Social Media Marketing: Part of Your Overall Marketing Mix

Speak­ing of Inter­net mar­ket­ing strat­egy, Search Engine Opti­miza­tion (SEO), Social Media Opti­miza­tion (SMO) and Search Engine Mar­ket­ing (SEM) go hand in hand.

A web­site with­out proper Search Engine Opti­miza­tion (SEO), no mat­ter how attrac­tive, it will never be vis­ited. If you want your firm’s web­site to be vis­ited, it must first be found. For poten­tial client or cus­tomer to find your site, it must be located by search engines.

There are many strate­gies and tac­tic can help your achieve that, social media or net­work mar­ket­ing, just one of the many pow­er­ful online mar­ket­ing strate­gies in which you should use as part of your over­all mar­ket­ing mix, espe­cial for the SMEs and SMBs (Small Medium Business).

A recent study report from eMar­keter notes that, the social media mar­ket­ing band­wagon is fill­ing up. Accord­ing to Equa­tion Research — “2009 Mar­ket­ing Indus­try Trends Report”, the sur­vey of US brand mar­keters found the major­ity already using social media.

Based on the respon­dents report, among brand mar­keters, 37% did not know enough about social media to begin, and another 37% said there was no good way to mea­sure its effectiveness.

The most pop­u­lar social media chan­nels for brand and agency mar­keters were Face­book, Twit­ter, online videos and blogs. eMar­keter high­lights the con­cept of “one-to-many” mar­ket­ing tac­tics and their abil­ity to pro­vide real results.

In a ear­lier study dug up by eMar­keter in Jan 2009 said: lots of small busi­nesses plan to increase their spend­ing on social net­work mar­ket­ing in 2009. In fact, 25% of the small busi­nesses sur­veyed by Ad-ology Research indi­cated that they would increase spend­ing on the medium this year, a higher per­cent­age than any other mar­ket­ing format.

From above sta­tis­tics and study results you can see, social media is mov­ing up a gear and becom­ing more main­stream as a busi­ness tool. Today, any entity used to medi­at­ing and con­trol­ling its publics will have to face this par­a­digm shift and engage in online con­ver­sa­tions if it is to stay rel­e­vant to its audiences.

How­ever, in order to use social media mar­ket­ing strat­egy effec­tively, there is still a learn­ing curve busi­ness needs to over­come. If your firm wants to join the con­ver­sa­tions, here are some basic things to help you get right.

Cost Effec­tively

The bar­ri­ers to enter­ing into the social media are zero, except your time, it costs noth­ing to set up and man­age a Twit­ter or Face­book page. This is espe­cially a great mar­ket­ing strat­egy to use in a reces­sion time, because social media has readily-available met­rics, you can start from learn­ing what works and what doesn’t, together work on the mon­i­tor­ing process toward your return in investment.

Empower Your Employ­ees and Engage them with Purpose

Use your inter­nal resources, find peo­ple who are pas­sion­ate about social media within your orga­ni­za­tion, put your trust in and assign the job to them, let your social media-savvy employ­ees take the respon­si­bil­ity and do their job on your behalf, but as themselves.

How­ever, if you don’t have capa­ble employee for car­ry­ing out the duty, or if you think it is a waste of time to let your own staff do the work, or the cost is higher com­pare with out­source the job to the vir­tual assis­tance or mar­ket­ing agency, and then you should out­source it and let the third party han­dle the tasks for you.

Get­ting Closer to Your Customers

Due to the fast pace of tech­nol­ogy devel­op­ment, together with the impact and influ­ence of eco­nomic, polit­i­cal and social cul­ture changes etc, the mar­ket today move fast, con­sumer pur­chas­ing behav­ior change faster than ever, they pre­fer to read and lis­ten to opin­ions about prod­ucts and ser­vices from fel­low con­sumers, their peers and friends more.

Social media is about under­stand­ing the nature of cus­tomers and nur­tur­ing it. So when your com­pany plans to imple­ment­ing the social media mar­ket­ing strat­egy, remem­ber — don’t inter­rupt their nat­ural con­ver­sa­tions with cor­po­rate spin and one-way mar­ket­ing mes­sages. You need to fos­ter a val­ued, trusted, authen­tic voice to get heard in the babble.

Get Pre­pared, Be Read to Lis­ten, Cus­tomers are Speak the Truths

On the social media plat­form, cus­tomers do speak up and speak the truths, they tell things to you straight way, and they will not go around. So you have to pre­pare your­self, be ready to lis­ten and accept what they said, no mat­ter they crit­i­cize or praise your prod­uct or services.

For exam­ple, Dell dis­cov­ered from its Twit­ter pres­ence that peo­ple thought its cus­tomer sup­port cen­tre was abysmal. They took mea­sures to improve the ser­vice based on the cus­tomer gripes that they picked up on Face­book comments.

Finally, when your com­pany on the social media, you need to con­ver­sa­tion wisely, and you should think before you post or tweet because social media is about immediacy.

And see your cus­tomers as your allies; make rela­tion­ship with them first, not just as peo­ple to sell to. They are your real brand value, so value their online con­ver­sa­tions about you and with you.

About the Author

Related Posts

• Too Bad: Facebook Blocked Twitter Account
• Who are the Big Spenders on Facebook and Twitter?
• Integrated Email Marketing Campaign into Social Profiles
• Is Twittering Necessary and Do You Really Need to be on Twitter?
• Is Facebook Sucking Up Your Life?