What is Social Media Marketing & How Can it Benefit You?

• 14% of people trust advertisements
• 78% of people trust recommendations from those they know

The best way of marketing your product is to get people to talk about it, and the more influential they are, the better. Once upon a time, the influential people were the talkback radio hosts, the newspaper columnists and the rock stars. Those people haven't lost their voice, but they are being drowned out by 200,000,000 bloggers, 100,000,000 YouTube videos, 4,000,000 Wikipedia articles and the 57% of Internet users who have joined some sort of social network (like Facebook or MySpace).

 

The Internet allows people to voice their opinions, share ideas and make recommendations like never before. They don't care about your ad, but they do care what their friends and heroes think and they're not shy in expressing themselves. Social media marketing is about getting out there and starting a dialogue with your customers. You can't make anyone do anything, but if you're prepared to engage the people who love your products and respond to the people who don't, people will love you. If they love you, they will tell their friends about you.

What do We Do?

There is no such thing as a 'typical' social media marketing campaign, but there are a few rules of engagement: you must be transparent and willing to listen. You can't trick people, you can't co-erce, you can't pay cash for comment. You can't be fake and you can't make stuff up. You have to be genuine. You have to care.

 

These are the sorts of things we do:

• Find bloggers who talk about the industry you're in. We show you where and how to listen and we help you engage them.
• Help you setup you own company blog (one that people actually want to read) and we show you some great examples of what other companies are doing.
• Find forums where people are mentioning your products and services. If people are happy, we let them know you're happy. If they are unhappy, we ask them why and let them know you're listening.
• Set up forums and social networks which allow you to own the dialogue that takes place around your brand
• Find podcasters with an audience and we might encourage you to send them something so they know you're listening.
• Show you how you can use Twitter to give your clients insight into what your company's employees get up to each day.
• Help you overhaul your online customer service so that people love interacting with you and feel like they get a response worth telling their friends about.
• Build you a Facebook page or start an online community where your customers can interract with each other, share their experiences and know that you are listening.
• Make sure it's easy for people to add you to social Bookmarking sites like Del.icio.us, Digg and Reddit
• Get you started on YouTube and Flickr.
• Make sure your company directors look like gods on LinkedIn.
• Make sure your Wikipedia entry reflects your best work and greatest achievements. If you have skeletons in the closet we make sure they have their best clothes on when they're taken out.

Measuring Success and ROI

Do you want to have 5,000 Facebook friends? Or would you prefer that the number of people who said they heard about you via word of mouth increased by 500%? Will you guage success on the bottom line in a meeting with the accounts department, or by a 200% decrease in complaints to your call centre?

 

Tracking the success of a social media marketing campaign is not just measuring column inches or page impressions, it's about how your customers talk about you.

 

Depending on what sort of return you're looking for, these are some of the ways we can track a campaign:

• Kudos: The number of times your brand is mentioned in association with favourable adjectives
• Referrals: to your website from any online source and FROM your website to other sources
• Traffic: to your website or blog
• Actions: That people take when they're on your website or blog
• Reach: The number of times your brand (or campaign) is mentioned full stop
• Conversions: If people take an action
• Word of Mouth Sources: But you have to ask them

Get started Today...

Start ranking where you should be!

 

Call us now on (03) 9442-4348, or request an obligation free quote.

 

With packages starting at only $30 a month, you can't afford not to...