Creating a buzz about your brand and great services is essential to your success. One important aspect to this is to find ways to promote yourself frequently and create buzz without taking time away from getting your job done. Promotion is great, but great work is one of your best tools for creating buzz. Do not promote at the expense of delivering buzzworthy results to your current clients.
While there are many traditional ways to use PR and the media to create visibility, I am going to focus this article on quick things you can do to create some buzz. Each one of these things done only once will be unlikely to produce big results. However, if you make a habit of doing these regularly, you will start to see great results.
8 Ways to Create Buzz Today
#1 Refresh Old Contacts and Relationships
We all get contacted by lots of people every day. Email, voicemail, letters, junk mail…. If you are a busy business owner, you probably focus on fixing problems and following up with potential sales.
While those have to be your priority, try to make a habit of going back to older emails or voice mails and following up with a less critical contact. I find the best way to do this is to follow up with three old contacts that are approximately three months old in my email. It is easy to go back and scan these, and choose three to send a quick note to.
Keep it simple and show interest in the person you are contacting. Refresh their memory on who you are and what was discussed. You will be surprised how many of these people are happy to hear from you again.
#2 Pay More Attention to Influentials
Influentials are people that have access to many people that could be valuable to you for creating buzz or as potential clients. Traditionally, these people were the media and that group is still important. Now there are many other people that might not come right to the top of your mind, but could create significant buzz about you.
If you are focused on a local market, it will be easy to go out and do Internet searches and find local groups, associations, blogs and websites with articles that have someone in charge and able to buzz about you. Start building bridges with these people.
If you are a designer, could you write an article “10 Design Tips to Sell Your Home Faster”? If you let every realtor use this article on their website as long as they had a blurb about you and a link to your website, you could find a strong referral partner and lots of opportunities to work with people selling their homes. A similar article could be put on architects websites that included 10 common mistakes made when furnishing a new office.
The key here is to respect and cultivate relationships with people that are influential in areas that benefit you. By providing them with something of value and paying attention to the relationship, you will end up with more people buzzing about you, more referrals and a stronger celebrity brand.
#3 Document and Spread Success Stories
What your clients value about you and what you think they value can be two very different things. The only way to know is to be serious about collecting testimonials and stories from your clients. These give you talking points that will be more powerful when you are spreading buzz about your organization.
First, be sure to collect these stories and record them in a formal manner. For example, each one could be a word document in a particular folder or they could be paper forms you fill out and put in a binder.
Next, follow up on some of the stories later on and see how they have changed. Imagine if you called someone six months after you worked with them and they said, “The more professional atmosphere you helped us create is a big part of why we have closed 30% more sales….” That would be a wonderful thing to repeat to others, but you would not know about it if you did not follow up.
When you want to create buzz about yourself but not seem like a shameless promoter, you can tell stories about your clients’ success.
#4 Start an eNewsletter
Email Newsletters can be a great way to keep your brand fresh in people’s minds. It is also very affordable and you can track the results if you are using a good eNewsletter system. Knowing which people are reading and clicking can help you focus your marketing and stories.
It may seem a bit intimidating to do the first time, but these systems usually come with an easy interface that allows you to build the eNewsletter with no technical skills. It is also important to not get bogged down in trying to write too much detail.
To make it easy, always keep the same format. As an example, if I was a designer, I would have 3 short parts to my eNewsletter. I would write a before and after success story with photos, because everyone enjoys looking at these. I would do a DIY design tip of the month, which is something anyone can do themselves, and I would highlight upcoming events, appearances and opportunities to meet me. I would be sure to be speaking or attending and event at least once a month.
Once you have done this a few times, it will become a familiar pattern you can follow to keep your brand fresh in people’s minds.
#5 Blog
Blogs are websites that people update frequently and often have a personal voice to them. They are usually arranged in reverse chronological order so the newest thing is first.
Blogs have grown in popularity because they are very easy to use. Once you get one set up, and there are many places to do this for free or for a few dollars a month, you just have to write the title and the text, along with inserting any images.
Unlike an eNewsletter, a blog needs to be done more frequently to get better results. However, it is a bit less formal than an eNewsletter and it can be updated quicker. The advantage of the blog is that it is a way for people to get to know you. I often compare it to a text radio station all about you. People will tune in every day if they are interested in you and your topic, and if they see it has frequent new stuff.
Search engines also like blogs. If your website already gets you leads, a blog can increase those leads by increasing your traffic and improving your relationship with your visitors.
#6 Make Every Communication Buzzworthy
This really comes down to self awareness. It is easy to get into a routine and do the same thing that works every day. But what would happen if you cranked it up a notch? Do people get your business card and stuff it into their pocket, or do they say, “Wow, cool card.”?
Every interaction, from your invoice to the way you shake hands has the opportunity to be remarkable or ordinary. If someone meets you at a party and talks to you for one minute, they should walk away feeling like you cared about them and they should walk away thinking, “Wow, she really loves what she does.”
Another easy thing that can be improved is voice mail. If someone is calling you for the first time and you do not answer, your voice mail is their first impression of you.
Make a point of reviewing something every month and making it more buzzworthy.
#7 Get Involved in the Community or with a Charity
Getting involved in a charity or a community effort is a great way to build your network and create some buzz. Chances are, some of the larger organizations near you strongly encourage their senior executives to participate in community activities.
You can also use this involvement to enhance your efforts to build more relationships with influencers. How? By contacting media and others about what is going on with the organization you are involved with. Once you establish yourself as a valuable resource to an influential person, you may have the chance later to talk about what you do.
This will also give you more great stories to talk and paint you in a bigger light. You are more than just your job, and by talking about these organizations you will show you are someone that people want to work with.
As a side note, many of these organizations may buy your products or services at some point. That should not be your primary motivation, but it is a simple reality. They are more likely to buy from someone that is committed to their success.
#8 Build Many Paths Home
The Internet is the new wild wild west. New websites appear every day and the latest trends make it easy for you to create resources on other sites that point back to your website. If you enjoy writing and publishing, you should really consider learning a little about Internet Marketing and using it to create buzz.
The steps are simple. First create or improve your website so people are likely to contact you after visiting it. Then create lots of paths that all lead to your wonderful website. These paths are called links and they will bring you visitors and add to your credibility on the web.
Beside the things we have already mentioned, you can create these links by writing articles for online magazines, you can do telephone interviews that are broadcast for iPods, you can create a Squidoo lens about design (www.squidoo.com) or you could create a work.com resource on how to improve the professional atmosphere of an office. There are 1000’s of things like this out there and doing one or two a week will steadily increase your visibility and success on the web.
These eight items are just some of the ways you can create a little bit of buzz for you and your organization every day. Find some you like and create a schedule to do them each week. Then track your results by asking people where they heard about you and monitoring your leads from your website.
The biggest challenge will be to remain consistent. Creating buzz and PR about your organization is a lot like an exercise plan. It only works if you keep doing it regularly. The good news is that creating buzz is a lot of fun and promotion as a way of life is a lot easier than promotion as an item on your to do list.
I have been a bit quiet for a few days. We will soon be launching a new product, revamping websites and blogs, and launching some new services (better packaged services) as well. Keep an eye on this blog and we will let you know as things become ready.
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