Online marketing is that great democratic leveler between competitors, because it’s a relatively cheap and effective way of reaching your customers. But the nature of online social media marketing has its own quirks, which you’ll have to work with. So what are the marketing techniques appropriate to online social media?
Multi-Layered Marketing Schedule
The challenging thing about social media is that your audience responds directly to you at a very fast pace which can redefine how your campaign goes. One little online comment may start thousands of other people talking about your products, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.How do you make sure they’re talking about your products in a positive light? And how do you try to latch your brand image onto the latest online trends (nicknamed “memes”), when these opportunities sprout at a moment’s notice? What are the marketing techniques best suited to the limited time you have?
The solution is to create a multi-layered marketing schedule. One layer will have a set schedule for the activities, created one year in advance, to ensure the biggest marketing goals are met (e.g., website or video launch, special promos, etc.). The next layer will deal with smaller activities that support the first layer, which are set about 2-3 months in advance (e.g., special series of blog and vlog entries). The subsequent layer will deal with activities that are planned a few days or less beforehand (e.g., Twitter tweets, Facebook status updates, YouTube comments) in response to whatever reactions your audience might have.
Once you have your own layered schedule, what are the marketing techniques which can go into each layer?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
You will need a website/blog for this. SEO simply means getting the world’s Web search engines to list your website at the top in a series of search results, whenever people begin looking for topics or items that are relevant to your products or services. (For example: if they search for “vanilla beans” and “organic,” Google or Yahoo will spew out the name and website link of your vanilla farm, automatically placing it on top of the search results as “most relevant.”) This way you drive traffic toward your website, where people can learn more about your products.
The most basic technique to achieving SEO is to fill your website and blog with exciting text content that naturally mentions, as often as possible, every possible relevant keyword or phrase people might think of that’s associated with your products.
Email Marketing
This is the electronic version of mailing newsletters, letters, flyers, and catalogues to a select mailing list. But just as people called it “junk mail,” email marketing also has its equivalent: “spam.”
What is spam? More specifically, it’s any content that’s emailed blindly to as many people as possible, regardless of whether they want to receive the email or not. It annoys people, and they’ll delete or trash your emailed newsletter or catalogue without ever reading it.
To avoid creating spam, make sure your marketing emails are sent only to the people who’ve indicated that they want to receive email from you, or are already obviously interested in what you’re selling. Create such a list of people by inviting people to indicate on your website or blog that they’d like to be on your mailing list.
Mobile Marketing
Nowadays, this means more than just regularly sending SMS to a select list of recipients’ cellphones. Since people can now access the Web from their smartphones, you can them to follow your presence in social media (i.e., Facebook updates, Twitter tweets, blog comments, YouTube posts, etc.). Send them content that’s witty, informative, and relevant.
These all should tie in with your emails and SEO. This way you create an online trend of your own, fueling the online “gossip”–and eventually translating that to product sales.
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