Tag: social media marketing
Is social media marketing the new yellow pages?
by admin on Dec.23, 2009, under social media
Improving collaboration between people and between organizations is no longer optional if you want to survive in today’s hyper connected businesses world.
Social media marketing (SMM) announces your presence to the world. It’s a reliable marketing trend to build your network online for success, for the world of tomorrow.
SMM is about finding the right way to promote and introduce exciting ways of communicating to consumers of internet and brick and mortar businesses.
If you think about it, social media is the new yellow pages. Social media is an innovative tool that will help local businesses pump out all types of information, from the latest in local news, to their promotions and coupons.
Social media allows you to be in control of your marketing, you’re able to reach out to your consumer through non-traditional channels and still have them listen to your message. SMM allows you to be in control of your business advertising, drive traffic to your site, where you want to place your promotions and coupons, with little or no cost.
About 54% of Americans have substituted internet search engines and local phone books for social media. More content is created, distributed, and advertised online, and more advertising dollars are moving towards social media. If your campaign is executed correctly, social media will get you more referrals, generate more leads and help you share information used to educate prospects. The all new SMM requires different skill sets and strategies when compared to traditional marketing. You can hire firms who specialize in this type of marketing or simply try it out for yourself. It is important to note, that is as in any form of marketing, consistency is the key to success. So, don’t expect to get a ton of new business from just starting a Twitter and Facebook account.
The public has turned to social media sites such as, Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, and Linkedin to reach their audience. Social media activity also helps your businesses improve search engine rankings through link building. There are now more and more companies that are seeking out alternative and effective marketing strategies, because the phone book is no longer providing what they need. Many would argue that SMM is the new yellow pages.
Manage Successful Social Media Promotions
by admin on Dec.08, 2009, under How To:, social media
With holiday shopping in full swing, social shopping is already making a big impact. Data from Hitwise shows that downstream traffic to the Retail 500 coming from both Facebook and Twitter increased 36% and 15% respectively on Thanksgiving from the previous day. Downstream traffic to retailers grew again on Black Friday and Cyber Monday as many retailers promoted sales through fan pages and tweets.
This data is very encouraging for marketers, but a social media campaign must still be managed correctly for maximum ROI. Here are some tips on how brands can best engage their customers by offering what everyone now looks to social media for – a bargain.
New Strategies to Turn Buzz Into Buy
Other recent research confirms the fact that people are increasingly turning to social networks to get deals on products and services. Razorfish found that the primary drivers of “friending” or “following” a brand were promotions and discounts. Over one-third of social network users and 44 percent of Twitter users engaged with a brand through discount promotions. This is good news for marketers, but the stats also pose challenges to the way marketing programs and advertising budgets will be structured in the future.
Brands have long spent big money on commercials, media placements, direct mail, and more. With most of these methods, there is little way to measure the impact on your bottom line. You either get lucky with a surge in sales after your campaign, or it didn’t work. Either way, success or failure was impossible to measure.
If done right, social marketing is a fantastic way to get the best of all worlds from a campaign – wide-scale and targeted distribution of your offer, for free. But to get it right, marketers have to step lightly. If you’re too pushy with too many promotions, your followers will feel “marketed at” or “spammed.” If you don’t offer good enough deals, your customers may become frustrated and stop following you. After all, they don’t really want to be your friend. They want bargains. Here are some steps for getting social media promotions right.
1. What Are People Saying About Your Brand?
Find out what people are saying about your brand, why they are saying it, and who they are saying it to. You have to do more than just get a vague reading on brand buzz. Track the actual pass-along of your brand’s social content via tweets, blog posts, Facebook postings, etc. to see which content is driving the most sharing on which sites. You can use social media traffic tracking software to do this.
Tracking this word-of-mouth buzz is crucial to formulating the right marketing messages and promotions. You must deliver relevant social deals that resonate with people’s interests.
2. Create a Social Promotion
Once you figure out what people want using the tracking methods above, go ahead and give it to them. For example, you might find that everyone loved your last 20% promotion – it was shared to hundreds of thousands of people via social sites and email – but that the most frequent negative comment was that shipping costs were too high. In your next promotion, offer free shipping.
Or, you may find that there was a huge surge in Twitter searches, blog comments, and Facebook updates about your brand’s winter boots during a snowstorm. This is a great opportunity to immediately put out a social promotion for 20% off boot purchases for one day only via Twitter, Facebook, and/or your company blog. Have fun with your social promotions. Unlike paid search ads and other media buys, you don’t have to plan and budget for them. Instead, just try one or two out and see what happens.
3. Did It Work?
Figure out whether your promotion worked, and what bottom line impact it had on sales and profits. Go back to your social media tracking and measurement tool and find out how much your promotion was shared, what increase it caused in traffic to your website, and what direct impact it had on conversion. You might want to compare two different promotions run during a similar time frame to see which worked better and why.
For example, did a 50% Off promotion drive more sharing, visits, or conversions than a Two-For-One? In addition to doing simple “A/B” tests, compare results for promotions like these against the data from your regular marketing analytics platform to see whether your social media promotions are performing better or worse than traditional paid marketing campaigns. Social promotions almost always perform better than paid media ads in terms of conversion, but paid ads may drive a higher volume of traffic to your site.
Lastly, do an ROI analysis of your social media promotions to find out their real impact on bottom line profits.
Conclusion
Social media promotions are here to stay. Make sure you use the social channel to deliver “exclusive” deals that make your friends and followers feel special. They’ll thank you by making purchases.
What social media tools do you use to increase sales and measure your brand’s reach? Please share them in the comments below.
