Editor’s Note: This post was originally published on Seattle 2.0, and imported to GeekWire as part of our acquisition of Seattle 2.0 and its archival content. For more background, see this post.
By David Aronchick
One of the biggest failures you can make for your company is adopting the Field of Dreams approach to marketing – I promise if you build it, people will not come. Ever. If this thought enters your mind for even a second, whatever you are planning to do will fail. Marketing your startup is a daily, brutal grind, but that’s your only chance of ever having any success. Assuming you would like to win, how do you get there?
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What’s the purpose of the channel you’re developing? Blog posts are great for subscribers and long lasting positions, and semi regular updates, twitter accounts for one-to-one communication, and facebook posts somewhere in between.
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What does success look like for a given set of work? If you’re looking for direct traffic wins, that may look very differently than if you are simply trying to engage your users. One is all about the short term wins (retweets, facebook likes, emails), the other is measured only after the search engines have had a chance to update their indexes (SEO, unique domains, etc).
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How long is your window for engagement? Being responsive to customers wins loyalty, and more users via word of mouth but is extremely short term. Miss a day, and you will miss lots of opportunities. Deep links, in-bound traffic and conversions are long slow burns; they take commitment but it is not the kind of thing that will be won or lost on a days postings.
There are lots more stats – the important thing here is thinking through up front what matters for you and your business.
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Frequency – more is almost always better, and regularity counts. If you are going to engage, commit.
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Content – There’s absolutely no harm in being a complete sell-out in these mediums, take every chance to talk about yourself you can. But, at the same time, people are not going to share unless it means something to them – help your readers and followers see themselves in your writings and they will want to connect and share even more.
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Length – It can vary wildly, but when all else fails, see the content point above. You could write a six word story or a four thousand word treatise, but all that matters is if your users care. Tweets and facebooks have length as well; whether or not they are simple two word responses, or URLs and detailed content, do not just think about blogs when it comes to getting your message out.
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Resourcing – I highly recommend that it is someone’s full time job to check all your accounts and do it on a daily basis. A part-timer could work, but it is one of those things that quickly can fall by the way-side when meetings and other deliverables pop up. Nothing sticks out as a sore thumb more than a blog or a social account that has not been updated in months.
The nice part about this is that there is no single formula that will work – on this, I completely agree with Jason Cohen. You should try a thousand things, some will work and some will not, but you will have a presence and that matters. Marketing will be far more hit and miss than other areas of your business, but the most important thing is to dive in. Because the bigger the success or failure, the more information you will get about your profile in the world, whether about your site, your company or you. In this case, it is not just ok to be self-centered, it is a recipe for success.
