The most effective way to reach your audience is to foster relationships on Blasterous. Encourage existing customers to connect with you on the site and if you provide benefits for doing so, your customers will assist in extending your reach via their personal networks. The larger your network, the more opportunity you have to reach your audience. You will benefit from word of mouth marketing as your contacts share information about your product or services with their friends, family and co-workers. You can imagine if every connection of yours had 50 of their own to whom they provide recommendations and shared information about you or your business. One of your goals is to create the largest following you can on Blasterous.

Provide regular and useful updates

Customers want to hear from you in a meaningful and relatable way. They do not want to receive an onslaught “dribble”. Be relevant and useful. Be personable and real.

Here are some suggestions:

1. Start posting blasts on a regular basis – at least 1 – 2 times a day (depending on your strategy and content, you may be better off blasting more frequently).
2. Focus blasts on local activities, events or happenings that your connections would care about. For instance, if you are a restaurant owner, you can blast (not only) about specials, coupons/promotions, but about parking conditions around your location or notify followers of a closed road or detour.
3. Give your audience a reason to share your blast with others.
4. Collaborate with other businesses and offer creative and engaging opportunities for your customers. Be creative – its appreciate by most.
   

Is this how you spend your local marketing dollars?

Get in front of as many people as you can
Strategies like waving a sign on a street corner or tacking a flyer to a telephone pole limits your audience to people who are not only passing by, but also those who are looking for exactly what you are promoting; at the time they are passing by.  This is a very small audience when you boil it down, particularly when a good percentage of people don’t see, let alone register the sign or flyer.  Even smaller when you consider there is very little word of mouth being generated.  Given the low success rate, you should save costs on printing large full color signs, employee to wave it and your time to hire a person and make the sign and look instead to social media tools which deliver a higher ROI.

Offer opportunities to save (promotions, coupons or tips)

In the current economic climate, customers are looking for ways to save money. Upload coupons or make promotional announcements frequently. Let your audience know when you are having a sale. This, by the way, is a great way to get rid of surplus. Promotions or coupons don’t have to be large in terms of dollars saved. People will drive the extra 2-3 miles to get a throw pillow from your store if it will save them a few dollars or if there is the promise of a promotional item.

Create a sense of urgency. Take a cue from those late-night “limited time only, act now, while supplies last” advertisements. With annual sales in the hundreds of millions, they clearly work.

Provide group purchasing discounts. This will generate buzz amongst your connections and their friends as they start sharing in an attempt to reach the criteria for the bulk discount.

Most everyone knows that word of mouth is the most effective means to advertise your product or service.  What many businesses don’t realize is just how big of a role they themselves can play in the generation of word of mouth for their business.

If applied correctly, Social Media can be a powerful tool for generating buzz about your business. There are several strategies and opinions on effective methods of generating buzz about your business.  Social Media puts much more control and therefore responsibility into the hands of the business owner.

Let’s start with a few definitions before jumping into tactics.

What is Social Media?
Social Media is the term used to describe the type of media that is based on conversations between people who are online. A key distinction that many people and companies as a whole miss when thinking about their Social Media strategy is that Social Media is not a Marketing Channel, like TV, radio or print; its a Communication Channel. It should be compared to a phone or email.

What is the Real-Time Web?
The “Real-time” web is a phrase used to describe the efficiency of sharing and receiving information with others as soon as it is published by the authors.  With mobile devices becoming more prevalent and powerful, information is able to be accessed and shared at a much faster rate.  The efficiency of distribution of information is only going to increase as more and more people move onto web enabled mobile devices.

Now that we have the definitions out of the way, the question is how do you generate word of mouth or at least assist in the spreading of your message?

• Be there. If you want to take advantage of social media, you need to be on the site(s) that your customers use.  Ideally, you should put as much time into your online brand and presence as you do your physical one.
• Be active. Regularly post to social media sites, particularly those with strength in delivering your message to your audience in real-time. When communicating online, make sure you are delivering a message that adds value to your audience.  Be authentic and genuine in your conversations.
• Be personable. People are more likely to read your message, remember it and most importantly pass it along to others if they feel connected to you in some way.  Social Media is all about being social. Think of your “online presence” the same as any other interpersonal activity, a wedding or cocktail party for example.  Those who actively engage in conversation, relaxed and being themselves, tend to have the biggest crowds around them and generally speaking are having a better time.
• Be memorable. Events are a great way to generate word of mouth about your business.  If you throw an event where people benefit from having attended, either by having a good time, learning about a new product or receiving a gift (some promotional item or discount), they are much more likely to remember your business months or even years later.  We’ve all either shared hear a story from someone about the great happy hour they went to or some great item they received when they stopped in to check out a new product.  Events are also things that people generally share with others who would find them equally interesting.  Most people bring a friend or family member to an event, so for every one person you reach that attends, you usually get 2-3 more as a bonus.

Its not enough just to spread the message, you need to get your message in front of those customers who can react, most often it’s those who live or work local to your business. This brings us to our last tip.

• Location is everything (even on the web). We’ve all heard the saying “location is everything”, well it’s as true for your business on the internet as much as it is in the physical world. Much like a store front on the busiest corner of a street has real value, so does having your product or service accessible to people hustling about on the internet.  Picking the right social media tool or site is critical to your success in generating buzz about your business.  You have a finite number of hours in a day and only a portion of those can be spent working through your social media strategy.

Like my grandfather once said, “No one will care as much about your business as you do.” If you, like I, subscribe to that statements, then you already realize that its your responsibility to understand how to most effectively reach your target audience and convert them to happy and loyal customers.

See our post announcing the Lists release for background on Blasterous Lists.

When you create a list and add contacts to it, you are essentially creating a micro-network, open only to members of that list.  In this private network, all members have access to the same information and functionality.  All members can view and submit blasts, see who else is in the member list, add comments, or reply privately to the author of a blast.

Here are some helpful tips on how to use our list feature and how lists can function as your own private social networks.

• Create a list. Organize your contacts and communication around topics, relationships or activities important to you.
• Add connections. You can simply add people who are already connected to you on the site or invite people not yet on Blasterous to join your list.  As these are all people you know, you should be confident that those people added will be excited and will contribute to the list.
• Set the tone.  As the list owner, you establish the value for the list; both through the blasts posted and the people you add to it.
• Define the radius. Your list can either be location centric (ie only members who live in and around you), or it can be independent of location.  Who you add and where they live will dictate how specific to your location the blasts will be.

Here is a quick example of what a list might look like. We’ll use “Coffee Lovers” as the example list. Within your “Coffee Lovers” list, members might blast about favorite coffee spots, hot deals or coupons, invitations to checkout a new coffee place, good and bad reviews, places with best Wi-Fi or cleanest bathrooms.  Through these conversations, connections are created, recommendations given and plans made.

Hopefully you find these tips useful as you start creating your own lists.  We’re constantly iterating on our site, so your feedback on Lists or any part of the site is appreciated.