Stacy Kinney

photo courtesy of webdivasuccess

Promoting your brand with a social media marketing campaign focused on addressing the needs of your target audience is an almost guaranteed way of driving customers to your business.

Before the internet came around, the only way to reach potential customers was to either advertise on the media outlets available at the time – i.e. newspapers, television and radio – or to directly connect with them by interrupting their day with a telemarketing call or approaching them on the street.

These days, however, social media has turned the sales process upside down and inside out. Customers hate being sold to and thus are resistant to the outdated sales tactics, such as cold calling, still being used today. Customers know what they need and use social media to seek out people they can trust to help them. Therefore running a social media marketing campaign has become a necessity for successfully attracting these customers to you.

Social media marketing is the art of promoting yourself and your brand on social networking websites. It is different from other forms of marketing because social media is dynamic and offers the opportunity for quick success. Social media marketing is also inexpensive and gives you the ability to leverage the popularity of the social networking site to get your brand in front of a large audience.

In order to use social media marketing effectively, you must first have a brand to promote. Without a properly formed brand, your marketing campaign will be unfocused and may fail to attract the customers you want.

Your brand is your story on a bumper sticker. It is the image that pops up in your customer’s mind when they hear your name. Take advantage of the innumerable resources on the internet to help you figure out what your brand is and why people should be attracted to it.

A second necessary component to successful social media marketing is knowing who your target market is. Though it sounds counter-intuitive, you don’t want everybody in the world to be your customer. You only need the people who want, and can afford, to do business with you. Focusing on only attracting those in your target market will make it easier for you to design a campaign that reels them in.

It goes without saying that promoting your brand with social media marketing requires that you be active on social networking websites. You’ll want to focus on working a few popular sites rather try to be active on all of them. You don’t want to spread yourself too thin and once people get to know you, they’ll spread your message to those other sites for you anyway.

The bulk of your social media marketing efforts will focus on interacting with the members of the site. You want to actively engage your target market by sharing useful information that is in line with their needs as well as respond to things that they share on site.

Last but not least, make sure your brand’s physical presence is consistent wherever it appears. This means the information about you should be the same on each site including image you use to represent yourself and you should customize your social media profiles to reflect your brand wherever possible.

Social media marketing is a tool that no internet marketing strategy should be without. Just remember to focus on addressing the needs of your target audience and you will find your business overflowing with customers in no time.