It’s not IF your business engages
in social media but WHEN
Marketing is moving on
One of the most noticeable shifts in marketing over the last three years has been the rise of social media as a means to attract and engage customers for business wins.
The development of social media in recent months has seen sites such as Twitter and Facebook enjoying considerable exposure, huge buy-in, incredible rises in numbers of online engagement, and a host of opportunities for marketers to promote their companies’ services and products online.
We’ve seen the same previously with other social media behemoths like Facebook and MySpace, and it has become clear to us and our clients:
you cannot afford to ignore social media as a means of gaining attention and business.
Business objections to utilising social media
The main objections usually include ‘It’s a waste of time’ ‘Our current marketing strategy is not geared up for social media’ ‘The return doesn’t justify the time investment’ and ‘We’re happy with traditional marketing methods’ and these responses all fail to acknowledge one simple truth: it is not IF your business engages with social media, but WHEN. It comes down to market demand.
It won’t be ignored, it won’t go away, your customers are on social media networks, your potential customers are there, and so are your competitors. Marketers must engage it to survive in business.
Engagement is the key
There are more compelling, positive reasons to engage your business with social media, such as:
It is relatively cost-effective as a marketing tool
More importantly, if you’re not communicating with your target audiences in the way they want to be communicated to, you’ll lose them. No engagement equals no interest equals no revenues.
The impact of utilising social networks can deliver rapid results for marketers looking to see measurable returns. Everything online can be monitored, of course, which means that the metrics for social media make it extremely easy to overview, manage and report back any results.
The combination of a company blog, twitter account, Facebook fan page and customised Wiki page can work in tandem to market online to a wide audience. Rapid, instant, global.
One of the most powerful elements of social media is the way in which customers promote, recommend and refer services and products within their networks, making full use of the crowdsourcing method of delivering business to your door – usually at low-cost, without expensive traditional marketing campaigns, and ready to buy.
The figures are staggering – Facebook has more than 300 million users, Twitter increased numbers of new sign-ups by 1,382 percent in the last twelve months, whilst Technorati tracks more than 133 million blogs daily across the internet for ranking and popularity.
This doesn’t include the plethora of other social media sites or tools, such as social bookmarking or youtube uploads.
What’s stopping you?
Can we help?
