What the heck is Social Media Marketing, and how can it help my business generate leads and sales?
Social Media Marketing sites and tools are used to create buzz, inform customers, and can serve as highly effective low-cost or even no-cost marketing initiatives. Small business owners need to understand the many tools, so they can best formulate and implement a social media strategy to promote and sell their product or service.
How can Social Media help your business?
Social Media, serves three basic functions: communication, collaboration & entertainment.
1. Communication
Marketing and branding is all about building relationships, and all strong relationships begin with two-way communication. Social Media tools like blogging (Wordpress), micro-blogging (Twitter), social networking (Facebook & LinkedIn), video marketing (YouTube & Vimeo) and photo sharing (Flickr), just to name a few, all help business owners to communicate, educate and share information directly with their potential customers.
Content in the form of blog posts, tweets, audio and video, help share information delivered in a less corporate or formal manner. This form of communication helps build personal trust factors that influence the buying decision. Web content is no longer delivered solely as written text; small business owners now have the tools to provide low-cost audio and video messages that deliver more communication punch.
2. Collaboration
At no other point in history, has it been so easy for an average consumer to sing your praises or burn you at the stake to literally millions of attentive viewers. The power of Social Media certainly works on a two-way street.
Social media collaboration tools like review sites (epinions), video sharing sites and blogs, allow users to comment, collaborate, and potentially serve as an endorser for your small business. Social media works as a marketing tool because people are more likely to trust peers rather than companies. These tools are quickly replacing corporate websites as the go-to places for the creation of opinions on a product or service.
3. Entertainment
Entertainment value is the primary reasons many of these tools have risen to prominence. It is for this reason they have attracted millions of users, many of which could be your customers. Where your customers are going online, so should your business. Be aware though, that it’s not just businesses going online to promote themselves. These tools have also created a stronger voice for customers as well.
Take the widely publicized story of the traveler on United Airlines whose guitar was damaged in transport. This person was having no success getting anyone at the airlines to listen to him, so he utilized the power of Social Media to help in his plight. After over 7 million views, the airline was forced to take notice.
See the video below:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YGc4zOqozo
Small business owners can use this entertainment value to connect with customers and create content that will be saved and shared.
So how does Social Media Marketing help sales?
Social Media Marketing drives sales indirectly by building relationships. Understanding that social media marketing is used for communication, collaboration and entertainment is the first step in determining your companies social media strategy and what tools would be most effective for you and your business.
The key thing that small businesses need to remember when using social media to help sell is that all social media efforts must have value. There has to be value to your content, community, and execution to get people to engage with you or your organization. Social media doesn’t sell things — people sell things. Engaging in social media marketing starts the relationship-building process.
To find out how ecentric media can help with the creation and execution of your businesses social media strategy, give us a call today.
