Social Media Marketing – Cheat-sheet
With the social media becoming rampant in the lives of many people around the globe, it is extremely important to leverage this new technology effectively. Moreover, since this method involves the prospective customers from getting an early feedback not only from other people, but also from some people they know or trust, this method of marketing is becoming increasingly successful as compared to the traditional forms of marketing. Following are some of the things that you should consider for a cost-effective yet successful campaign.
Leverage the Social Networks
Most of the social network websites provide different types of tools that allow you to reach out to your target audience. This can be in form of Communities, Fan pages, Groups and Landing pages among other titles, but what all of these allow is for you to reach out to prospective clients, and for people to cite their views and opinions.
Since most of the people who have already joined the particular group are interested in it, this way of marketing helps in getting targeted audience easily. Apart from this, since a prospective client will trust the word of a fellow social-networker he is connected to much more than any advertisement or marketing scheme, this way of marketing is extremely effective.
Another huge way to reach out to prospective clients is by means of written content that speaks to them. There are various article directories, microsites and blogs, which provide information about the related topics and expert opinions. It is also important to look at options like getting popular writers to guest-blog for you, or that you post your articles on famous blogs, since this is how you can reach out to followers of that particular writer or blog.
Many people prefer to visit forums on their specific areas of interest or to find the advice of fellow members, and so it is equally useful if you find the good forums in the area of your interest, and provide good posts and discussions on them. Blog commenting, if done properly is yet another way to build some credibility and reach out to prospects.
Directory Submissions, Link Building and Other Networking
Once you are done with the article posting, you can also look at ways to improve backlinks and get more traffic by means of social bookmarking, RSS feeds and directory submissions. These steps help in improving your search engine ranks, thus improving your overall residual traffic. While this method is slightly less personalized as compared to the other options, the conversion chances are fewer, but it still is an extremely effective way to market your products.
Overall, the social media does provide a variety of ways in which you can market your products, however, you need to smartly decide which of the campaigns will result in better return-over-investment. Thankfully, since most of the social media marketing options are scalable to both the scope and the demographics, it is very easy to reach out to the target audience effectively.