videos on YouTube and on Your Facebook page and Tweet links to these pages. This information should be posted on your blog, too.
Make it Easier for People to Find You: We all know when people have a question, they Google it. The great news about posting regular updates to your blog is that it increases your website’s search engine optimization – so it’s easier for people to find.
So think again the next time someone tells you websites are dead. Instead, think of what you’re doing to breathe life into your blog – and your website.
Websites aren’t dead they just need updated. Big Difference. Very informative post, Thanks!
It is important for blogs to be updated, but your post is quite informative.