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More Mileage from Branding

Guest post by: John Williams

Article Overview: Let’s say your online business-or your local business with an online presence-has some really strong customer stories. Where can you place these stories on the Internet to enhance your brand, boost credibility and support your sales and marketing? There are numerous online ways to use customer stories. You could try any or all of these:

More Mileage from Branding

1. Place your customer stories in a special section on your website, with a link to this section in your main menu. 2. Brief stories-a paragraph or two-can be used as running text on a single webpage. This way, a visitor can scroll down and read several brief stories. You could also list the titles of these stories at the top of the page, so a visitor can jump directly to any story that looks interesting. Remember to include a "Back to top" link after each story, making this page easier to browse.

3. Each longer story deserves its own webpage in your special section. However, there's no hard-and-fast rule. You might place each shorter story on its own page too, perhaps with a photo-even a generic photo-that conveys the spirit of the story.

4. Ask yourself what's really interesting, intriguing or exciting about a particular customer story? What is it about this story that people probably respond to at a gut level? See if you can translate this essential bit into a "teaser", a word or phrase, perhaps illustrated, that could hook people into wanting to read the story. Put this teaser a creative banner ad on your own site, linking to the related story page inside your site.

5. Use same teaser as a banner ad published on other websites. (You'll typically have to pay for this. Or, in some cases, maybe you can trade with another website owner: do a reciprocal deal in which they publish your banner ad on their site while you publish theirs on your site.)

6. Feature your story teaser In an email to prospective customers, driving traffic to your site (or to your local brick-and-mortar business, for that matter).

7. You could instead tell the full story in a promotional email-but first think carefully about your objective. If you want to get people to visit your website, then a teaser might work better. Depends on the situation.

8. Tell the story in your blog. Or contact someone who writes a popular blog read by people who buy your products/services. Offer the story to them as a great example of some bit of business wisdom or industry trend. (Why? Because other people, especially editors and publishers, don't have a vested interest in promoting your business and brand. But they do have a vested interest in demonstrating trends and insights to their readership. By presenting your story as exemplifying an important trend or essential wisdom, you give the blogger or publisher a strong reason to use it. Otherwise, unless the blogger is your brother-in-law, he could care less.

9. Using a similar rationale, see if you can get the story published in a magazine or newspaper-if not in print, then at least in the online version of that publication. Most print publications these days have online versions with additional content that didn't make it into print.

Getting into a magazine or newspaper carries an important extra benefit: third-party credibility. Anything positive said about your business by a public third-party source (like a periodical, either in print or online) adds a new layer of credibility to your brand. Once published, you can link to the story from your website and perhaps get other sites and blogs to link to it too.

10. Using the same exemplify-a-trend strategy, try to get your customer story picked up by your local TV news. Even if they air it for only 20 seconds as a filler at 1 a.m., you now have a video news clip with the station's on-air ID that you can post on your site, promote in emails, send to bloggers, etc. Credibility is the name of the game. Try to parlay one published appearance into others.

Always keep in mind that the purpose is not to become famous, or to generally spread your company's name around (though that's good too). Instead, you have a very specific mission: to tell stories that reflect the positive attributes of your brand.

That, plus the publicity itself, will help drive visitors to your site or foot traffic to your local store. Eyes on the prize!

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