Tuesday, January 20, 2009

Social Marketing

By Justin Harrison

A new and innovative method for advertising your business is social marketing. It lets you generate awareness of what your company has to offer using Internet blogs, social networking sites, and other forms of social media. Using social marketing has a lot of advantages never before seen in the world of advertising, including the chance to establish a relationship with your customer base.

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.

When you gain potential customers on our site, remember to be open and honest and if the customers have questions or concerns, be there to answers any questions they may have. And answers the questions in a timely manner. Don't ignore your customers. Because this will turn them away from you and this will give you negative feedback and that could spell trouble for you.

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.

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