What skydiving can teach us about online marketing

When marketing yourself or your organization online, one of your goals should be to build up trust with others. After all, people do business with those they know, like, trust, and value. But how can you do that online?

The key lies in consistency. You have to be consistent in your online communication. Send out your email newsletter consistently, update your social media consistently, blog consistently.
This is not Gary.

But it’s not only about keeping a consist schedule. You should represent your organization’s culture in a consistent manner as well, and respond on a consistent basis to online comments, both positive and negative.

The danger of inconsistency is demonstrated well in skydiving. A friend of mine, Gary, is an avid skydiver. He jumps out of a plane just about as often as he can.

Recently, Gary and I were talking, and the subject of consistency came up. I asked him, “Do you use a checklist when you jump?”

“Absolutely,” he responded before I could even finish the question. “Always.”

“So how comfortable would you feel winging it instead?”

He chuckled. “Let me put it this way: I never have done it.”

Of course, when you’re marketing yourself online, your life isn’t in danger. But your organization’s reputation is. It doesn’t matter if you represent a nonprofit or a for-profit business, people have to have some level of trust to be a customer, a client, to volunteer, or to donate.

Maybe you’ve gone to a company’s website, and they had a blog. But when you looked at it to see if they were really experts, they hadn’t posted anything for six months. You may have even asked yourself, “Is this company still in business?”

Do you want people to ask that about your organization? If not, you need to be consistent.

Need help?

Plenty of people struggle with consistency in their online presence. If your issue is coming up with ideas, you might check read the free previews of the books I wrote to help with that, 102 Tweets for social media, and Blog a Week for blogs (and it’s useful for newsletters as well). If you find the free previews beneficial, feel free to buy copies on Amazon.