Hub of Social Marketing

We as marketers and business owners are now very lucky? why?  (i hear you asking). Well, because selling our products and services and getting our audience to take some kind of action has now become so much easier. The reason is because of Inbound Marketing.

It used to be that if you wanted to get your message to your audience you needed the medium of Print, Radio and or TV. These methods mainly relied on interrupting people while they were thinking about or doing something else. It worked quite well for some time but because now most of us use the internet (search engines) to research our buying decisions customers and potential clients come to you. What people want when they find you is useful, relevant customer focused content in the form of text, video, audio etc that educates and informs their buying decision.

So Inbound Marketing is about creating and optimising your web content to generate traffic to increase leads and sales. Create good content for the web and people will find you, create awesome content and it positions you as an expert who is credible and worth doing business with.

We are definitely seeing a shift in marketing through Inbound/Content Marking, Understanding how your buyers use the internet to make purchase decisions and how to educate and nurture your prospects through the sales cycle is crucial in this age of the internet.

Recently I really have been bangin on about how marketers and business owners need to stop chasing that PR pot of gold in terms of  getting featured in ‘The Times’ or on ‘BBC local news’ and start engaging with influential bloggersand thankfully, thankfully! people  are realising that to get your product infront of the right audience you need to get bloggers on your side. But not any bloggers the ones who cater specifially to your nieche. Selling baby toys? well then you need a blogger who has an engaged audience with a large mother and expetant mother subscriber base. Selling used cars? well then you need to get in contact with bloggers who blog about Cars. You get the point. It’s obvious but the number of people who miss this simple fact is staggering.

Bloggers have the ability to boost sales of your product and servce exponentially. Samsung relaised this and instead of marketing down the traditional route when they brough out the Galaxy S, they sent the smartphone to some of the most influenceial tech bloggers on the internet (for Free!) promissing that it was better than the I phone. (a blod starement) However upon testing the phone they loved it and proceeded to blog about it. The results were  amazing, they managed to achieve world wide recognition for the phone without spending a single penny on tradition advertising.

Tip 1 – Be the first to comment.

To get a blogger’s attention you have to show them that you read their stuff and comment regularly. If it is a popular blog you need to be the first person they see in the comments section. Do this by subscribing via RSS to get an email notifiaction whenever they send a new post that way you can comment quickly.

Tip 2 – Actually read their work.

Bloggers take pride in their work and they want people to comment with relevent feedback. Read their post and reply with something that they would get some insight from. It show them you actually read their work and took the time to draft an appropriate response.

Tip 3 – Provide trackbacks and Pingpacks

When you blog refer back to their work with a link. The blogger will be alerted that you have done this and are referencing his work and helping him grow his audience. that goes a long way in generating good will and building relationships.