By: Kenneth F. Petersen, CEO Encharter Insurance
In my opinion, this is one of the best times to be a small business person. In the past, the BIG BOX companies had an unfair advantage when it came to advertising. However, with the advent of social media and the internet, a small company has the ability to compete with the big boys on equal footing.
Take YouTube for example – 10 years ago or so, if you wanted to put out a commercial or shoot a testimonial video, you had to hire a PR Firm and a production company. Then you needed to get your message out on Television. Total cost – best not talk about cost! It was so prohibitive that only large corporations could play. Today with a $300 camera, inexpensive editing software and a free subscription to YouTube – bang you have a great insurance commercial or insurance testimonial video, ready to broadcast to the world. Click on the hyperlinks above to check out two of ours.
How do you get your message out? No need for the expensive PR Firm or high cost television broadcast company, you can get your message out on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Blogs, etc. to all your fans. Then, allow for the “viral” nature of the internet to take over, capitalizing on one of the oldest and best advertising methods available – Word of Mouth Marketing.
Suddenly, marketing your firm isn’t the high cost venture it once was and telling the world about your unique selling proposition has never been easier. The only thing standing between you and your BIG BOX competition is – “Doing”.
A little uncertain about exactly how to get started? Hey it’s natural to avoid something new. My recommendation is to jump in using blogging. Blogging is a great way to increase your Search Engine Optimization and help people find you. The best thing about blogging is that through hyperlinks, you can drive key search terms for your business. I also highly recommend Facebook. Facebook is just too big a community to ignore and best of all it is easy to develop a following in your local community. However, like blogging, Facebook requires work. You need to post regularly and remember that Facebook is about being social. If all you do is push your business, Facebook will not be a successful -social media for you.
Still uncertain as to how to get started, why not reach out to Encharter Insurance. We have been using social media to grow our new business 67% in just 10 months and we are helping businesses in CT & MA figure out how to use social media. Our offer is unique – sign up to be an Encharter Partner and we will advertise your business on our web-site to our 16,000+ client for FREE. By “back-linking” from our web-site to yours and from yours to ours, we increase both our firms SEO (search engine optimization). We also will give you a free social media consult, where we will help you learn how to use blogging, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter to help you grow.
Interested, visit us on line and sign up to become an Encharter Insurance Partner. At the very least, come and “Like” Encharter Insurance on Facebook – then you can watch how we go about posting and what we do to be successful. You could also add this blog to your RRS Feed or become a follower of one of our other blogs – MAInsuranceblog.com or CTInsuranceblog.com.
August 21, 2010 at 4:59 pm |
[...] Kennethpetersen's Blog A Blog about Business Leadership « Taking on the BIG BOX with Social Media – A small company’s unfair advantage! [...]
August 23, 2010 at 9:22 am |
[...] grow and one of the best ways to do that is through Social Media. As stated in my previous Blog “Taking on the BIG BOX with Social Media – A small company’s unfair advantage!” I talked about how the local business can succeed using social [...]