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These metrics provide your business with the facts that are essential to launching your company’s social media marketing campaign. This research documents that social networks are here to stay primarily because they cater to the psychological drivers of human behavior to communicate, connect, interact and be recognized.
It’s easy to compare the dollar value social media marketing represents to its costs. Companies that shift in consumer preferences to social media will be able to best capitalize on the many opportunities that social media marketing present. The effectiveness of “word of mouth” advertising to generate sales is well documented.
Compared to the expense of traditional marketing, the required revenues for creating a social media marketing campaign are minimal. The traditional cost drivers can be significantly reduced using social media marketing.
The investment of time and effort is greater, however, than the return on investment in both time and money. For example, a company using a “Product Review and Rating” feature can lower their operational costs by reducing the number of product returns.
Social networks online extend and expand your company’s existing social media and the new developing social media initiatives will also produce a higher level of value than many of the outdated marketing practices that some companies still use. For example, the direct revenues generated by the typical paid traffic drivers such as banner or display ads compared to the revenues produced by free social media marketing will be less. At the same time social media provides a cost-effective alternative that actually produces results that can become a “viral” marketing campaign, increasing the goodwill toward your company for free.
Actively participating in social media marketing is also an important part of keeping your eye on your competition and this awareness of your competitors campaigns can help in refining your initiatives. By reviewing the social media tools that are effective for business-to-business and business-to-consumer marketing, you can select the tools that will produce the best results in delivering what your customers want.
SUMMARYFor businesses to utilize social media marketing fully, you will need some of the same tools used in search engine marketing. First you will need to select a group of social networks that are related to your service/product. Research is the key: this means developing an audience profile and the keywords that relate to them and the service/product you offer. Then you have to structure a plan to introduce yourself and the service/product that will benefit your circle of friends and the membership as a whole. There will be videos that accompany this guide to show you the process step-by-step.
The reality is that your company may already be the subject of a social media network conversation. As an exercise to prepare for the next section, take a minute and perform an Internet search on your own company to see what is being said about your service/product and what image these comments present. This gives you an excellent starting point for developing a social interaction with these consumers. Places like http://www.google.com, http://blogsearch.google.com, http://www.serph.com gets you started. There are many more resources and tools for this. (Contact me for a list of resources and tools pertaining to a particular product or offering if this search becomes overwhelming).
In this section, the focus has been to demonstrate the power of social media as a marketing tool to use within social networks. Not only does this form of marketing have the potential to increase the profits of your company through sales, it can also help you keep your finger on the pulse of the consumer. In turn, this can lower your operational costs as well as build awareness of how your competitors are using social media to fulfill their business objectives.
In the next section, “Creating an Authority Presence Online: What It is and How to Achieve It” you begin the process of organizing the information that you need to establish for core success in a social media marketing campaign.
How well all of the social media tools, resources and strategies work together is heavily dependent on the level of confidence your interactions inspire on the social networks of your choice. Establishing your company as an authority and developing a successful social media campaign require you to look at your company through the eyes of your customers and adapt your operations to suit their needs.