How Social Media Marketing Can Help Your Dallas Business

For a few centuries social media marketing happened over the backyard fence and at community gatherings. Sam would tell Joe about a great fishing lure or Mary would encourage Sarah to try a brand of coffee she really liked.  Social Media Marketing has more in common with conversation than with marketing by traditional print, TV, and radio.  Today, this technique depends on the interaction between people using social networking to pass on recommendations via the internet. Getting a referral or recommendation from someone you trust can be a powerful influence on buying decisions. Small businesses all over the country are taking advantage of social media marketing and we can help you be one of them. At IPG, we make marketing easy.

What is Social Media Marketing?

The common characteristics of of this tool are the participation of regular folks, the transparency and disclosure of biases, and the facilitation of conversation within a community of people interested in the subject.  Social Media Marketing is inexorably linked to the culture phenomena of social networking – the sharing of personal views over the internet that is exemplified on sites like YouTube and FaceBook.  These sites use concepts of sharing personal insights, ranking content, and providing links to similar sites. The unique feature of Social Media Marketing is the tailoring of the topics, comments, and links to your business area. Social Media Marketing may include:

•    Personal observations or blogs
•    Podcasts
•    Webcasts
•    Wiki’s
•    White papers

How does Social Media Marketing Work?

Once you have decided to try Social Media Marketing as a means of generating leads, gaining new customers, and branding your Dallas-Ft Worth small business, what next? Before you plunge into trying to create content for a social media site, we strongly recommend that you contact and work with a marketing professional who understands how to make Social Media Marketing work for your small business. In our 17 years as marketing and sales consultants, we have seen many good marketing intentions fail because of a lack of knowledge about the consumer and the marketplace.

Social Media Marketing begins with content that offers information and value. This is not selling in the traditional sense; however, you can use your content to link to your existing marketing page or your home pages. Your goal in creating the content is to get your information portrayed positively in front of as many potential customers as possible through reader ranking, forwarding, and linking from other sites. Therefore, whatever content style of Social Media Marketing you choose, the content must have value for those who read it. And, it must be credible – believable, not hype.

For example, let’s say you operate a landscaping business. Your information (podcast, blog, white paper) could potentially tell people “how to draw your own landscape plan”, “how to care for your landscape”, “how to use Xeriscaping”. It may seem counterintuitive marketing to tell people how to do without your landscaping business, but in reality, people know that already. What can happen though when a potential customer, searching for information about Xeriscaping, finds your informative article is that they think to themselves, “Hey these guys really know about landscaping”. And they tell their friends. However to be successful at Social Media Marketing, this one moment is not enough – you need this pleased and potential customer to tell many others. This leads to some best practices of effective Social Media Marketing:

1. Ask your reader to recommend your article to collective social sites like Digg, Del.icio.us, or StumbleUpon by placing a checkbox at the end of your article. These sites provide a great deal of exposure for your business and encourage their readers to rate and share the content.
2. Make it easy for people to share your content through provided email links and by using standard document types like PDF or MPEG.
3. Be truthful and real
4. Add new content regularly
5. Participate in the online community by adding comments and information to other people’s social networking sites and sign your comments with your name and a link to your site.
   

Social Media Marketing can be a powerful asset in building your small business. Contact IPG and see how we can help you make the best use of your effort and your money by creating an effective, strategic Social Media Marketing plan for you!