Social Media Marketing for Small Business
Social Media Marketing is fast growing with its exponential global users, small business can now leverage this form of marketing to get their products noticed in the international arena.
To achieve Success in today’s business, we need to focus on the three basic components namely, Growth, Profits and Implementation. These components define the prosperity of any organization. Here are a few ideas on how Social Media Marketing could be a lucrative option in Popularizing the organizations’ products and services.
Relationship Marketing in today’s business
In today’s competitive business-Relationship Management is the key component. It is here that social media marketing and online marketing as a whole come in place. It shifts your mindset from using online marketing just to generate leads to creating deeper relationships with customers and prospects and improve your "findability".
A PAT Model best describes the strategies employed in Social Media Marketing through Strong Positioning, Attracting Attention from right market and Getting Traction with your users selling more number of times sets a vital record. We need to create business choreography to keep and attract clients. Small business marketing efforts will work only if these things are in place.
1. Funneling Down On Target
In small business, its important to connect with people in the same geographic area, especially if you are dealing with products of inelastic demand (essential products).Targeting your social media with specific area or keywords, ensures that you are interacting only with viable leads.
There are hundreds of thousands of status updates getting published every minute, so cutting through the clutter has to be a top priority. Start small. Starting out to familiarize yourself with tools like search.twitter.com, and you can eventually move on to using a more business-specific tool like CoTweet or Hootsuite.
2. Proactive is the key
Going after the prospective leads and interacting with them is the key to turn into successful closure of business deals. Waiting and tweeting in unrelated arena may not give you the desired results.
You need to find out people of your interest by Joining Facebook groups, Linked-In groups, check out PeerIndex.net lists on your genre, and look at a person’s Twitter Grader score. These are so many tools online to target your exact customer, so make use of them wisely.
3. Recognition of Bad Automation
When you’re having a conversation with potential clients, you need to be real. Spam is sure to turn people off instantly. Starting a conversation with qualified leads and growing the conversation organically from 5 to 10 qualified leads adds to the bottom line
Streamlining the process online is possible through simple automation process for example scheduling updates, pulling in from your RSS feed, these are all great time savers. Ready made templates prove useful in replying to queries when you see people tweeting or posting on Facebook but never automate replies as the result could be embarrassing. While a Casual visitor may be replied with a quotation of products may prove irrelevant to the situation.
4. Don’t Miss the Giant Gorilla
As a Small Business Owner, you need take on several roles. When your of Social media for a little while, leave your followers with some helpful posts to read, while you’re busy doing your important work. Social media is a great way to field in lot of customer queries, requests, support and even research.
Setting up searches for keywords related to your brand and creating time to handle request daily, will ensure that the Giant Gorilla (Prospective Lead) never escapes your notice. By promptly answering requests many problems could be solved in its initial stage.
5. Give others Credit
There are various opportunities in Social media like Retweeting is a great way to show your followers you have your finger on the pulse of your industry, but a big mistake is just posting a load of unattributed feeds as your own. Crediting the original author shows your credibility. First it shows your users, that you are monitoring your field and curating some great content for fans and followers. Secondly it may be a great opportunity to drive home your ideas through the words of the author. You can start a lot of strategic partnerships with just simple Retweeting.
Social media sites are exploding with users. Though the ultimate goal is to maximize the value of the content, savvy businesses today are focusing and concentrate on creating interactions that will help turn the social media users into traffic which converts into business. For a business without a lot of time or a very large marketing budget, social media is a great place for a targeted interaction to become a viable lead.
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