No doubt this is self serving, but we have found this to be an effective strategy. Our various smb's have used a variation of this for several years. All of them. We work on it.
Phil Rozek has mentioned sponsoring MeetUps for quite a number of months. We do exactly that ...and we expand it. While we do it for every smb, admittedly we were on cruise control. But seeing Phil's repeated comments over the months, I believe I commended him on the suggestions and finally sent him a "funny" revealing stat for one of our smb's relative to meetup.
He suggested an interview and here is the application of Phil's suggestions in article on his blog: How to Use Meetup Sponsorships for Local Marketing and SEO: Dave Oremland?s Tips | LocalVisibilitySystem.com
Lot of questions: Long winded answers. But here is the strategy in a nut shell. Success at some rate is in the implementation:
1. Research local social opportunities in your market, region/city. MeetUp is an example
2. Look for larger ones, with more members and more eyeballs.
3. Look for ones with relevance to your products or services. Tie the relevance to potential customers. The closer the match of your products or services to the social group, the better.
4. In the case of meetup --become a sponsor of a group. In other cases with other social groups get as involved as you can with as much visibility as you can.
5. Go for good links
The article focused on one of the SMB's. We have been with these groups on meetup for about five years. That business has done this sort of thing with other groups before meetup.
The site gets reasonably good traffic from the meetup pages. More importantly we gain revenues. We do the same type of thing with every other smb. We've had to experiment with each one to find good "local partners". It depends on the business service.
Once we started the interview process I also reviewed the effectiveness of these efforts for each smb. They are all working okay. We are upping the effort to expand with other social groups.
They are simply a great way to add visibility, a great way to add links, and if you host events at your brick and mortar you add unstructured citations.
They are win, win, wins. I'd try them.
Phil Rozek has mentioned sponsoring MeetUps for quite a number of months. We do exactly that ...and we expand it. While we do it for every smb, admittedly we were on cruise control. But seeing Phil's repeated comments over the months, I believe I commended him on the suggestions and finally sent him a "funny" revealing stat for one of our smb's relative to meetup.
He suggested an interview and here is the application of Phil's suggestions in article on his blog: How to Use Meetup Sponsorships for Local Marketing and SEO: Dave Oremland?s Tips | LocalVisibilitySystem.com
Lot of questions: Long winded answers. But here is the strategy in a nut shell. Success at some rate is in the implementation:
1. Research local social opportunities in your market, region/city. MeetUp is an example
2. Look for larger ones, with more members and more eyeballs.
3. Look for ones with relevance to your products or services. Tie the relevance to potential customers. The closer the match of your products or services to the social group, the better.
4. In the case of meetup --become a sponsor of a group. In other cases with other social groups get as involved as you can with as much visibility as you can.
5. Go for good links
The article focused on one of the SMB's. We have been with these groups on meetup for about five years. That business has done this sort of thing with other groups before meetup.
The site gets reasonably good traffic from the meetup pages. More importantly we gain revenues. We do the same type of thing with every other smb. We've had to experiment with each one to find good "local partners". It depends on the business service.
Once we started the interview process I also reviewed the effectiveness of these efforts for each smb. They are all working okay. We are upping the effort to expand with other social groups.
They are simply a great way to add visibility, a great way to add links, and if you host events at your brick and mortar you add unstructured citations.
They are win, win, wins. I'd try them.
