Tuesday, January 05, 2010

Social Marketing

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 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 web designers are commonly looking for interesting content they can use on their web sites. If you are able to give them quality articles they may begin using them on their sites. With this method you can create thousands of hyperlinks to your web site with every article you write. Popular articles are capable of being read by many bloggers that would like to comment.

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.

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. - 2364

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