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.

Share/Save

“Businesses have to realize that having a Facebook page for their products makes them look ridiculous and could actually harm the brand.” “They should:

01. Run a blog to which actual company members post regular updates.
02. Ensure that the blogosphere is alerted to any new and breaking news or important posts.
03. Offer early access to special offers and discounts for their customers loyalty.
04. Give away free samples of their product.
05. Be active in their customers online communities.
06. Never push unwanted messages to their customers.
07. Ask their customers to interact directly with their product, for example through competitions and giveaways.
08. Allow the sharing of their products amongst a community.
09. Work closely with influencers.
10. Embrace radical transparency. Openly discuss their problems with their customers and allow negative comments to remain on their blogs.

That’s the top ten; number 11 in my list would include — have dedicated staff working on your company’s online communication 24/7.” Read the full article here.

Share/Save