I was advising the manager for a compliance readiness business yesterday about lead generation options. He ran a small business that usually had anywhere from 2-5 employees at a given time based on his work load. He was looking for options to augment the money he was spending with Google Adwords. Cost was an important consideration due to the size of his business.

I recommended he take the step to move into social media focusing on creating a blog, monitoring and sending out tweets on his specialized compliance areas, and transitioning the newsletter he was sending out from a promotional sales focused piece to a tool highlighting best practices and practical advice that would be meaningful to his ideal prospects. This would be an easy way for him to not only help prospects find him, but would prove to be a more effective way to market to his existing database of contacts. This appealed to him as well because for a small business it came with no costs other than the time to establish and maintain these mediums.

Using Twitter, blogging and newsletters is a powerful way to create and promote unique valuable content to your prospects. If you are using a newsletter to market to your contact database, and if you aren’t you should be, make sure to include links to your blogs. Blog entries are consistently one of the most clicked links in a newsletter because they focus on best practices, news and relevant information rather than sales pitches. Twitter is great for both promoting your blog entries as well as monitoring opportunities to engage potential prospects in a conversation. The point here is that your marketing efforts all work together for a more cohesive marketing strategy.

If you have resistance to using these mediums in your business you are not alone. There are a lot of misconceptions about the value of Twitter and how it should be used. Yesterday, there was a Gartner blog entry titled Twitter is mostly for losers. This post was intentionally titled to draw in readers and comments, but it is a sentiment that is shared by a lot of people. Most recently it was echoed on the David Letterman Show when he characterized Twitter as “a waste of time.” Show how Twitter plays an important role as a part of a coordinated marketing effort and you will change those perceptions.