We discussed it until we exhausted every clever headline copywriters would send us for a nominal fee — social media advertising is here to stay. Despite our opinions on its alleged effectiveness, clients are going to take advantage of sponsored tweets and boosted posts because it’s the thing to do.
And so, Twitter has a new thing to do — the “Buy Now” button is coming to a timeline near you, as seen in this picture from TechSpot.com. Twitter and e-Commerce: what a fabulous marriage this should be.
Today in what may seem like an attempt to show him up, Gallup released its latest study into the wild. It tells the world something the rest of us have known for years: Social media advertising is as good as flushing $100 bills down the toilet.
Here’s why those Benjamins are swirling down the drain.
Before you could reach long term success through online marketing, you must have a good strategy. True, there is short term success once you build a web site and release a product but that doesn’t mean a great deal over the long term without your creating a good strategy at the outset. You have to be looking to establish a business that will continue to expand and produce a long-term income source. So as to realize long term success through your business here are some new and creative techniques you should employ.
Ranking highly within the search engines is a requirement for any site that you would like to transform into a long-term success. Once you’ve got your site ranking highly, you will get plenty of traffic to your website, without having to work continually on it. We all know that one of the key factors in developing a long term successful business is to have a lot of traffic that you can turn into purchasers. You will need to have good search engine optimization in place on your web site if you wish to raise yourself up within the search engine rankings. To do this, you have to find the right keywords, and then optimize your site for them. After you’ve done this, and created a great back linking strategy, it should only take a few months before you find yourself in the top five rankings for the different search engines.
Pay per click marketing (or PPC) is one other method you can use to get traffic and, with some luck, buyers. As long as you can run marketing promotions that will generate more sales than the money you are investing in your advertising, it’sa great way to boost profit. As long as you learn what you are doing, Google Adwords can be a highly effective strategy, but done wrong it can cost you a small fortune in a quick hurry. You have to set up your marketing promotions correctly, and monitor each campaign, and by doing this, you should be able to keep within your budget.
Another good way to boost the traffic to your web site is through the use of social media marketing. Get high rankings in websites like Stumbleupon and Digg, and a lot of potential customers will reach your site. Business blogging is something that is used even by the major offline companies including American Express and Burger King. Blogging helps to establish relationships which is an essential part of online marketing and for attracting new business. Press releases and article marketing are minor parts in a much larger long term strategy that you can use to increase your professional success. Not only do they give a back link to your web site, but bring buyers through the information you are providing.
These are only a number of the vital market strategies that will figure into your ability to develop your business up enough to pull in high levels of traffic and to make high levels of sales. You’ll want to properly target your market to ensure that you’ll create better marketing plans and become the success you’ve dreamed of becoming.
Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, Revver, WordPress, Reddit, Digg, Ning, Xing, Squidoo, Tumblr and Flickr (overwhelmed yet? I can go on) are all social media. What is the hype? It’s the talk of the town and everybody is doing it. However, is it of any use as a tool for marketing? It is! And you aren’t using it yet?
It’s FREE – Connecting with customers/clients through Facebook and LinkedIn, posting your deals on Twitter, and demonstrating your expertise through a blog or video can all be done at the cost of $0. What it will cost, however, is time and some DIY prowess because each social media platform requires its own variation of communication for optimal effectiveness. Some initial research is suggested to decide which platform may best suit your business. However, if you’re a strong believer of “time is money” and are too busy to teach yourself social media, there are companies that can help you and your business get started for as little as $299.
Location, Location, Location – You want your product/service seen by as many people as possible, and, without any statistics to back me up here, there are a lot of people on the internet using social media sites. A lot. We’re talking hundreds of millions. For you naysayers: as of July, Facebook alone had 250 million users. Can you afford to ignore these people? A better question: can you afford to have these people ignore you?
Sharable – Not only will your product/service be seen, you can also have it shared. If a person on Twitter sees your tweet promoting your business and knows people in his or her network that can use it, he or she may pass the promotion on with a retweet. If you write a great blog post on the benefits of your service and submit it to social bookmarking sites, people can discover and rate it moving it up the site’s ranks, which allows more people to discover it. If you made an entertaining video about your product, it could be passed around to hundreds, thousands, and possibly millions of people. Imagine that, a :60-second video about your product seen by millions. It’s FREE advertising.
Long Lasting – Once your business/product/service information makes it onto these social media sites, it can live on forever. That’s a long time (don’t worry, it’s a good thing). There it is, your info being seen and promoted long after you posted it and readily available when you want to put some extra muscle behind it.
Engagement – People who use your product/service will have an opinion about it, and more often than not, they will voice their opinions through social media, and you should know exactly what they are saying, good or bad. If someone sings your praises by writing an elaborate blog post, you can share that with your network or use it as a testimonial on your website. If someone tweets a complaint about your product/service, you can address it and ideally change their mind. No one likes to feel ignored, so if you can show your customers/clients you care and listen, that will definitely strengthen relationships.
There are easily more than five reasons to use social media for your business, so be sure to come back for updates. As usual, feel free to ask a question or drop a comment.
P.S. Once again, to redeem my cool points, here’s a video from my Creative Director poking fun at so called “social media experts,” because you can’t be an expert in something that is constantly changing with new platforms, bells & whistles.
Tommy Liu, the man, the legend (to be) wields his pen of creativity against the injustice of mediocrity plaguing the world as the Senior Account Executive at Supercool Creative & SpotZero where he also manages the blog. Click here to view some of his battles (he doesn’t always win).
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This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
