​Shaun Uthup, Creative Director at SOZO Design explains why we must all engage in the online revolution

ONLINE marketing is currently going through a revolution.

Gone are the days when companies can just have a static website, sit back and let it do all of its marketing.

Today’s online marketing is all about engaging with customers in ways that were never possible before.

Historically, marketing has been very much a one-way conversation. Companies have tended to preach to potential customers about how great their products or services are through a printed brochure or static website.

However, this has been flipped on its head now with the fast-moving pace of the internet and social media.

Broadly speaking, the principle is to give information or offers away in the hope that people will find it useful and then either comment upon or share your content with their network of contacts.

For example, if a company gives away useful tips on its area of expertise, potential customers will find them, see that they are an expert in their field and then strike up a conversation with them.

Another example would be to provide exclusive offers on your website, Twitter or Facebook pages and allow users to share these offers with their friends.

This creates ‘viral marketing’, whereby users market your information for you by spreading the word online through social media networks.

Video is another important part of a successful online marketing strategy. Video online is growing at a phenomenal rate. YouTube is now the second largest search engine after Google.

People are starting to bypass Google and even bypass websites altogether and looking straight on YouTube for information.

For example, if someone wants a demo on how to do something, rather than trawl through lots of websites to find a page of text, surfers are searching directly on YouTube and watching a video showing how to do it.

Often video can explain services or show off products far more effectively than pages of text. Provided the video is concise and well thought out, it can engage an audience like no other medium.

In summary, try to think about your online marketing in a completely new way and provide content that your audience would find useful and interesting.  Then try to deliver that content through as many new channels as possible.

 Remember to change the language and style of content according to the tool being used, eg short snippets on Twitter, conversation on Facebook, videos on YouTube, expert articles on blogs and so on.

For more information, please visit our blog, at www.sozodesign.co.uk