As the social media industry is booming, small business owners are seeing it as a low-cost marketing platform. Small businesses are considering social media as a means to sell or resell their products. There are three simple yet effective ways small business owners can market their products on social media.
1. Communicate with your Clients
Marketing is about creating and maintaining a new relationship and a relationship is about maintaining communication. So from here we can understand that communication is the most important step for success in social media marketing.
Social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn allow business owners to market their products. Other web tools such as podcasting (BlogTalkRadio), event coordination (Meetup), photo sharing (photobucket, Flickr), wikis (Wikipedia, answers.com), video sharing (YouTube, Metacafe) allow small business owners to share information directly with your customers. .
Content in the form of a blog post, video or audio, review or comparison, social media post, or tweets help share information and guide customers in a less formal way.
This approach builds a trust factor between business owners and customers. Features like targeted viewers allow business owners to market their product to customers based on their location, gender, or interests. Facebook sports this feature.
The direct communication feature of social media helps business owners to communicate with their target customers. Social networks have made it possible for customers to give feedback on their experience with products. This feedback helps business owners improve their product.
2. Collaboration drives the customer-owner relationship
When small businesses communicate with their target customers, they feel empowered. When target consumers feel empowered, they buy from you, trust you, and stay in touch with you. It is consumers in this age (of media marketing) who make, break, or shape buying patterns.
Small businesses create communities or join existing communities to ignite business-consumer collaboration. These communities bring your target customers closer and in turn increase your sales percentage. Social networks like Facebook, Twitter, etc. serves for this purpose.
Consumers trust social networks more than companies themselves, since they trust their peers as well as advertisements. Social collaboration has become important to boost sales and popularity of a product.
3. Entertainment attracts fewer interested customers
Have you ever thought why social networks serve as a marketing tool? No? I’ll tell you why. Social networks are fun and full of entertainment. Small businesses market their products by entertaining consumers. People choose the place where they feel heard and have fun.
Social media giant Facebook serves as an entertaining marketplace by featuring Facebook likes or fan pages. The number of likes shows the popularity of a business (not always). Other social networking sites like Twitter attract small businesses to market their products as they also have entertainment value.
Always remember to combine the marketing of your product with the tools of social networks. Try to post some relevant videos with some humorous title. Entertainment is an important mantra for social marketing.
Sites like Facebook and LinkedIn are catching on with business owners because they are fast, entertaining, fun, and not to mention very popular.
So what will your company’s strategy be when it comes to social media marketing?