As technology progresses, more and more exciting marketing tools come onto the scene to delight businesses in every industry. It is no longer an exclusive domain of advertising firms to manipulate the contents of powerful marketing programs. These can be taken advantage of by any web consumer with the emergence of social media. Web-based technology is available to allow all consumers to communicate interactively.
Consumer generated media is driven by consumers through social media channels on the Internet. Smart businesses today are embarking on social media marketing to utilize such powerful approaches to connect with target markets.
Benefits
Social media marketing can bring in a plethora of benefits to any type of business through social media optimization. This approach emphasizes website optimization to gain a wider web presence for any business site. Social media covers popular social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn as well as personal and business blog sites that have a huge following to generate potential leads for the business.
There are interesting aspects of social media marketing where video sharing sites like YouTube and social bookmarking websites such as Reddit and Digg allow information of any kind to be shared. Web businesses can gain free advertising and large potential leads from an active membership with these social networking sites.
These social media sites allow presentation or photo sharing where businesses can share their latest products or services subtly in an interesting manner that would captivate the audience. There is also the Meetup website that allows various parties to meet up online for discussion and chats; this can also be manipulated by web businesses to connect with potential leads for more sales.
The public at large can be involved or informed of impending activities organized by the business enterprise through these social media sites as part of their social network online marketing strategy. This approach is very easy and cheap with a high return on the desired results.
More and more business owners are integrating social media marketing into their business marketing strategies as cost effective campaigns to grow their business. Studies on social media marketing approaches reveal a 50% increase in business exposure with more traffic coming into the web business site; many of which are qualified leads and potential business partnerships.
Viral marketing
One interesting and impactful online marketing technique via social media marketing is viral marketing. This approach allows marketers to manipulate social media networking sites to create brand awareness and improve sales very quickly like a virus that spreads easily from person to person. Hence, any marketing information posted up in the social media site would have a viral effect of being passed on via these social networking sites without cost to the business entities.
Viral marketing uses a host of exciting tools to get the message across effectively; these include video clips, text messages, games and appealing images. Viral marketing is successful when the right audience is targeted. It must be a large social network with a significant influence to reap the desired outcome of optimum visibility and sales conversions.
Reaping results
In order to enjoy increased business growth, a business enterprise would need to embrace social media marketing. A good social media networking site must be selected to have access to the target audience. Experienced marketers and market surveys reveal Twitter as the top social networking platform while blogs took second place in reaching the masses. Facebook fared excellently for novice marketers to generate some web presence. Twitter and LinkedIn are also effective to boost brand awareness and online sales.
To reap the desired results, some effort must be put in as a member of the selected social networking site. The primary purpose of membership at the start is to forge good relationships with thousands of members in that online community. Web marketers should seek out the niche audience in that community and work on being accepted in the online discussions, forums and chats with interesting contributions.
Once respect and trust are established, web marketers can subtly promote products and services or any information related to the business. Responses to these potential leads must be fast and sure to win the consumers over.
Linking with the main industry players via social media marketing is a great advantage to the web business. New insights, latest developments, upcoming trends and other important business information can be secured more quickly than what the mass media may offer. Different main industry players provide a great channel of access to insider information as they are cross-cultural and global players to allow a wider market penetration.
Consumer focused
Web businesses must be highly consumer focused with social network marketing approaches. The spotlight is on the consumers’ needs and preferences rather than pushing them with undesirable products. Their feedback would be helpful to web businesses in generating consumer preferred products and services to ensure a sure market audience. Products and services can be improved via consumer feedback to help businesses gain more favor with the community market.
When the right consumer group is identified and collaborated using the right social media approaches, web marketing is very cost effective. These consumers would indirectly assist the business entity in promoting their products and services for free as they tweet to their wide circle of influence. A satisfactory use of the product or service can lead to online praises of the entity that would be most effective in drawing many other consumers to try the product or service. Soon there would be hundreds of consumers pounding on the business door for their products and services. The company did not need to spend much to gain such a huge response to their favor.
This is free advertising which works even for small and new business enterprises. A low capital or marketing budget is sufficient with a strong dedication in using social media marketing tools and strategies that suit the company. Changes to the creative approach may be needed over time as technology progresses. Social media marketing approaches definitely benefit the business much more than traditional or conventional marketing strategies.
