Are you still looking for effective ways to promote your online presence? It’s a good idea to always be looking for new, and creative, ways to drive traffic to your online assets. It’s hard for people to connect with you online when they have no idea that you’re using the Internet to promote your business. Almost every interaction with a customer, or prospect, provides an opportunity to promote your online presence. It doesn’t matter if you’re using Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare YouTube, a Blog, or any other online social tool, be sure to take the opportunity to drive traffic to your online tools as often as possible. In today’s post, we are going to explain the art of the “Connect with Us” Card – a simple tool that packs a big punch when it comes to driving traffic to your online tools.
The Connect with Us Card is a simple idea that was sparked through an email conversation with a Catalyst client, the local Central Bucks Family YMCA of Doylestown. The Marketing Director at the Y was explaining that a Senior Membership Director was heading out into the local Doylestown community to hand out 2-week membership passes to employees of local Doylestown businesses. During the conversation, we realized that we had missed an opportunity to promote our online presence. We wanted to print our Twitter & Facebook URLs on the 2-week membership passes. From there, the idea of the Connect with Us Card was born. Instead of printing the URLs on the 2-week membership passes, and any other subsequent print materials that we wanted to promote on, the YMCA created the Connect with Us Card.
The concept for the Connect with Us Card is simple. It’s like a business card for the organization’s online presence. On the front of the card is the Central Bucks Family YMCA logo, the logos of each of the online tools that they use to connect, and build relationships with, their members and the surrounding community, as well as, their physical street address. On the back of the card are simply the links to each of their online tools. The card is clean, and to the point, connect with Central Bucks Family YMCA online.
FRONT
BACK
As you can see from the images above, it’s critical that you create custom URLs for each online tool that you use. Having a custom URL that isn’t very long provides you with much flexibility when creating promotional tools like Connect with Us cards. A few months back we wrote about the importance of having a custom Facebook URL for your Facebook business page, and this is a perfect example of why it’s important to have that custom URL. Can you imagine if you wanted to create a Connect with Us Card with that ugly URL string that all Facebook Business pages have before you customize your URL? The card would have to be 6 inches long just to contain the URL.
If you need to shorten your URL for Facebook and don’t have 25 Likes yet, then you can use URL shortening tools like bit.ly, and even customize your URLs. Using URL shorteners may even be the best bet for your Connect with Us Cards, as you can create customize short URLs for each online tool, which you can then track via the Analytics section of bit.ly – Just be sure not to use those same URLs in other tactics, as that will taint your data. If you create customized URLs for only the Connect with Us Card, you’ll be able to tell how much traffic the cards are driving to each of your online tools, simply by checking the Clicks for each link.
Connect with Us cards can be given out at events, during trade shows, with receipts at your store, with deliveries, etc. If you have been trying to answer the question, how do I promote my online tools, then Connect with Us Cards are a great answer to your question. Have you been using something similar? How has it been working for you?
Tags: creative marketing, promote social tool, promote your blog