The First Step in Online Marketing: Listening

There are five steps in online marketing we always recommend to new clients who are just beginning to branch out using the web to grow their businesses.

They are:

1. Listen
2. Assess
3. Engage
4. Measure
5. Refine/Improve

In the next few weeks, we'll cover each of these steps so you know what to do and how to do it. We'll give you practical applications and tools to make things easier and not seem so overwhelming. We'll even provide some case studies so you can see how some companies are using each of the online marketing steps in their own efforts.

The Art -- and Science -- of Listening

This week we're going to focus on listening: The foundation to any online marketing effort.

Before you begin, think about the historically great communicators. They ask a lot of questions. They really listen to what you have to say. They get you talking about yourself. They inquire deeply into the answers you provide. And then they provide advice, counsel, and coaching -- but only after they fully understand your needs.

These master communicators are better at listening than they are at talking.

Online marketing is no different. It's another way to communicate through listening and engaging in conversation -- online. To be a master at online communication, you must have a strong foundation of listening.

Last week we talked about how to create alerts to monitor conversations that come directly to you. It's so low-maintenance, all you have to do is open an email.

Now let's discuss eight more free tools to enhance the alerts you are receiving.

1. Reputation Management. Twendz is a reputation management tool that looks at how people feel about a brand or a topic. It measures Twitter, specifically, on positive, neutral, or negative tweets. Use this tool to measure people's sentiments in order to set your benchmark goals. Pay attention to how people are talking about the company, your leadership, key employees, your products or services, your customers, and even your competition.
2. Blog Tracking. The media landscape has changed and print journalists are no longer the only ones with influence. some bloggers have immense influence and you cannot afford to ignore them. Learn which bloggers care about you, your products or services, and your customers. Use tools such as Technorati or Google Blog Search to determine which bloggers already are aware of you and develop a plan to target them.
3. Social Bookmarking. Collect case studies of social media success in your industry, in your category, and from companies and people you admire. Use Delicious, Evernote, or Diigo to bookmark the case studies in one location so you can refer back to them while you develop your goals and plan your next steps.
4. Twitter Search. There is nothing better for real-time search than Twitter. Even if you don't have a Twitter account, you can still use their search application to find conversations. While we believe everyone should have a Twitter account in order to funny understand and take advantage of their wide range of services, you can subscribe to the RSS feed without an account.
5. Website Optimization. Right now, go to Marketing Grader and bookmark the page. Now type in your URL. What's your grade? Is it 100 percent? No? It tells you exactly what you need to do to fix the site so the search engines are crawling it and you are competing on the web.
6. Competitive Analysis. Now go to Compete. Enter your URL and the URLs of two of your competitors. This site then creates a graph, comparing you to your competition. While it's not flawless (it only tracks U.S. traffic, for instance), it gives you a good baseline of understanding where your competition is beating you (or vice versa).
7. Web Analytics. Do you look at your web analytics at least weekly? If not, this is a must. It will help you track where people are visiting from and which accounts are home, corporate websites, or blogs. If you find visitors coming from blogs, add those sites to your RSS feeds, comment on the blog posts, and develop relationships with the bloggers. Having an insider understanding of your visitor demographics will allow you to easily identify your demographic.

As you listen, monitor, and get smart about your web properties, as compared to competitors, you'll begin to understand how to create your goals.

Next week we'll discuss assessing the need and figuring out where to put your stake in the online ground.