Lately I’ve been busy with a little side project – building the online brand for an wedding planning software web site – and one of the things I’ve been doing to get some traction and generate some interest is to contact bloggers who write about wedding-related topics and see if they will look at our site, give us their feedback on it and, if they like the site, mention it to their readers. This has been a fairly effective way of driving up our daily unique visitors as well as currying favor with the search engines, and it reminded me that often the best marketing isn’t done via the marketing department.
One of the bloggers who just loved our software devoted an entire blog post to it, and while some of the bloggers who wrote about our software used some of the language from our site to describe it, this particular blogger came up with her own slant on our site, in glowing terms, no less. After she posted the blog, she emailed me saying the post was up and asked me if I would like to change anything about it.
She described our software in terms that I couldn’t have used without sounding pathetically self-aggrandizing, but it worked because this was coming from an objective audience and a fresh set of eyes. In addition, she pointed out features of our software that seemed minor to me but were indispensable to her. In the end, not only didn’t I change a word she wrote, but I ended up asking her if I could use her copy on our site to market our software.
So next time you’re trying to launch a brand or tweak your marketing message, think about giving your customers the microphone and let them speak freely. The results may take you somewhere unexpectedly rewarding.
