Grade A Entrepreneurs

By Marylene Delbourg-Delphis @mddelphis

Reaching out to customers has been most companies’ motto for over twelve years, except that back then, “reaching out” mostly meant finding ways to bring them to your website with the maximum of bells and whistles through large email marketing campaigns. Great. It works, and works well, but it’s only one side of the equation. Reaching out to customers today also entails going where customers are and interacting with them where they are: social networks. In other words, you must interact with people your company does not already know because they haven’t already necessarily filled out a form on your site, chosen to get squeezed into giving their email address, or expressed that they “like” you.

Invite socializers to stretch their neck: Build up a base of followers. But you may not want to do this by blasting messages only about your company to people who didn’t especially care about you in the first place. Also send meaningful information showing that you care about them and that you are not simply company-centric. People do notice useful data and interesting messengers. Then, they feel like stretching their neck a little bit. Each time you send a message that includes a link (whether it leads to your company’s site or not), associate an ObjectiveMarketer landing page. Here is how it works:

• You write your message using ObjectiveMarketer;
• You choose the landing page you want to associate to your messages.

For example, at TWTRCON in San Francisco the other day, I sent this tweet:

When people clicked on it, here is what they could see: The page of the TWTRCON site I was referring to and a reminder of me, as the messenger, at the top of the page – the landing page- where my two latest posts are automatically displayed.

Think of the benefits for a company or a company division!

The ObjectiveMarketer landing page is:

• A frame of whatever size you like that accompanies the messages that you send.  You can create different types of frames depending on your campaigns.
• A stage where you can add information under any form: a link to your site, a video, a chat box, an image, coupons, a shopping cart, you name it!
• A Website on-demand on the fly. The department where you work may offer promotions at a faster pace than what the corporate Web development team can implement. So just tell your story through a dynamic landing page!

The ObjectiveMarketer landing pages present the capabilities of traditional lead capture pages and can be indifferently reference or transactional landing pages depending on how you decide to design those frames. The possibilities are virtually unlimited. Just look at the wide set of features and designs offered by Marketing Hits, a Web Design, SEO, and Online Marketing company created by Brian Yanish, that also offers custom Objective Marketer landing pages: “MarketingHits custom landing pages are designed to leverage social media ROI by providing top of the page brand recognition and click-through,” Brian says. “In today’s fast-paced Twitter and Facebook world,” he adds, “brands need new ways to connect web content to their brand. Landing pages provide a unique opportunity to drive visitors to a company’s website sales or content pages – of course without violating the rights and the revenues of the site that is framed by that landing page.”

Marketing Hits has designed the landing pages of multiple companies.

Here, the agent tweets about a post from inman news.

When the user clicks on the link, he/she sees inman news but also has the opportunity to know more about the agency’s hot listings in the videos placed on the landing page.

It’s a win-win situation. A tweet brings traffic both on the site that is tweeted about and that of the messenger, who can increase his/her own traffic by 30%, and often much more.

Note: Traffic generated by an ObjectiveMarketer landing page is controlled by the user of ObjectiveMarketer, never by ObjectiveMarketer as a vendor – which makes OM’s landing pages completely different from the advertising banners implemented by technology vendors in exchange for free usage of their products. Disclosure: I am a board member of ObjectiveMarketer.