Marketing that Harnesses the Power of Web 2.0

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.