Nowadays, it has become highly important for marketers to include social media in their plans to accomplish their marketing campaign goals. Most consumers, around the world, use social media to interact with others, and keep themselves updated with the latest information. Therefore, it has become a sort of necessity for the businesses to market their products or services on social media as it has a lot of potential of attracting new clients. Moreover, social media marketing is the cheapest form of marketing; it requires a little amount of money to invest while giving huge benefits do the businesses. However, it is highly important that social media marketing is done appropriately and consistently.
Once a business has decided to market its products or services through social media, it should also make a plan to sell their products or services online, because social media has the potential of generating high profits through promoting online shopping. Consumers that use internet extensively, like to do shopping online as it is more conveniently done just by sitting at home or in office, and using computers or smart phones.
The operators of social media like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and others have provided really interesting marketing tools on their websites that businesses use for the promotion of their brands. These tools help them in attracting new clients to a great extend because they are so much interactive. Following are some of the guidelines that must take into account when adapting marketing and sales messages for social media:
- Who is your audience and what is their behavior?
When creating an online marketing and sales plan, you should focus on segmenting the audience available over the internet. You cannot create a single way to market the product through every marketing channel. Analyze the type of online audience that is likely to be interested in buying your product or service, and then create a separate attractive plan for them. Many large corporations have discovered a new type of customers interested in buying their products.
- Create a simple, lively social media marketing plan
Social media websites are type of bonuses that marketers should use to enhance their marketing plans. Creating a hashtag for your brand does not mean that you are being socially active. There are several other social activities that you have to adopt like engaging in instant conversations with consumers, flyers, retweeting, live blogging, creating live online videos, sharing milestones of your brand, and the list goes on.
- Defining of goals clearly when using social media for marketing and sales
Social media itself is not a tool or marketing strategy; it just gives you a platform on which you can achieve your marketing goals. Typically, these goals are segmented into, awareness, engagement, sentiment and acquisition. Focusing on each goal at a time will help you do future forecasting, as ROI using this platform can be difficult to measure. Moreover, you should clearly define each goal to make the marketing plan more effective. Once you are done with it, you should relate these goals with your target audience. Surely, you will find marketing over the internet more effective than the traditional ways of marketing.
References
Belicove, M. E. (2012, September 11). Entrepreneur. Retrieved from http://www.entrepreneur.com/blog/224386
Brown, M. (2013, April 11). MarketingProfs. Retrieved from http://www.marketingprofs.com/opinions/2013/23865/four-questions-to-ask-yourself-when-adapting-traditional-marketing-techniques-for-social-media
Divol, R. (2012, April 12). McKinsey&Company. Retrieved from Demystifying social media: http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/marketing_sales/demystifying_social_media
