After you’ve set up your green website and written blog posts for a month, you may be surprised to find that the world is not beating a cyber path to your door.
You might be tempted to think it is something that you’re doing wrong.
Perhaps your recent posts on changing the world one ecological step at a time were a little too casual in its style; or perhaps, the problem was just the opposite, a bit too scholarly.
However, before you accuse yourself of being either irrelevant or pedantic, there is something that you need to understand: the idea that if “you build it, they will come” is a romantic myth perpetuated by the Field of Dreams movie.
If people are not showing up, enthusiastically commenting on your blog, subscribing to your newsletter, or buying your eco-friendly products to improve the world, it’s not personal. You just haven’t done enough to catch their attention and stir their interest.
So, after you’ve developed your business model around your green business idea or permaculture design and fine-tuned it, the next order of business is getting the word out.
Get the Ball Rolling with Social Media
You will get fast results by using popular social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Youtube, and Google+, you will find your tribe.
Unfortunately, however, marketing is not as simple as merely connecting with other people on social media. There is a lot more to it.
What is Marketing?
Marketing is a process to tell people about your goods or services. I basically coordinate four things:
- It describes your product or service.
- It determines your prices based on the value you offer,
- It finds ways to deliver your product or service to the consumer.
- It continually informs a select group of people (your target audience) that you’re in a business that can help them.
After people show an interest in your product or service, then you can begin selling them. Sales, however, is not always about money; it can be simply persuading people to do something, like signing up for your newsletter or volunteering to help out a cause.
However, marketing, too, is not enough to develop your business; you also have to focus on branding.
Branding is not Marketing
There is a lot of confusion about the difference between marketing and branding. Marketing is more about push while branding is more about pull. Marketing is about doing. Branding is about being. Perhaps, this is a bit of an oversimplification, but you get the idea.
In an excellent article on the difference between marketing and branding, James Heaton on the Tronvig Group blog offers the following distinction:
“Branding should both precede and underlie any marketing effort. Branding is not push, but pull. Branding is the expression of the essential truth or value of an organization, product, or service. It is communication of characteristics, values, and attributes that clarify what this particular brand is and is not.”
While people often associate branding with things like logos, colors, names, spokespeople, mascots, and so on, these are symbolic of something deeper—a company’s values. Hence, branding is more about ways of being rather than doing. For instance, a good brand projects you and your company consistently and authentically. It is also niche-focused and people can relate to its values.
4 Promotional Tips
Here are four ideas to help you get more visitors to your eco-website:
- When it comes to social media, your main order of business is to sign up at the top social media websites and find a way to offer value there. On YouTube, for example, you could have a series of video tutorials explaining how people can go green in simple, practical ways. On Facebook, you may want to engage people through a Facebook business and personal page.
- You could improve your website in the following ways: optimize it for search engines, make sure it loads fast, and make sure that it is easy to navigate and read.
- Once, you’ve got your website set up, you need to figure out ways to engage with other people. Some ways to do this include blogging, creating an email newsletter and participating in link exchanges.
- You could try advertising both online and offline to engage people. Online advertising might be buying banner ads, Facebook ads, or Google Pay per click ads. Offline advertising might include classified ads in the newspaper, using custom brochure display holders on the counter at a local flower shop with tips on going green, or posting small flyers on public display boards, like those found in supermarkets.
Frankly, the only difference between you and the success you desire for your business is not taking the necessary steps to get the word out there. You have to tell people about your business!
