Social Marketing Explained

By Justin Harrison

Social marketing is a part of the Web 2.0 development that uses social networking sites and blogs to market your product or business on the world wide web. This kind of advertising makes for a more personal connection between you and your customers.

Social marketing is unobtrusive marketing. If you are too pushy and members begin to see you as a salesman type, they will probably remove you from their friend list. You should endeavour to be seen as an authority in your field, and to build up relationships with possible customers by facilitating open discourse with them. By nurturing good relationships with customers, and opening up online communication with them, you will be able to get trustworthy feedback which you can use to improve your product or service, and which will also help you better understand the particular consumer group you are trying to reach. The simplest ways in which to do this are through blogging or through the more popular networking sites such as uTube or MySpace where members are able to and happy to comment on your work.

The more often people hear your product's name the more likely they are to remeber it in the future. However, since the way users view your brand will greatly influence how well your marketing campaign will work, you will want them to think of positive experiences. You can help this by making funny videos or articles, offering helpful content or making competitions based on your product. If you utilze the right skills social marketing can help alot when establishing a new brand or enforcing knowledge of an existing brand.

Bloggers and website owners are always on the lookout for interesting things to put on their websites. If you can give them articles that are noteworthy, they will begin to refer to them on their blogs and websites. A good article can actually end up being read by huge numbers of bloggers on the lookout for stories to blog about.

Due to the fact that the goal of many marketing campaigns is to improve sales, this is something important to consider when it comes to social marketing. Even though social media interactions don't commonly generate sales they do provide a way to develop a positive relationship with customers and provide brand awareness which can generate more sales in the long run.

Social marketing is cheap. In fact, with the exception of a time investment, there are no explicit costs. Therefore each successful lead generates a net positive return. If you don't have much capital then social marketing is the most budget-friendly technique to generate interest in what you have to offer.

Lastly, social marketing perhaps offers its biggest advantage in it being "do it yourself" without any need for outsourcing. A computer literate individual with an internet connection can leverage the multitude of social networking sites available to market a product or service.

About the Author:

No comments: