Using social media marketing
July 26, 2011 by admin
Filed under Latest Lingerie News
CORPUS CHRISTI —
Using social media marketing
Q: How can I use social media to market my products and services?
A: Social media is one choice to use in your marketing plan, not the plan itself. Your marketing plan should include market research, objectives, your competitive advantage, strategy and a system to track results.
Research tells you the demographic description of your customers. That includes things like age, sex, income, occupation, marital status, location, interests, opinions and values. You need to match your customer demographic to the best social media service like Facebook or MySpace to reach that demographic.
A good local social media consulting service can help you do that and teach you how to use the media. However, only you have the knowledge and credibility to communicate with your customers using social media. It’s not a technology that can be easily outsourced.
Only one in five small businesses use social media. Of those that do, about 73 percent use Facebook or another net working site, 28 percent use a blog and 23 percent use Twitter.
Your over all objectives for social media should be to first keep your existing repeat customers and second to have those existing customers use your social media space to endorse your product or service and recruit their friends to become new customers. Personal referral is a powerful tool to recruit new customers.
Social media can accomplish several marketing objectives. First, listen and gather feedback on which products or services to supply and how to market them. Using the right software tools you can measure how many times your message is viewed, how many times it is shared with the viewers friends and what the fan responses say.
You use that information to adjust your message to encourage more sharing. Second, do market research. Facebook now has the capability to allow you to target ads based on personal information, which users have disclosed about themselves. This allows you to do demographic market research by trying alternative messages with niche groups to see which ones get the highest response rates and the highest click-through rate to friends of the viewers.
Third, build your credibility as a reliable, knowledgeable supplier. Many businesses have official Twitter handles and Facebook pages for the business, however, it helps if the owner or manager personally participates in the conversation. That makes the message more authentic and encourages the conversation from viewers and their friends.
Lastly, social media can sell your product by offering promotions, discounts and contests with prizes. Consistency is essential to maintain the ongoing communication with customers that social media customers expect. Success depends on your customer demographics, type of product or service sold and your consistency and skill in communicating with your social media customers.
