How do I use social media to shamelessly market my business?

The wonderful world of the web these days (WEB2.0) enables us to touch base with our customers/potential customers in a soft way, build up trust, get creative with content, have the freedom to add and change information on our websites and blogs plus drive traffic to places we want it most – all for the cost of our own time. Social media is one of the most powerful ways to do this right now.

Okay, so I’m always looking for quirky and powerful ways to market the business online (and our clients too), using the strong social media tools we have available to us. WIN WIN! To attract people’s attention, I need to keep it fresh, original and catchy for my target market and reader base. I also need to think about how I can increase good quality traffic to the website via the platforms and keywords I choose to use – then capture the viewer’s interest so as they keep coming back for more.

Last year I visited my home country, England, and ended up breaking my leg, lengthening my three week holiday to a three month long haul stay!

With so much time on my hands, I started to think of creative ways to market the business and grab online and offline attention.

The one thing that I thought was a burden then turned out to be a blessing! The leg cast – from hip to toe!

I decided to utilise my leg cast as a means of advertising space. Here I could softly promote the outstanding businesses I work with, and of course Thinktank Media too.

This strategy would be used to gain exposure via all the juicy social media platforms in a unique, catchy and extremely powerful way. Now stick with me here!

Click here to see how we did this. It was such a fun and entertaining ‘cast paint branding session’, with a few gin and tonics thrown in… because we can!

We used many platforms to expose the leg cast in a text based, picture and video format; this gained us an unexpectedly high amount of traffic, attention and new clients. We received a whole bunch of emails, tweets and we even saw people sharing this with their friends. But why?

I asked my trusty followers on Twitter why they were sharing this, plus other people that had forwarded it on too. Here are some of the answers I received:

1. Business owners saw it as a way to gain THEMSELVES attention-immediately (on Twitter). Interesting hey?
2. They wanted to help me out (sometimes people love to assist others, they find it easier to promote other people rather than themselves.
3. Using our quirky pictures and videos got them more click throughs to their own websites.
4. They believed their follow base on Twitter increased due to “retweeting this” (sharing my post on Twitter via their tweets).
5. It got them thinking outside of the box, with new ways to promote their own business.
6. They had a resource, some material and content that they could write about in their blog posts, and talk about on and offline.

We even got asked by quite a few people how much would it cost to advertise on the cast! Hmmm… interesting, save that for next time. So, people were using our pictures as a way to gain themselves attention yet at the same time, they were passing on our message.

This is why social media and social networking works – I love it! It’s all about word-of-mouth, getting creative and providing value. And THAT my friends is one of the fastest ways to gain exposure, attention and build up a trustworthy fan base for you business – then drive traffic to your site.

What did I (as a small business owner) take from this, apart from a whole bunch of ideas and some quality feedback? Plain and simple – a new strategy to our business plan. By using this strategy we can add value to our clients by gaining them some powerful and free exposure, yet at the same time we get a healthy promoting session too.

Each month we decided we would offer one of our lucky clients the opportunity to be promoted exclusively in an extremely quirky and catchy way! When I say promoted, what I mean by this is giving them viral exposure, growing their presence through the wonderful web2.0 platforms (eg. on our blog, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, bookmarks, YouTube plus many of the video platforms we use and drive traffic to their site too). It will be unique, catchy and different. It also raises my heart rate above 100BPM, and I’m guessing you now me by now, I love that!

Have a think about what you have just read.

How can you get creative with social media and shamelessly market your business?

How can you add value to your clients/target market through the Web2.0 platforms?

How can you make it fresh, different, catchy and at the same time make it a win win?

I’m really interested to hear what you come up with. If you need any quick ideas then feel free to comment too and I will get straight back to you.

Sam Mutimer is a creative Web 2.0 strategist, speaker and social media marketer based at the ever-developing Thinktank Media. Sam has experience in the latest strategies and functionalities within the Web 2.0 world.