Do you know how to convert website traffic into buying customers?
Social marketing is all about the relationship you build with people. Social media offers amazing opportunities for sharing and engaging with likeminded people. Traditional marketing is built on basing your marketing on encountering people you have never met, are not particularly interested in your product and services or very much anything that you will market to them. There really is no way to build a strong bond with them like there would be in face to face networking. In the case of social marketing you are not making it a face to face thing.
But while building a strong bond isn’t necessary in social marketing, for most people it isn’t really as easy as it looks. Because of the wide variety of options people have to choose from, social marketing can be a challenge. Which social media site should you be using and which one are the most effective for what type of marketing you are prepared to do? Based on this information you want to select your social marketing strategy.
This brings us to the key question, when you are choosing which online marketing strategy to take advantage of,
What Should you Use?
Are only your social media sites?
In other words, are only the sites for social purposes or are they used for business marketing? Depending on your social marketing goals, you may very well need to use a different site for business, based on this information.
Examples of an effective and commercial social media hosting site include LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube and MySpace. There are quite a few others that may work for you or have yet to be explored, as your shopping cart or marketing needs vary.
Over the course of your social marketing campaign you may very well realize that LinkedIn, in particular, can be the most effective social marketing site for your business needs. This depends on the needs of your business and the products or services you are marketing.
Will these sites or a number of them accommodate all of your business marketing needs or are some of the sites your business needs are so small that you don’t really need to use all of the hosting sites? How easy will it be for one business to tailor a plan to suit their social networking needs, in particular? You will need to decide that very early in your social marketing campaign or it will be difficult to make strategic decisions.
Is large enough for your needs?
Will several sites handle them or are you prepared to handle this work yourself?
Is it going to cost you extra?
Do you know which site needs work the most?
Read your social media plan to ensure that it covers what your company is trying to achieve. For example, if you are running a local car wash business, will you need to get involved in every gardening related social networking site like Facebook, i crawled recently going on a gardening site and commenting on a social site to drive traffic but finding very few guests or do you need info on having a page overview for smell?
You can’t forget to keep the price when your time is extremely limited. There is an old saying, “time is money”. Do decide how much you need your social marketing efforts to cost. Particularly social marketing. If there is no way that you can hit your financial targets, you are better off leaving the web marketing to spend on other advertising venues such as Facebook or Google.
RememberMeThis is a business, there is no free lunch.
