In days past, putting together a successful marketing program meant you would have to browse through the Internet for hours on end searching for competing products and to make sure that yours is unique. Then, you would have to start networking in order to find suitable partners to attract traffic to your web site. Next, you would have to go about looking for affiliate or joint venture partners to send out broadcasts to their client lists so that you could get noticed by a lot more customers who were not even present in your target market.
Yes, this did take up a lot of time and energy just to get enough web site traffic in order to get noticed and sell a few units of your product or service. However, there is good news for advertisers. Over the years, a new way of advertising goods and services was created and developed. This new way of advertising only advertises to a targeted audience who is actually interested in what you are selling.
This is where Social Marketing comes into play.
Today, there is only a handful of people who are aware of social marketing, and these few people have been marketing and advertising their products and services to thousands and thousands of people that are:
- Actually interested
- Targeted
- In the thousands
- Looking for a solution to their problems
- Willing to pay for the solution to their problems
If you look at some of the social networking web sites on the Internet, like youtube.com and myspace.com, you will see that these web sites have millions and millions of users looking for friends and other people to network with. There are sections for fathers, mothers, businesspeople, pets, people with money problems, and so on.
The Advantages of Social Marketing and how use it
Social marketing is a new wave of business advertising – and it is growing in popularity with more and more people are jumping onto the social marketing bandwagon.
The biggest advantage of social marketing is not that you can advertise your products and services to thousands of people that are looking for a solution, but it requires absolutely no money – you can advertise your business for free! All you have to do is sign up for a free account, fill in an interesting profile with some nice looking free layouts, add a few links to your products and a few banners to your links and you will have already started a social marketing program.
Once this is done, you can start adding contacts to your network and other people who are looking for your solutions by using more finely targeted searches. You can then start sending out bulletins to all your contacts so that they get interested in your solutions.
This is only the tip of the iceberg of what social marketing can achieve for your business. There are many social networking websites on the Internet that have from a few thousand members up to millions of users. Make use of these opportunities and advertise to people over the Internet; by taking a little more time to learn how to do it the right way, you will be able to attract more traffic to your website – and get more customers as a result.
