Social Marketing for Small Clients
So you have a client and they want to get into social marketing. The problem is that they do not really have a marketable website in the terms of content or SEO. Another problem is because they are in a niche market making even harder to find a calling especially if it is high-end. So what do you do? That is a good question.
If you are not going to use the play of content to build and gain fans or visitors then you would have to target the individuals or companies themselves. I think this will be a little tougher because it would be more PR. You will have to produce the list of companies and or people that would best suite client. Investigate the list to determine who or what is already online and has a channel you can get to and then promote a social site from those channels.
Here the thing, some of those channels will be hard to come by because some people do not want to be found or do not care to spread your information. So what you have to do is get the client to start there own social network as an individuals and promote there product from already establish channels. The president, vice, directors, and employees would have to get involved to create an internal social network to promote the external one.
The only other tactic that can be introduced would be the play of a viral campaigns, which can be very successful but really take some creative thinking and I am not sure if there is anything that can be applied to this type client other than a really well done image ad. Social Bookmarking like Digg could help spread the ad.
My recommendations would be to make a play on content and have them establish a content outline that can be written on a weekly or monthly basis. This will help produce fans and visitor loyalty to the site. I would also set up links on the main site to promote a Facebook, twitter and other types of accounts on the website to help gain visitors who are already interested in the already established materials. The 3rd thing would be to promote the site with online media buys such as ad words, Facebook advertising and so on.
There is no good answer. Before you can really come up with an all encompassing strategy, you need to have all the research in order and then break it down.
Start with the building blocks.
Phase: 1
a. Establish the structure and content of social websites.
b. Establish the demographic.
c. Build the connections (This would be creating the accounts and making them visible to all the channels you have).
Phase: 2
a. Build the content in all the channels and then social bookmark them
b. Start online media buys
c. Establish a contact form to capture leads
Phase 3:
a. Evaluate the changes and what channels are working and adjust accordingly.