Anatomy of a Social Media Marketing Campaign – Contest

If you’ve spent some time on this website you know that, in addition to designing great websites we provide internet marketing services from search engine optimization and search engine marketing to online reputation management and social media marketing.  Its not every day we get the opportunity – the FUN – of really digging our teeth into a client’s web presence and creating an online marketing campaign to promote their website and product.  Because we’re so excited we thought we’d share our secrets with you … while we’re in action!   Anyone can write a great article about a success story AFTER its become a success story.  We’re writing our success story BEFORE it becomes a success story!  That’s how confident we are.

Our client is Pacific Northwest author Judy Nedry.  An expert on Oregon’s wine country, Judy has written several books about the wine industry and Oregon’s rise to prominence.  Judy decided it was time to stretch her writing repertoire to something a touch more visceral … MURDER!  Fictional murder, but murder nonetheless!  For the past two years Judy has been working on her first novel, An Unholy Alliance.  As she was working on the final pages and the beginnings of publishing, she arrived in our office to hire Transmutation Sciences to create her web presence and consult with her about the various internet marketing opportunities available.

First Steps
Finding a Domain Name That Works.

Our first thought was to get the domain name of the book “An Unholy Alliance” but immediately realized the limits of such a domain.  Firstly, its harder to remember and, secondly, its only the first in a series called The Emma Golden Mysteries.  However, since Emma hasn’t yet reached the status of say Poirot we decided the best option was the most obvious, JudyNedry.com.  This afforded Judy the opportunity to promote The Emma Golden Mysteries and any other novels she chooses to write.

Creating a Relevant Design

Judy needed a website that she could edit – add calendar items and events, post a blog about writing.  Judy also needed a system as simple as possible as she did not want a huge learning curve; thus we chose to use the blog engine WordPress.  Judy also needed to keep the costs as low as possible so she could budget more for the book itself.  Additionally, neither of us were certain exactly how the book cover would be designed; so, we focused on the common thread betwixt An Unholy Alliance and the future Emma Golden Mysteries … wine!

Making the Effort

Judy was our first client to receive our book “Top Ten Guerrilla Blogging Strategies” as a guide to aggressively marketing her website.  Our book details ten fantastic techniques created to help push the site to the top of the search engines, build a fan email list and create a sense of community.

We planned about three months of website development – building content and building relationships – to take us through the publication and release of the book.  Subsequent to the release of the book, Judy began an aggressive author appearance schedule that has taken her all over Oregon at bookstores and wineries.  At each event, she’s acquired emails and distributed flyers, postcards, business cards and sold tons of books all emblazoned with her domain name.

Taking it Further

How do we now expand the awareness of Judy’s novel beyond the Pacific Northwest?  Obviously, the website has the ability to reach an international audience but without a large internet budget we have to rely on our SEO expertise within the limits of the WordPress engine and the amount of time Judy can spend on pushing site content and pursuing linking relationships.

We began building a social media presence for Judy by signing her up for a Facebook account and a Twitter account; then charging her with the responsibility of gaining quality friends in both accounts.  The reality is that without a large number of friends in your social media avenues you don’t have an audience to read about you, your product and your services – or, in Judy’s case, her book.

We have tools that help.  In particular, we have Just signed Judy up for a TweetSpinner Pro account that will help automate the friend-making and tweeting process.  TweetSpinner Pro is the perfect tool for managing a huge marketing campaign.  We highly recommend it.  We’re also using Bit.Ly to reduce URL length and help track individual tweet activity and response.

Next week we’ll take you step-by-step through the development of our social media marketing campaign.