About Mindgrub
Mindgrub is largely a consulting company and we have a few different products. We have a new product, the Edualizer, which is a definitive product that we sell licenses to. We have some partner products such as viaPlace and EdInfo, and these are also products that we make money off of, so we want to drive traffic to those sites. We also provide consulting – more... services on top of our location-based services frameworks, so we want to drive traffic to our consulting as well as our framework websites. We can get our word across, we can talk about how great Mindgrub is, but we need to get that user to visit our contact forum - it doesn't matter if we have brand awareness because they can't go to a department store and buy our product.
So Twitter, for instance, is a good avenue to talk about what we do. However, it's ultimately a benign outlet unless we focus on driving traffic back, and Twitter is really good in regard to search engine optimization. At least one or two of our Twitter links show up in our main Google search results. Therefore, it's really good to use Twitter and get some links out there about what we do, but ultimately we want to get traffic back. One of the ways we do that is by creating tiny url's on Mindgrub's website instead o f just posting long url's that are loosely related to us and then allowing Twitter to create a tiny url for us. By using Mindgrub to create that tiny url, we drive traffic back to our website. For instance, I mentioned a Fortune Magazine blog that talks about which industries are making money, one of which is for profit education which our product, the Edualizer, falls under. So I wanted to link to this blog post and mention Mindgrub and the Edualizer. To post to that link, I created a tiny url created via Mindgrub. This way, Mindgrub is getting hits back from Google, and those hits include this Mindgrub-specific tiny url. It's like getting two hits in one. This paired with our Twitter hits will raise our ranks up on Google so that when someone searches for Rich Internet Application development, which is one of our primary consulting focuses, our link will probably appear above our competitor's link. So we use Twitter as a marketing outlet and the goal is to drive traffic back. It's the same with Facebook. We have a Facebook profile where we constantly drop information about what city I'm going to next, who I'm meeting up with, or some new blog posts about one of our products. If I'm Nike, I could create a Facebook group and tons of people would join because they adore Nike.
Alan Wolk gave a phenomenal presentation at the meetup called "Your Brand is not My Friend. For example, if I started blasting my Facebook friends about what we do at Mindgrub, they won't care. Mindgrub is not their friend, so they're going to tune me out. But someone like Nike might actually be someone's "good personal friend," similar to the way people follow sports teams. So Nike will probably directly benefit from creating a Facebook or LinkedIn group to get their name and brand across, and their friends may be moved to buy a Nike over an Adidas shoe when they're in a store. A company like Mindgrub isn't big enough that people will join a LinkedIn or Facebook group simply because it's a Mindgrub group. But we happen to do social media implementations, so it would behoove us to create a social media group on LinkedIn, get a lot of people to join, then drop information in that group whenever I speak at a conference, Mindgrub gets a new contract, and spread awareness that way. So, I indirectly drop that Mindgrub does social media implementations, which may be a solution to a problem for those who joined the social media LinkedIn group. Seeing Mindgrub's name in the group may lead them to visit our website, and then we get business. If I'm Nike and can directly raise brand awareness therefore directly raise sales, that's wonderful. But smaller companies like Mindgrub really have to analyze how we'll benefit from these groups and what our resources are to maintain our presence in them - it takes a lot of effort to maintain these different marketing tools.
So, it's a really a very indirect return on your investment - direct marketing on Twitter just isn't direct marketing. If I put $110 into LinkedIn, I'm not going to get all of that back in direct profits. These avenues are really just a way to inexpensively market your company. I don't benefit from these avenues the way Nike may, but I do build brand awareness over time by linking users of these different groups back to Mindgrub's site. You want to be able to spend a minimal amount of time maintaining these things, and maximize your potential for indirect returns.
There are a few things you need to identify, the first being: what makes you money? Getting the word out about your company so people recognize your brand in a store, or so that you can get people to visit you website? Then, look at all the different avenues that will help you get your word across in as many ways as possible. Lastly, identify your resources. Who will be building brand awareness? Who's best suited for Twittering and blogging, for going to conferences and talking your company up? Put together an approach for moving forward, and then implement it. Analyze how beneficial your plan has been after a period of time, adjust as necessary, make amends to the plan, and think differently in order to improve your plan for the upcoming month, quarter or year. – less – More from ZoomInfo »
