Web 2.0 offers amazing opportunities to market your business. The thing sis, you need to know how to do it well. Web 2.0 has been around a little while now so you can do yourself a big favour by learning from what other businesses have done before you, marketing themselves in the post-Web 2.0 cyber-world.
First you need to know what Web 2.0 is. Essentially, it is a collection of technologies. They are tools, and tools should be used to meet your businesses particular needs. What they can utilize is a network of business and social connections and an access to all the latest information, updated often, in real time. It can also allow collaboration and public interaction.
It performs all these functions by the new technologies which have facilitated wikis, blogs, online communities, virtual worlds and networking sites. In this way, ordinary people with little or no internet knowledge and experience can advertise and promote their business. From the consumer side, things get even more exciting as they can affect what business develop and how they do it. Consumers and companies can really collaborate for the first time ever, thanks to Web 2.0. How else did Revels get their new flavour!
Millions of web visitors make effective use of Facebook, MySpace etc. Shouldn’t you be doing that? Use web 2.0 technologies as a two-way process to find out what your clients want and give it to them. Be prepared for some negative feedback and embrace it. Use your web 2.0 technologies to take the criticism, act upon it, then advertise how well you have responded to consumers’ wishes. That way, from a problem, you come out looking on top.
You can use Web 2.0 for more traditional marketing purposes too – advertising your new products or services and encouraging people to buy them from you. Blogs are a very effective way of doing that, populated with articles about the benefits of what your business does. Make them interactive, too, allowing people to comment on your blog entries or even sending in their own. That will increase the faith in what your business has to offer as it is made clear that ordinary people support it. You can even allow people to collaborate with you on company developments. People will feel involved and their loyalty to your brand will be assured.
Wiki’s which allow people to add, edit and delete factual content and questions and answers are a great way to market your business through Web 2.0 technologies. Problems can be spotted early after a product or service’s introduction. This empowers you in your business and you can fix any problems and also advertise how well you responded to clients/ feedback.
You need to encourage this participation in some way, such as offering a free gift for sign up to a forum, or by allowing people to add their own topics for discussion, so they can talk about what they want to talk about. So, to effectively market your business through web 2.0 technologies, you need to give a little power over to your clients. Web 2.0 has to be truly interactive to work effectively.
Everyone who is serious about making money on the internet these days has to stay ahead with the Web 2.0 game. People expect it – or t least they expect you to make effort with some of it. Don’t think that you have to throw away your old, perfectly good website and start again, though. That is not the case. You can perfectly feasibly incorporate Web 2.0 features into your existing website. It doesn’t have to be difficult and it doesn’t even have to cost you anything.
The main thing to bear in mind when updating your website with Web 2.0 features is what would your clients want? Your clients and potential clients are what matter because if you aren’t meeting their needs you won’t have a successful business and you won’t make a profit. Keep your website simple and only incorporate the Web 2.0 features which you think your target group will appreciate.
However, here are some of the things you could quite easily do with an existing website to update it for Web 2.0.
First of all, you can build a social community with your website. People like to feel they belong. Making them feel they belong to some exclusive club which is somehow connected to your products and services will make them feel good and encourage them to spend more money on you. You can easily build a social community at your website by including discussion forums where you invite comments about relevant topics.
Linked to that, you could provide content which can be edited and commented upon by the users. Let them upload their own videos, articles etc. You can still build in ways to approve or deny this content before it is posted, if you want to.
A word of warning here, once you use web 2.0 to let users in the sphere of your website, expect them to use this opportunity in ways you may not intend. That’s just life. Embrace it as it may open up further possibilities you hadn’t thought of. However, be aware that you also may have to exercise some editorial control over what is portrayed on your website, for the good of your business reputation.
The focus of any good Web 2.0 website should be on giving people what they want. Give people access to content quickly and easily, without having to wait a long time for a ton of content to load. Make your website content informative, nit just useless words. Educate your website visitors so they take away something useful that they will talk about with other people.
You can provide the most authoritative and up to date information by linking in to RSS feeds and news groups. Let your users also upload their own content and build your website. Let them build your business’ reputation by encouraging them to chat about it in other forums and provide links etc. They can generate you a lot of traffic this way if they talk positively about your website and your business. A client’s good word carries a lot more weight than you blowing your own trumpet, any day.
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