Social media is about talking to your clients on their terms not yours. Join the conversation.

Social Media, Marketing for the always connected world

Social Media Marketing is a newest tool in the marketing worlds toolkit, the primary goal being the building links and content about your brand online in places your potential customers will see it. In many ways it's more about building a brand and an image then traditional marketing has ever been. With social media marketing there is an inherent focus on relevance to the audience, this allows your message to have more of an impact. If your message gets to far off topic then it wont thrive and it will die and fade away, but if you get the right message then your message can spread like wildfire.

When most people hear "social media marketing" they have no idea what is being talked about. If you instead say "twitter" everyone at least knows its something trendy and cool. Twitter is just one piece of the social marketing puzzle. The main social networking sites we use to the word about your brand are facebook, twitter, youtube, flickr, digg, stumbleupon, yelp, and reddit. We also use many different niche social networking sites that are focused around the needs of the specific campaign or brand we are working with.

DON'T PANIC!!

For many business Social networking is a scary idea. It congers images of angry customers yelling to the world about how much they hate your brand and specifically why they hate it. Something to keep in mind is that whether your participating in social media or not your customers are and they will say what they want. As the saying goes "if you cant beat them join them" don’t try to hide the conversation instead join it. Answer their needs and concerns as best you can, keeping the resolution in the public eye. This will help build that part of your brand identity. This will show to your customers that yes your company is a real company and like everyone else you sometimes have unhappy customers but when someone is unhappy you are there to help fix it. This can be a huge shift in corporate thinking, going from an attitude of controlling the conversation to one of simply guiding it. It takes a realization that you no longer own your brand it is in the hands of your customers. They will ultimately control how the brand is seen both online and offline. Through social media you at least gain a voice in the direction the brand takes.

One of the biggest shifts in thinking that’s needed to make social media marketing effective is starting to think of your customer interaction as a real two way conversation instead of a one way broadcast. An extreme example of traditional marketing is the late night used car sales commercials. We all know the ones with the big inflatable animal, mostly a gorilla, and the star-busts shouting "LOW LOW PRICES". This is the extreme view of marketing but most traditional marketing has the same sort of idea, show the customer a great deal and shout it at them until they cant hear anything else. This doesn’t work with the modern Internet enabled consumer. The modern consumer goes to google, bing, yelp, or any other of the thousand sites out there to research what they are going to buy. They will read product information, product reviews, product comparisons, company information, or anything else they can find. They will watch videos about the company or products, they will ask their friends on facebook or twitter what they think. Then after consuming everything they can find then they will make a decision to buy. This is why its important to be out there in the conversation with your customers getting your message directly to them.

OUR PACKAGES

Its hard to "pre package" a service like search marketing. What we have done is pull together the needs of most sites and put then into general buckets of time and resources. All of the packages are designed to be customizable to fit your specific needs.