Social Media Marketing
A category of sites that is based on user participation and user-generated content. They include social networking sites like LinkedIn or Facebook, social bookmarking sites like Del.icio.us, social news sites like Digg or Reddit, micro-blogging sites sucha as Twitter and Plurk and other sites that are centered on user interaction. At the core of social media marketing is the idea that the old way of traditional marketing-the business drives the message into the consumer’s brain-is out.
The new way is in: that by listening to customers, companies will understand what the consumer values and needs. In order to understand what your customer wants, their preferences, behaviors and web ability you must utilize social media marketing in order to gain a holistic view of your users.
“Social media marketing (SMM) is a form of internet marketing which seeks to achieve branding and marketing communication goals through the participation in various social media networks”. Social Media is a shorter top level term that describes the space overall, and covers the activities around social interaction, content, videos, images and audio exposure. This is the new frontier in marketing where the consumer and marketer have one-on-one interaction. No longer is the marketing message one-way from marketer to consumer. The dialogue is happening right now online about your business, and you need to be "speaking" with your customers.
At this point the measured impact of social media networking on the success of a business has not reached the point of Search Engine Marketing-it's a new, young way to market. However business are reaping rewards from having a reasoned, thought out social media marketing plan as an integral part of their online/traditional strategy. How can a business use Social Media?
Business should position social media as a component of their overall marketing plan. If you engage in print advertising, you’re used to making the case that print advertising is a branding component that is used to support your overall marketing messaging. Like social media, the ROI from print advertising is very hard to measure. Social Media should be one medium you’re using among many in your communication with your audience and customers.
When is the last time you created a brochure and were asked to measure the ROI from that effort? You created the brochure to support the overall success of a product or service. The brochure helped to position and describe your product development effort. Blogging as a social media medium could be considered along the same lines. Your online presence is available 24 hours a day, and therefore the chance to communicate with a potential customer is also never ending. Every blog post and Twitter update has the potential to share content about your business or business practices with interested customers. Social Media , whether it's on Linkedin or Facebook, is essentially a unique and innovative tool they can be used to spread goodwill amongst prospects. . As long as you’re providing useful, funny, or interesting content for your audience, they’ll appreciate your effort and most likely visit again.
Want to know what your customer base is thinking, Social Media can provide valuable streams of feedback from the field. We’re also finding success in using blogging as a method for gathering customer feedback through surveys, new product ideas and product feedback forms. Social media is supposed to be a conversation, correct? Well, treat it as such and allow your audience to participate in the future of your business.
At Soal Marketing we will put together a comprehensive marketing plan that includes advise on capitalizing on social media marketing. Using the blogosphere and social media sites to spread the positive message about your business and engage in conversation with your prospects and customers is a crucial element of modern day marketing.
Ready To Learn More? Use the "Getting More Social" Menu in the right sidebar |
