Sunday, January 25, 2009

Social Marketing

By Justin Harrison

Marketing socially is a new method that enables you to promote your business and describe your products and services using the internet, blogs, social networking sites, and social media. Many advantages exist for social marketing and they include the ability to create relationships with 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.

When you start a business, the first thing you need to really think about is, what product or service is needed. And once you figure that out, then you can tailor your product or service to the needs of the public. And then you can figure out how to market it. And make sure you start a web page and come up with an idea that will really catch people's attention.

Do some research and look for people who have blogs and then talk to them, tell them what your product/service is. And be honest and tell them all about it. If the blogger is interested then they will be willing to help you and before you know it, you will start to see a lot of people on your site and you will have a lot of business.

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.

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. - 15790

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