Saturday, January 31, 2009

Social Marketing Explained

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 visible a brand name is, the higher the recall of that brand name with people. However, the impact of a marketing campaign is crucially dependent on the users' brand experience, hence the need for a positive experience. This can be achieved through amusing videos or articles, providing useful information or even using competitions built around the product. By utilizing appropriate techniques, social marketing can help establish a new brand or strengthen the awareness 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.

A marketing campaign exists to increase revenue and sales, and social marketing is no exception. Your business exposure in social media won't always generate a sale, but it is like word of mouth advertising that spreads awareness of your business in a friendly way that will eventually lead to more sales.

One of the best things you can do for your business is word of mouth, you can talk to people whether it be on the internet in social forums or on the street or in stores. And you would be surprised as to how many customers you will start seeing.

If you use the internet to draw customers in, there is no over head costs, because you can do this yourself. And then you will have more money you can put into your company. Any one who can use a computer can set up a company web page. This is so easy to do. I mean people use the computer everyday for everything.

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