As newspaper and television advertising is becoming irrelevant, you may have some grasp as to what is going on with how social media is becoming the norm. It has evolved through social networking and eventually content sharing, but it has since become something more of a science – a kind of voting process that brings your website(s) and content to the top of social consciousness. The traditional advertising approach used to be that people just had to know your business to get their business. Then as more people began to offer the same services, people had to know and like you to do business with you, and as competition increased, people had to know, like and TRUST you to do business with you. The current advertising approach requires one last feature – FREE items.
The free item approach gets people in the door and if your prospects are happy with the free item, they quickly come to know, like and trust you through the process. It is a much more efficient process and brings many more prospects into your sales funnel than promoting the sale up front. Very few people that use your product and service sales pages are ready to buy, so it is very important that you provide an incentive (the free item) to bring them into your sales funnel process, so you can nurture your prospects into customers.
Depending on your industry, the nurturing process can take up to a year before you make a sale to a prospective customer (prospect), and the one-on-one approach is time consuming and cumbersome at best. It is much more effective to take the one-on-one approach to sales and use technology to automate it. Publicly traded technology companies like Sales Force,Inc. (CRM – NYSE) have created a great business out of automating these sales processes, but although they are effective, they are also very expensive to implement.
The social media marketing approach to sales has allowed people with a little time and almost no money to create a blog to generate interest in their products and services. The problem is that the Internet is becoming more and more inundated with mediocre information and good information is becoming harder to find. The most innovative search engine strategies, initiated by Google, now use a voting process to rank your content. To provide more relevant information in your searches, they are looking at the count votes within social media sites. Cumulatively, they call this “Buzz”.
The search engines are paying attention to social book marking and social media sites, blog comments and other factors to count “votes” and create a score (buzz factor) for content to determine rankings. Quality information (content) is becoming the free item that businesses are offering to generate interest in their products and services. This quality content has become the single most valuable asset a company can generate with its advertising dollars. Content includes reports, audio, video, press releases, blog posts, discussions, comments on other peoples’ content, etc. The goal is to provide relevant information that is useful to visitors, so that it attracts as many visitors and leads as possible.
A simple strategy for building leads through content generation is demonstrated in upcoming chapter “Content as an Asset” below. Content has become king and it has become the most valuable asset for companies looking to expand their advertising and marketing.
This is from Teo's book "Social Media Marketing and Syndication - The Evolution of Advertising"
Copyright 2009 Grace Lee International Publishing
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