May 7, 2007
This morning a client asked me if I wouldn’t mind sending him an e-mail with instructions on how to create and edit pages on his website using WordPress. Aha!
This was a great opportunity to do what I’m calling “Web-Directed Marketing”: taking material that you create to promote your business, answer customers’ questions, etc. and – rather than use it for that one purpose only – put it immediately onto your website, as well.
The result is a new WordPress Tutorials page on the mcbuzz.com website: How to Insert Images Using WordPress
Instructions on how to edit a website using WordPress are a good example of Web-Directed Marketing because, obviously, my client is not the only person who can benefit from the material. Other clients of mine can benefit, and – big key here – so can people who don’t even know about my business yet.
It takes roughly the same amount of time to answer a question in an e-mail to a single customer as it does to put the answer into a format that other people can access on the Web. Obviously, getting your answer out to a ton of people on the Web is going to give your business more visibility than sending a single e-mail. And you can always do both.
The great thing about this approach is, even if you have already taken time to send an e-mail other people might learn from, it doesn’t mean that time was spent inefficiently. On the contrary, it means you already have the content you need for a good website or blog post! All you need to do is take a few minutes to put it up on your site.
Certainly, there are some e-mails you are not going to want to share with a broader audience, but why not consider retooling the contents so that they don’t contain any private information? If another client or prospective client asks you a similar question without referring to any specifics, that’s exactly what you would do to give them an answer, right? You can do that on your website or blog.
I will talk more about all the positive benefits this kind of “Web-Directed Marketing” approach can have. I said something about it here: Google’s Success Can Mean Web Marketing Success for Your Website and Your Business – on the old Making Communications Buzz blog.
The other point I want to make is this: A WordPress website makes Web-Directed Marketing possible for small businesses – because it is so easy to put new material on your website. You don’t need a webmaster. You don’t need a marketing department.
You do need to know how to use a computer well enough to use a web browswer and program like Microsoft Word. And you do need to know your business – meaning that you need to know your product or service inside and out, and you need to know what your customers and prospective customers are looking for.
With a WordPress website, you can put all the right kinds of information onto your site quickly and easily. By doing so in the next 6-12 months, you can set yourself apart from much, if not most, of your competition in a very significant way. And when your competitors wake up to the reality of web-directed marketing for small business, you will have been there, done that. Sound good? It is.
