Growing Your Brand on Search and Social

Imagine this. You’ve got your store. You’ve got a physical shop, and you’ve bought a domain. You’ve got a website on the go. So great, what’s next? How do you get people to see it?

Have you really ticked this box already? Think about your domain. Is it your brand name, or have you gone for something that you know is going to scream SEO straightaway? You might have because you’ve picked up some bad habits in the past or some bad advice from an SEO friend.

What you really want to do is get your brand name. That’s the first thing to do. So instead of securing something really cool, that’s like keyword stuff and is going to look amazing on SEO paper, it’s not really going to grow a brand. You can’t grow a keyword, but you can grow a brand.

So the next thing you want to think about doing is securing that brand on social media sites. I’m not just talking about places like Twitter and Google+ and Facebook. Those are the three sort of  main places you would go, depending on what you do. I’m thinking more about the smaller sites, the other things that pop up first, like maybe Yell, like maybe Yelp, LinkedIn, company profiles on there, stuff like that. So pick all of those up as well.

Don’t think about, yeah, we’ve got to get the perfect Twitter handle, this, that, and the other. That doesn’t matter so much. What matters is that you’re there and you’re ready to grow. You’re ready to start off.

I wrote about a blog post about this called “How To Get Your Business Online In One Day.” You can read it on the Koozai blog. You can search it. I’m pretty sure it even comes up in Google if you search for the title of the blog. So give that a go. That really outlines the first port of call. So it does really cover your Twitter, Google+, and that sort of thing, first and foremost. But there is more to secure out there.

There’s plenty of stuff, and in doing that, you not only get the social profile, you get a bit of page one domination as well. So when people search for your brand, page one is just covered in your brand and nothing else, which is exactly what you want to be starting with, and it’s a really good place to grow from.

So once you’ve done that, you need to start promoting. But to promote you really need content. Without any content, you have nothing to promote. So the first thing you need to think about is who you’re promoting it to and who you’re writing the content for. Are you writing it for yourself? If you’re passionate about what you do, maybe you are writing it for yourself, something that you, as a consumer of your product, or something your brand does. If you’re interested in that, then yeah, by all means write it for yourself. But always remember what the end goal of that is and where that’s going to be placed.

If you find that you’ve got loads of success on a particular platform like Facebook, for example, if you do much better on Facebook than you do on Twitter, maybe you should put more focus on your Facebook page than your Twitter profile and vice versa if it’s successful in the other direction. So always pick your channel. Go where the audience is, find the people that have the same sort of taste and similarities, and promote your content to them, instead of just sort of blasting out in every single direction, because that’s not going to help anyone. You really need to focus on this bit and where it’s going and who it’s going to.

So if you’ve got your content and you’ve promoted it, hopefully your audience is listening, and then they might respond to you. So you get an engagement, and that is an ongoing process. So it doesn’t matter what channel they come through. If they email or if they tweet you or if it’s a comment on your blog, you’ve always got something to go back to. That’s the first sort of step to starting that conversation and getting people engaged with your brand.

If you keep all of that going, you will eventually grow. The search stuff will come on its own because your content is great. It’s going to the right people. They’re sharing it amongst themselves. Links are naturally generated, and your social is buzzing as well because you’ve got all the right people targeted and you’re engaging with them all the time. That’s the thing you want to return to. So promote and engage. So once you’ve secured everything, go back to promoting, target the right people, and when they come back to you, keep the conversation going.

Thank you very much. If you want to follow me on Twitter, that is my Twitter handle right there. Check out the blog post that I wrote as well, like I said. Yeah, thanks for watching.