Posts Tagged ‘Startup’

If you’re a small business, one of the goals of your marketing strategy is to drive more traffic to your website, where you can convert those visitors into leads.

To generate traffic, you need to publish great content that is interesting and useful to your target market.  You can write a blog, newsletter, white papers, press releases, articles, how-to guides, whatever, and then you’ll push out all of that content to your audience via email or social media.

Well, how about tapping into an audience on social media that goes way beyond your followers?

Check out this Baltimore-based startup, SocialToaster.  I first wrote about them for Tech Cocktail back in March.  I have zero affiliation with them, but their idea – and the technology behind it – is really interesting and super useful for small businesses, so sharing them here at GrowSmartBiz has been on my to-do list for a while.

So, here’s how they work:  Ask customers, employees, Facebook fans, and anyone else you’d like to be your ambassador (their term, not mine).  You’ll share content with them, and they will spread the content on their social networks (Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and/or LinkedIn).  Naturally, there are built-in analytics so you can track website visitors to see which ambassador sent them.

SocialToaster is a great way to gain brand exposure and build up your sales funnel, but it is dependent on you producing content on a regular basis.  You don’t need to go crazy writing new stuff all the time, though.  If you already blog, you can ask your ambassadors to share your posts.  If you publish a newsletter, ask them to share that.  Each SocialToaster post contains a unique URL and appears to come from the ambassador themselves, so your clickthrough rates will be higher than traditional online advertising.

So, what’s in it for your ambassadors?  Rewards, at least for the people that drive sales leads to you, furnished by sponsors.  Recruiting them is up to you.  You can send an email to employees, newsletters to customers, post something on Facebook, blog about it, or tweet it – or anything else you can think of.

The SocialToaster software can be integrated with your existing content management and CRM systems including Drupal, WordPress, SugarCRM and SalesForce.  As for pricing, you pay a flat monthly subscription fee based on the number of SocialToaster posts you want to push out.  Their most basic plan is free.

Image Courtesy: SocialToaster