By Andrew Seel
The media landscape is changing so fast it's hard to keep up. More and more people are going online not only to communicate with their friends and business colleagues but for their education and entertainment. And increasingly they are doing this through social networks.
Traditional forms of marketing are becoming increasingly ineffective, particularly when used to reach audiences that are mostly online. These days it is much easier to avoid marketing that interrupts your life, from using Sky+ style recorders to avoiding TV adverts and opting out of direct mail.
The question for businesses looking to sell their products or services is firstly how do you find your audience in this new landscape and secondly how do you communicate with them.
This is where Social Media Marketing can help.
What is Social Media Marketing?
Social Media Marketing - or SMM - is a relatively new marketing discipline which has come about in response to the increasing amount of social activity now taking place online.
Activity can include:
Listening:
Identifying where your potential customers are online and who is most influential amongst them, then monitoring conversations.
Building connections:
Joining or starting a conversation with your target audience online – perhaps commenting on their blog or forum or starting your own blog or responding to a comment they make somewhere, such as on a forum.
Community building:
Starting and cultivating a community of your own.
Managing your reputation:
Managing your reputation amongst online communities by responding and acting on conversations happening online.
Social networking:
Building a social network group such as a Facebook group around a cause.
Where can it help?
Social Media Marketing can achieve real results in a wide range of situations. You may recognise some of these:
- People are not coming to my website.
- People are not staying or buying at my website or don’t want to sign up/register or don’t opt in to email contact.
- Other forms of marketing (eg print advertising) are not working so well – it's very expensive per conversion.
- People are talking about me negatively online.
- It is getting harder to reach top rankings using Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) techniques these days.
- Our competitors are starting to do this.
- I know I should be talking to users in social networks but I don’t know how to start.
- I have a forum on my website but no-one uses it.
Does Social Media Marketing work?
In a word, yes!
You just need to look at the real world – in business to business (b2b) sales and marketing - business has always been done on a one-to-one basis by building relationships between individuals and referring people to others.
The web now enables this to happen for consumer facing businesses – you can now easily communicate on a one-to-one basis across the globe. Relationships will be increasingly on a more personal basis and by following some of the rules of b2b online you can make a significant impact on your business.
Successful b2b sales focus on building relationships, building trust, talking to each other as real people, being honest, providing a personal service – in short what we want from the people we're buying from.
Until now this was too expensive for smaller consumer items. However, using the techniques search engine marketing (SEM) can provide, you can do this online with your b2c customers at a fraction of the cost.
It works because:
-
• it builds trust with your customers
• it generates links to your website (key to a successful SEO strategy)
• it makes negative comments valuable by responding to them
• it doesn't interrupt your customers – it engages them
• it identifies the influential people in networks and invites them to help you
• it goes where your customers are and doesn't try to force them somewhere else with little benefit to them
• it appreciates your customers are intelligent and don't always respond well to being told what to think or do.
Find out how we can help you harness the power of social media - call us on 01273 689672 or email us to talk about Social Media Marketing.