*Full disclosure: Emily is my cousin by marriage.

Dear Jessica,
I've been enjoying your Q&As and have learned a number of things from your other readers questions. My question has to do with growing a community and following around a company. Its a little different from a personal brand, because clearly people expect we are interested in selling our products.
My company is called C'watre (pronounced seawater) oceanic skin care and we are the only ocean water based skin care line in the world. We were in the midst of launching into the Spa Market when the recession hit which has limited our spa presence to NYC and Southern California. However, we were featured in TIME Magazine, so we have a number of fans across the country who purchase our products online. What we are trying to do - because the Spa industry is still struggling - is to expand our online sales and community. We're on Twitter and Facebook and we're adding content to our blog twice a week, but I'm having a hard time getting noticed. Its like being my pre-teen self at a Junior High Dance.
Do you have any advice on how a young company with incredible, all-natural products can get more people to come visit our website and blog?
Thanks for you help,
Emily
Co-Founder of C'watre oceanic skin care

Emily, This is a question I know many companies grapple with.  My recommendation is to start with the spas you have relationships with.  Because of the current state of the economy, I am sure these spas are facing a much more competitive climate as well.

What if you partnered with the spas to offer a promotional day of pampering for their most loyal clients.  If the spa offered a special package rate for a day of services and you offered a discount on a package rate for your product, you'd accomplish two things.  You and the spa would be rewarding those who are most loyal (and therefore most likely to be repeat customers for both C'watre and the spa) AND it would be a way to let those customers experience a product or service they might not have experienced before.

At the event, those customers could opt-in to an email list for C'watre for special discounts and services.  On the back end, you could keep track of which spa they frequent so that you could continue to cross-promote with the spas without the special event in the future.

As your email mailing list grows, you could keep track of women's birthdays, anniversaries, and segment into to lists: brides, moms, etc...so that you could launch different promotions for different audiences.

Along with these promotions comes the community building.  Reward those who share your product and give them opportunities to share...when they forward to a friend and the friend signs up for your mailing list...give them a special discount code or an invitation to pick up a free sample at one of your partner spas nearby.

A lot of times, the community is already there, it's just a matter of bringing those people into one platform.  The key is to figure out what the best platform is based on WHERE your customers are already.  Is it Facebook?  Is it your blog?  Is it on niche beauty blogs? Is it at events?  Sometimes the platforms are the home base of the community while other times, they're simply the path to an offline community.

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