Social Marketing Campaigns – 3 Secrets to Success With the Social Web
Social marketing campaigns are all the rage these days. Why? Generating cost effective, qualified business leads is tough in this economy and with media changing so rapidly.
Whether your business is service-oriented (such as accounting, legal, architecture, business coaching, executive recruiter) or a retail store (specialty coffee, health food store, wine store), you have a huge new opportunity to compete with any size business in any market. Social media marketing is effective, and for the most part, free.
Business marketing strategies have never been more affordable and cost-effective than with today’s technology and new web 2.0 applications, like social media.
Many small businesses are experimenting with social media marketing, but do not implement a strategic approach to a campaign. Many are flailing from one new tactic to the other based on the “flavor of the day”.
3 SECRETS to success that we know work are:
Secret #1. Become an expert in your niche. Participate in communities that have your target prospects and add value to the discussion with your unique insights and knowledge. Use content that you create and give it away, free, to people who are looking for solutions your company provides.
Secret #2. Create a solid keyword strategy and USP. Also make sure you thread that through the various levels of your distributed content and the social web. You need to be aimed at “owning” the right market. You also need to leverage your strategy across all your social media efforts to nets your linking strategy across pages, articles, PR and your website.
Secret #3. Social media marketing needs to be implemented as a comprehensive strategy. All the pieces work together to combine into a powerful marketing program that is part SEO on steroids and part huge reach lead generation.
The key is having a systematic approach to providing valuable information and ideas to the right communities across the web. So, rather than interrupting customers in their tracks and trying to get attention, your targeted social web content will be considered helpful and put you and your business in an authoritative position with customers.
This is the primary “secret” to successful social media marketing-providing valuable free info to position article writers as authorities. You’re also in total control of creating your own authentic content. On the obverse side, giving people a “freebie” actually enhances cultivating trust, to enable easier and faster sales conversions down the line.
Take the time to develop a social media marketing strategy for your business today. Winners and losers in the “new normal” will be dependent on a company’s ability to adapt to these new marketing opportunities.
