Going Global Using Social Media and Blogs

We’ve all read the articles about how you can use your own blog to market your business, tweet and share, but how about working with other bloggers to market it too?

SMEs have a growing challenge to embrace social media, get heard above the noise and be transparent with any communication with consumers. Most of us will have understood the need to claim our voices on twitter and facebook. This is all good and grand but it sits in a very closed environment.

Consumers are increasingly checking google in order to get extra background on businesses before making a buying decision, this is especially true for e-commerce websites and lesser known brands, they want the reassurance that the site is trustworthy, that other customers have bought from it and that most importantly there is help in need of assistance.

Going global is a tough and can be an expensive task. Market research is the key to success but finding real potential customers can be difficult, especially if they are on the other side of the world.

Embrace the bloggers

There are millions of people blogging daily or weekly about all manor of issues. They blog about their favourite technology, cars, food and some even blog about what they wear every day. These bloggers have an online voice, in an open environment, their findings can influence the buying decisions of their readers and the rich content of their blogs is like honey to a bear for Google and Bing. Search engines value blog content highly and the long term benefits are SEO related needless to say that you should start embracing the bloggers with your brand.

Bloggers should been seen as potential customers.

So how does it look for a new customer? In this digital age, people will always firstly buy from recommendations from friends or family, failing that they look to google and will search for a brand. If your business has no-one talking about, how will the new customer be able to determine that you are what you say you are. In their eyes, you could be anyone. Having bloggers talk about you not only enables initial coverage to their readers, it also helps Google position the reviews alongside your website, new customers can even leave a comment on the blog review and actually ask for that recommendation, why, how or what. This also helps remove off some spurious comments that may have been written by your competitors..

Fuelmywebsite

Fuelmywebsite.com helps small and medium sized businesses connect with bloggers through their blogger community of over 60,000 bloggers. Businesses decide on a product (or service such as hotel or restaurant) they are willing to put in the hands of bloggers in return for a full review. This not only highlights SMEs products and services but it also generates fresh content from a customer perspective (why not take a look at a recent blog review here.)

We can reach out to any country on the planet and can help you with testing products overseas and finding out new markets from the comfort of your office.

Bloggers only apply to campaigns if they are interested in the service or product in the first place and if it is relevant to their lifestyle. They receive no money and will blog in their own words their experience with the merchant and the quality of the service they receive. If you wish, the bloggers can offer their readers a discount to entice them to purchase your product off the back of the review.

Many SMEs are using our blogger outreach service to incorporate the reviews in their testimonial pages, they use this opportunity to engage with the blogger on twitter and use the link of the review on their facebook page. The service is both a powerful validation and SEO tool. While it may not generate a huge surge of traffic or instant sales a campaign is a fast track ticket to the blogosphere and online branding communication. And by sending the products to new overseas markets, you might just find a brand champion before you start to export.

Kevin Dixie is Managing Director of Fuelmywebsite and can be contacted by email [email protected]