Reaching Out to Your Community

If you're a local business, you want your community to be on board with your efforts. That's just common sense.

But what's also common sense is the other side of that equation: You have to be on-board with your community, too. It's not enough to cross your fingers and hope new customers will walk in the door. You've got to work hard to be a community participant and give back if you want the relationship to work both ways.

So what are some simple ways to reach out to your community? Here are just a few.

1. Use your social media for the greater good

When you can share important community information (like health events, non-profit fundraisers, and community celebrations), you take the spotlight you've created with your social media presence and shine it on others.

Make yourself known as a community resource. It's as simple as sharing a Facebook post or retweeting others every now and then.

2. Be a local expert

Find ways to share your knowledge with the community to position yourself as the local expert. That might mean speaking to civic groups, appearing on local radio shows, or writing a regular column for a local newspaper or magazine.

While they require a little extra time and effort, these activities are helpful for your fellow neighbors and build name recognition for you and your brand.

3. Partner up

You can reach new audiences when you partner up with a local business or organization. Maybe you co-host an in-store fundraiser, or you provide the food and drink and a community art event. Any time you can get your foot in the door and meet new faces, both parties reap the benefits.

You can keep your investment low while still seeing a large positive impact.

4. Lend a hand

If your business thrives on referrals, look for ways you can build trust with your community by being an active participant. Coach a soccer team. Lead a civic group. Join a book club.

Not only will you get some enjoyment out of it, but you'll form new relationships with families and peers alike.

Being a beacon to the community means people grow to feel a source of pride when associated with your business. You become a trusted friend and well-known name throughout the area. Give it a try, and see how it impacts your business relationships.

Partnering with Influencers for Expanded Reach

As great as social media is for sharing content, sometimes you just need a little extra oomph to reach new audiences.

Partnering with influencers is one way to get your brand in front of some new eyeballs. Whether it's for an in-person event or a social media promotion, teaming up with people who already have a large following can help you grow.

So how do you approach this tactic? Here are a few different strategies you can test out.

1. Build a Blogger Council.

Before I started Lumen, I managed the blog and social media assets for a non-profit. And since our advertising budget was basically non-existent, we had to get creative. By reaching out to five people from the community who were already blogging (a few "mommy" bloggers, a school official, a community resource blogger) and asking them to participate as a guest blogger every few months, both parties were able to reach new audiences.

Do some digging and find the active voices in your area who you can team up with to reach new people. Then, make the ask. Outline the expectations and benefits and make them realize you're not asking for much.

2. Partner up for Giveaways or Features.

I also owned a successful online jewelry store before I started lumen. I never paid for advertising and sold more than $40,000 worth of product by using this tactic in tandem with other social media marketing strategies.

Find a few influencers who fit within your target demographic, and see if they'd be interested in teaming up for a promotion (a giveaway or contest) or would just be willing to feature your product. This might mean giving away some product, but it's a valuable exchange.

Track your success for these partnerships by monitoring your Google Analytics and seeing if they are paying off as top web traffic referral sources.

3. Invite an Influencer to Attend Your Event

If you're hosting an event and want to get more people in the door, reach out to the recognizable names and faces in the area that will help encourage others to attend.

For example, many retail boutiques have begun inviting local bloggers to attend special in-store events where they act as the hosts or hostesses. Not only does this help with promotion of the event, but it adds ethos to your brand by association.

There's many other ways you can connect with new audiences by partnering up with established voices within your niche. Make a plan, reach out, and watch people start taking notice.

How to Write Blogs that Increase Your SEO

One of the main reasons most organizations maintain a regular blog is to improve their organic search engine optimization (SEO.)

Blogging helps improve SEO in many ways.

• It helps create more pages linked to your website, making your website's "web" larger and therefore more likely for people to be found in search engine results.

• It means content related to specific subject matter will be tethered to your website in search engine results. (Ex. Shoe company writes about sneaker trends.)

• It improves your Google quality score, which is part of how it decides which pages rank higher than others in search results.

And these are just a few examples.

But for many people who are spending hours developing copy for their blog, they still feel like they're spinning their wheels. They don't know the ins and outs of SEO, and don't have hours to spend getting trained on it.

That's why today, we've got one helpful strategy that will help increase your SEO performance. It only adds a few minutes onto the process, and makes a big difference.

Here's how it works.

Step 1: Sign in to Google AdWords (create an account if you don't have one. It's free.)

Step 2: Go to the Keyword Planner tool.

Step 3: Click 'Search for a new keyword and ad group idea.'

Step 4: Type the subject of your blog post into the first box, and then click 'Get Ideas.'

Step 5: Click on the 'Keyword Ideas' tab and look at the results of different keyword phrases.

You want to find a phrase that's 2-5 words long, has 1,000 or more average monthly searches, and has low or medium competition.

Step 6: Once you've found your perfect keyword phrase, try to work it into your blog post naturally 3-5 times throughout the post. Don't force it or overload on the keyword, as that will actually harm your SEO (Google sees that as "keyword stuffing.")

Now, will this strategy make you the #1 result when you Google a certain keyword phrase? Probably not. But if you use this strategy over time and regularly produce quality posts, your SEO will improve.

Think about what phrases your audience might be searching if they were looking for a product or service you offer, and then see how you can create blog content around those topics, pain points, and questions.

Still don't have time to write SEO optimized blog content? We can help.