If you haven’t noticed already, Social Media Mar­ket­ing is dif­fer­ent. Don’t let the word Mar­ket­ing fool you. The days of Ad Gurus, sit­ting in their Ivory Tow­ers, dis­pens­ing mag­i­cal potions on your prod­ucts to bring in auto­matic sales from Tele­vi­sion, Radio and Print are GONE. Your cus­tomers are immune to that brand of “magic”. They have dimin­ish­ing loy­alty to brands they hear about via the tra­di­tional methods.

Your prod­uct sales and cus­tomer loy­alty will also not be improved any­more by pay­ing high-​​minded con­sul­tants high fees to berate your pre­vi­ous mar­ket­ing cam­paigns and insist that only their pro­pri­etary (read: exces­sively expen­sive) method­ol­ogy will work for you. Your cus­tomers are reject­ing that kind of manipulation.

Celebrity endorese­ments? Press releases? Inter­ac­tive adver­tis­ing? SEO? Still effec­tive meth­ods to get your web­site seen, to be sure. They’re noth­ing to dis­miss in your efforts for web­site vis­i­bil­ity. But you want *more* than just to be seen, right? You want cus­tomers who are loyal to your brand, even when other com­pa­nies slash prices. You want cus­tomers who are so excited about your prod­uct that they tell their friends. And their friends, in turn, tell their friends. Ulti­mately, you want more sales, more con­sis­tently, with less expense on your part. You want the promise of Social Media Mar­ket­ing. But lever­ag­ing Social Media to reach con­crete busi­ness met­rics is a mys­tery to most com­pa­nies still.

Your cus­tomers ignore mar­ket­ing mes­sages and refuse to be manip­u­lated — but that’s what tra­di­tional mar­ket­ing is built on. So how do you use Social Media to reach your cus­tomers with the mes­sage they want to hear? The mes­sage they want to respond to?

I’ve con­sulted busi­nesses in the area of social media strat­egy, and what fol­lows are some of the most com­mon (and eas­ily solved) con­cerns about social media mar­ket­ing I hear.

Mys­tery #1
“We cre­ated a blog and our own social media net­work, signed up for other pop­u­lar net­works and blast our spe­cials to our “Friends” but our sales haven’t really improved. In fact, we some­times even get hos­tile reac­tions to our offers. What gives? We’re just try­ing to help.”

Mys­tery #2
“We got celebrity endorse­ment for our prod­uct, set up a web­site with a blog, do SEO and PPC, but our online sales are still flat. The prod­uct really moves when cus­tomers who love the prod­uct tell their friends about it. We’re think­ing of going into an MLM model.”

Mys­tery #3
“Social Media Mar­ket­ing is a fad and it doesn’t bring in rev­enues. We’re just focus­ing on improv­ing our search engine rank­ings, and we think that’s enough. We’re only get­ting into social media mar­ket­ing because our strongest com­peti­tor is, and we have to stay competitive.”

In my next post, I’ll share some of the advice I gave the com­pa­nies who made these mys­te­ri­ous state­ments above, and give some anec­do­tal results of improve­ments made when imple­ment­ing a solid social media mar­ket­ing strategy.

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