Beyond SEO: How To Engage Potential Customers With Viral Marketing [w/VIDEOS]

The simple fact of the matter is that due to this realization, webmasters and business owners have to go beyond simply obtaining good rankings, in order to turn increasingly social media-savvy consumers into actual clients & eventually, brand advocates. A word of caution: we don’t advise shifting your company’s marketing focus away from SEO, but rather suggest how to use trusted social media agency guidelines for SEO and viral marketing to their full potential.

Starting With SEO

As we stated above, SEO is critical to obtaining good rankings & the initial push in visibility to your company’s prospective clients. For businesses still looking to establish their brand in the regional and national marketplace, having strong placement in search engines is as crucial now, as having a yellow pages ad, 40 years ago. For established brands, poor or no SEO means no visibility for consumers who are searching for a product or service, as opposed to the brands providing those products & services.

The main difference between phone books of 40 years ago and present day search engines, is that visibility now starts with and depends on the quality of website content relating to your product & service, as well as your website’s “digital reputation” among search engine-trusted resources. Yes, its a new layer of complexity, but imagine how much better a phone book would have been, had they graded businesses based on expertise, instead of ad budget.

Incorporating Viral Marketing

Now that you’ve made your prospective customers aware of who you are, where you are and what you offer, by way of some thoughtful & lasting SEO techniques, its time to tell them why they should come to you for the products & services you offer. This happens by way of engaging consumers on various social channels with content of various types that goes above & beyond what your website already offers.

If you’re strapped for new content ideas, they can vary greatly from the essential details of your firm and what it offers. Viral content can include anecdotes about previous customer experiences, breaking news in your industry, videos & graphics that show expanded information on your products or services and posts that include a little humor related to what your company does. At the forefront of this content strategy, should be some creativity, cleverness & wit not fully utilized by your competitors. This defines a piece of content’s “virality” or its potential for how frequently and how fast it gets liked and shared.

Why Its Important to Do Both

If, thus far, you’ve invested a fair amount of time in internet marketing and you’re not producing the leads your business needs in order to accel past the competition, its likely time to consider a new approach. Even if competitors are not using social media and viral content to market to prospective customers, its dangerous to assume they never will. And if they already are, they’re engaging segments of your market that you aren’t.

Beyond that, consumers now are smarter and more well-informed than they ever have been before. With nearly the entire internet being as close as their smart phones, telling them you’re the best doesn’t cut it anymore. You have to show them evidence as to why you’re the best on the channels where they most frequently engage new business and lead them down the path from general consumer to brand follower, to dedicated customer & finally, an advocate for your brand.

If this sounds like a massive undertaking for your company, or you simply don’t know where to begin, take comfort in the fact that you & many other businesses are not alone. Utilizing a forward-thinking social media agency like ours can put your business on the path to engaging digital content that produces real leads, so why not contact us for a free consultation? You could find yourself quite surprised by what we have to offer in terms of viral content strategy.