Reviewing your strengths is a smart way to begin designing a great custom link marketing campaign for your business. Capitalize on your existing resources, determine your target audience, and develop a great campaign idea. Here’s how to do it.
Resource Assessment
A custom link marketing campaign begins with an assessment of how your company currently reaches out to customers, industry, and the media. This includes newsletters, blogs, public relations people/companies, marketing departments, and social media.
Next, have the key people in your company put together an assessment of how strong their contacts are, whether it’s email, IM, LinkenIn, Facebook, forums, or elsewhere.
Also look for anyone in your company with a strong Twitter following.
Once you have a good assessment of your resources, move on to determining your targeted audience.
Audience
Now it’s time to determine which audience to target utilizing your existing resources. Remember, what’s popular with industry insiders might not be with consumers.
Focus your attention on one specific group to increase your chances of success. The more specific, the better.
Here’s an example. Let’s say you’re mostly a consumer business. At the same time, the industry connections within your company are outstanding on LinkedIn, Twitter, and email.
If this is the case, rather than targeting customers you’ll want to go with something targeting your industry. That will be easier to promote with your existing resources, and would make it more likely you’d get picked up by journalists and bloggers covering your industry.
The Idea
There are several ways to develop a link marketing idea that will appeal to your targeted audience. One of my favorites is to do research on what type of content, and I use the word “content” very loosely, attracts attention in related industries.