In marketing, you have to get your message in front of the people who are looking for the solution to their problems. Your product or service is important to your customers, but if they do not know about you, they won’t find you.
So what do you do to get your product in front of prospective customers?
Social media marketing is the number one way to join in with your prospects so that they can get to know you, like you and trust you. It lets them see you and how you handle yourself.
Prospects are out there on the social networks, tweeting their lunches, posting pictures of kittens and babies on Facebook, pinning on Pinterest and connecting on LinkedIn. It may not look like the kind of place that you want to spend any time with your business advertising, but you would be surprised at the results that can be obtained by simply adding social media to your marketing mix.
Your brand is your identity.
Use your brand to unify your message. All social media communication should enforce that brand. If you share kittens, do it from your personal profile, not your business page. That is why it is crucial to create a page for your business, so that when you communicate outside of your branding, you can use your personal profile and communication your brand message using the business page.
Gather your prospects.
Use Facebook and LinkedIn groups to bring together all of the people that have identified themselves as your ideal prospects. Using these groups, you have the ability to educate your prospects on the benefits of your product or service. Even more important, you should grow an email list of prospects, too, so that you can contact them with special offers when they are away from their social media. If you want to get even more cutting edge, gather the cellular numbers of your prospects so that you can text them when you have important information for them.
Put it all together!
Your blog is the hub for all of your brand communication. That blog has to fit with your brand: all the graphics and messages have to be brand related. Your social media posts should either originate from your blog or appear on your blog somewhere. When your business releases a video, your blog should feature it. The benefit to doing this is the ability to offer visitors a chance to raise their hand to identify themselves as prospects. A simple opt in form on the sidebar or in an unblockable popup can do wonders for your prospect list.
In conclusion…
Using social media marketing will make it possible to brand your business in a variety of ways. We didn’t cover YouTube or any of the video sharing sites, but just having a profile and/or page for your business is crucial – as long as you use them to communicate your brand message. Some online marketers may not have a brand identity, and it will scare them to hear this message. Take the time to brand your business. Find a coach if you can’t do it yourself. Having your social media message conveying your brand is so much more valuable than a disjointed mishmash of messages. So use these social media tools wisely, because your business depends on your message making it to the people who are looking for a solution to the problems that your product or service will solve.
