I simply cannot wait for spring to get here. This has been an unusually long winter for us in the Southeast (snicker all you want, my Midwest and Northeast comrades). But it has been unusually cool for unusually long stretches of time this winter. When it is cool, potential clients stay inside and watch the Olympics. They aren’t outside raking or daydreaming of all the projects that they want to hire my team for.
Ours is an odd business to market. For the most part, folks consider our service a commodity. Potential clients generally think that Company A’s product and service will rival Company B’s. This is even more true when they haven’t gone through a bad renovation or home building experience. But there is also something critical to our marketing efforts that is often overlooked – Social Networking.
As Generation X and Millennial clients become more and more the focus of our marketing efforts and an ever larger component of our client base, it is important to realize that these age groups gather more and more information from non-traditional (electronic) means than ever before. Social Networking (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.) will not make you as a company. But a lack of presence can break you.
Younger clients don’t just read your marketing material and ask close friends and relatives about you. They dig online to find happy customers and disgruntled ones. They use social networking to find the electronic “shadow” organization that depicts the real experience your company offers vs. the stylized version presented in your print marketing materials. Like it or not, an electronic shadow company exists for each of our businesses. Those companies behind the eight ball have this image controlled by those outside of the enterprise. Proactive organizations are defining and monitoring their own image via means of the web and social networking tools.
I am not a big believer that social media will ever transplant standard marketing and face-to-face meetings. But I do know that as younger generations continue to control more and more of the client base, social media will become increasingly important to attracting and landing these clients. Don’t be afraid to venture into social media and add your business to Facebook and update it regularly with photos and news. The key point that I am making is that organizations today must control their electronic image, or others will do it for you. Which position would you prefer?
