Streamline your advertising budget with social media marketing
September 4, 2009 by Marney
Filed under Affiliate Marketing, Featured, Outsourcing, Social Marketing
One of the newest ways to market your business to interested audiences is through the practice of social media marketing. Simply put, social media marketing is the technique of using social networks on the web to advertise your company to friends and then their friends and so on using the principle of the six degrees of separation. When used correctly, social media marketing can increase your consumer base by at least double if not more depending on how much time you are willing to put into your marketing efforts.
Streamline your advertising budget with social media marketing
There are two reasons why social media marketing is so easy to use; the first is because it addresses the infinite nature of the internet. Due to the fact that a large percentage of people that are now signed up on social networking websites you can potentially reach hundreds up to thousands and millions of potential consumers with just one update. Even better, you can stay in contact with your previous customers and listen to their feedback so that you can encourage them to visit your website again with promotions and other offers.
The second reason that social media marketing works so well is because you can use it as a form of behavioral targeting. Obviously, if you are able to market your advertising and promotion efforts directly at your target audience you will receive a much larger response. Since each social network allows its users to build an interests page and join groups that reflect their interest you can not only market your business to users on the site, but you can market to the users who are most likely to purchase your products or services. Thus, you can make sure that your time is spent only on consumers who might decide to buy from your business.
Due to the fact that social media marketing allows you to direct your efforts to your target audience, and is very cost efficient since most times it costs very little or nothing at all to get started, the only investment you have to worry about is time. If properly conducted, you can ensure all your time is spent building a customer base and your sales revenues making it well worth your time to consider.
@Marney: Business needs to understand that they need to announce their presence on social networks to their customers first so that they can start with an initial set of friends and fans. Using this ‘base friend list’, they can either use applications or ‘offers’ announcements to get noticed by other potential customers.
I should point out that you and I are only talking about ‘free’ methods. Buying advertising space on facebook, digg or other social networks is not cheap and getting a professional application written won’t be cheap either.