Brandon Sheley

The Learning Curve of Social Media Marketing

Marketing has changed since our parents saw it last. From airwaves to cyberspace, most are optimistic about this continually evolving market. Social media marketing has affected most of us so drastically that it’s now hard to imagine daily life without it. After all, products are literally everywhere now. Link sharing is happening thousands of times a minute. Company owners now have the ability to easily talk with an anonymous customer thousands of miles away and still be able to satisfy his or her concerns. However, to appreciate the advantages of social media marketing, we must remember the advantages that traditional marketing had as well. In combination, traditional marketing and social media marketing can create a big boom in a business.

Traditional marketing was primarily known for its visibility to the eye. If an audience saw it, they’d remember it. Of course, if you’re like me, visual overload can happen quickly. Then you find yourself staring blankly at a television screen while some woman is talking about some brand, reading off of an unconvincing script. It’s a dismal scene, and one of the travesties that traditional marketing has fallen into from time to time. Traditional marketing has taken the form of public ads, such as brochures, pamphlets, and billboards. Other venues include television, word of mouth, business cards, postal mail, newspapers, magazines, and telemarketing.

Three advantages of traditional marketing include:

• A higher percentage of visibility
• Easier to know where to invest campaigns
• More accurate ROI (Return on Investment) Calculations

It’s harder for social media marketing to gain the same percentage of visibility. For example, an ad on a billboard is going to capture the attention of most drivers down a main highway because of its large size. Ads or links on the internet have to be more subtle or they end up looking like spam. To avoid the downfall of the visibility percentage, those using social media marketing must increase their subtle ads and links and continue to gain visible and genuine customer satisfaction.  It’s also harder in social media marketing to know where to invest campaigns because it’s hard to predict where likely consumers are going to come from. Often in social media marketing, campaigns must be split up into many different projects on different social media websites. Also, ROI is harder to calculate. Now, companies must be willing to listen to the voice of their consumers rather than the statistics. The voice of the consumers, if monitored diligently, can hint at a success boom or adversely plummeting dissatisfaction. Customer satisfaction is paramount in the success of any website or company. Read the rest of this entry »

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Here are some of the most common mistakes made by people involving themselves with social media marketing:

Slow Response

The pace of content on the web is fast, and that means that you have to keep up. If a customer asks you something or has a concern, it would be wise to respond in a timely manner. This not only shows the customer that you care about him and his or her time, but that you care about all customers and their time. Also, if your company gets involved in a controversial social media mess, it’s best to address it as quickly as possible. Letting people speculate about your involvement in a controversy can damage the company’s reputation.

Inexperienced Social Voices

In the effort to keep up with social media advancements, many companies have hired young, technology savvy writers to keep up with social media marketing demands. The drawback to this is their judgment may not be in the best interest of your company. If a customer’s concern causes them to become defensive, it could make your company look bad. As long as the people you hire can demonstrate their maturity in handling your customers, you can be sure that this will be one mistake you avoid.

Pretending To Be the Consumer

This is a big one. No consumer wants to involve themselves with a company who is so blatantly dishonest in their marketing strategy. This devious strategy is known as ‘identity cloaking’ and can get your company in some hot water if anyone finds out who the blog or website really belongs to. Ultimately, it becomes an embarrassment to the company and to the consumers. It would take the same amount of time building genuine customer relations as it would repairing your reputation from a stunt like this. Obviously, the former would be less hassle and would mean better customer relations. Read the rest of this entry »

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