This is a guest post by Michael who blogs at Sittercity and 6pm. He often writes on coupontriumph.com and 6pm promotion. If you wish to write one, kindly check out our guidelines to write a guest post.
Marketing your site via social media sites can be profitable. In this modern internet age, a heavy performance weight have been placed on your social media presence. Even offline conglomerates have started working towards social marketing.
You should too!
But going about social media marketing in a mediocre way isn’t going to yield good results. You need to master how it works and take the right action. Fortunately, it’s not a rocket science, even a beginner can profit from this form of marketing if guided.
In this informative post, I want to unveil the 5 proven ways to improve social media marketing. But first, let’s dig deeper into this topic to have a clear view of it.
How Does Social Media Works?
If a 15-year old was to throw that question at you, what would be your response? Well, as you think about that, let me help you out because there is no time to think. You need results and I’m here to guide you.
Social media is a unique platform that allows you to network, share and interact with your colleagues, friends and family without much ado. Everyone have been a part of this marketing system, either directly or indirectly. Some people approach this marketing with the mindset of attracting prospective customers, while others do it for the fun of it.
If you’ve ever uploaded your photos, shared your contents, or networked with another person, then you’re a social media worker with a mindset of your own. But in this article, I want to take it from the angle of profit making. Social media marketing works, but until you abide by the nuggets listed below, you’ll be doing it for the fun of it.
1. Set Out Plans Before Starting
The mistake a lot of internet marketers (bloggers, affiliate marketers, email marketing, freelance writers and web designers) make, that sabotage their social marketing is to start, and thereafter set plans. If you don’t know how facebook and twitter works, you should learn how to use it. Don’t go signing up and later discover you’ve chosen a wrong fan page username.
A friend of mine who runs a web design blog made this mistake. He chose a different facebook fan page username, and we all know it’s static. You can’t change it on your own – not even the administrator is going to help you. This shows that several people have a wrong motive about social media. But you don’t have to. Know what you want from any of these social portals and don’t lose hold of that image in your mind.
2. Have A Unique Selling Proposition (USP)
You need this to succeed in the face of fierce competition. Your unique selling proposition is what makes your product superior to others. You might be offering the same product that a neighboring company down the road is offering, but until you stand out, big companies are going to drown you.
There are millions of users on Facebook and Twitter for instance, these people are busy, but every minute, they are exposed to 100s of internet commercials. They also have their own family issues, business issues and social issues to bear with.
It’s your uniqueness that would attract or chase them away. You can make your downloads faster than your competitors, offer a 20% discount on orders above $$, etc. These are all examples of USP and if you get creative on this, success is sure.
3. Speak To The People’s Need
When people gather together in one place, you can easily decode their needs. How? By the questions and comments they make. Just like building a profitable niche blog, you need to write quality contents that gets the reader engaged. In this way, your bounce rate is reduced and Google would regard your site or blog as being relevant, thereby boosting your pagerank easily.
When it comes to social media marketing, you still have to go through the same protocol. Even though you have limited space to write your content, you should write to “meet people’s need.” When this becomes the pivot of your marketing career, winning in every campaign you launch out is sure. When people have needs (problems), there’s bound to be desperation and the eagerness to get answers.
You can’t succeed by shying away from this – rather, run towards the problem with your packaged solution and sell to make profit. That’s the best way to go…
4. Build Relationship With Your Target Customers
In the recent years, in-depth research studies shows that social media traffic is usually un-targeted. This means you have to put in extra work to convert them to either buy or subscribe to your newsletter. But in the modern age, with help of sophisticated email marketing tools, you can build strong relationships with hit-and-run visitors.
How? Whatever marketing activity you carry out on social media sites, make sure you have a good landing page in place. The reason for this is because, people don’t usually take action in their first visit to any website. No matter how beautiful and benefit-driven your products are, you need to build an element of trust with your customers.
You can achieve this by first capturing their email, following up with pre-scheduled messages on a routine basis, so that when you eventually recommend a product, your prospect is in good position to make buying decisions. Don’t be a stranger to your customers, be their friend and they will put money into your bank account.
5. Automate Your Advertising Campaigns
We are living in a high-tech world. The person with the right tools is going to make money headway than someone who is a manual-geek. Fortunately, there are several tools you can use to automate your marketing campaigns. But first you need to understand what marketing is, so that you can benefit from it.
Marketing is about people; prospective customers and people who are yet to make decisions to buy from you. Marketing helps you to situate your product where it can be found by these people, and when they eventually subscribe to it, it should deliver on what you promise.
Therefore, Marketing identifies, captures, builds, converts and profits from your target audience.
Now, you can go ahead and automate these concepts, with the right tools. For instance, you can use ping.fm to social bookmark. You can also use twaitter to schedule your tweets so that you don’t have to do it manually. All these are aimed at enhancing your social media marketing, eliminating all the obstacles that people face in bringing their online business to the limelight.
If other web promotional methods have been helpful to your business, you can achieve the similar or greater returns with social media marketing. If you follow the above highlights and work on it, success is around the corner – will you?
Image Credit: watblog