MARKETING | Marketing With No Money: Using Social Media to Grow Your Offline Business
July 22, 2008 · Print This Article
Marketing doesn’t have to be a huge drain on your budget. Online social media allows business owners to connect with the public like never before, providing an outlet for you to get your name out there and get noticed. You don’t have to be an online business to use social media to your advantage; you can use it to grow your offline business, too. Social media comes in many forms, from blogs and microcommunities to video and social bookmarking.
What social media does is create an elevated platform for your content, to give it a broader reach. It’s not a miracle worker – you’ve got to have high quality content in the first place to be successful with it (and how to create viral content is a topic for another day!).
The essence of social media is person-to-person contact. Marketing is no longer about faceless corporations plastering ads all over every possible surface. Consumers want ‘conversational marketing’ – wherein the advertiser actually listens to what they have to say in return. The old yelling-into-a-megaphone routine doesn’t work so well anymore.
Social media isn’t a direct highway to sales – social media users like the notorious Diggers and Stumblers don’t care about your static direct-response website. They want to see unique content that pertains to their interests. That’s why some social media sites work hand-in-hand – like creating your own blog and then using media like Digg, Twitter and Stumbleupon to promote interesting posts. The best use for social media is to boost unique traffic and high quality links, which will in turn create a community of supporters and better search engine rankings.
Once you get the hang of it, using social media isn’t complicated. You might provide updates to new content published on your website via Twitter, or create and upload a how-to video related to your field on YouTube. You could network with others on Facebook and LinkedIn, social networking sites that let you virtually schmooze and make new contacts.
Some of the best online social media resources available are the previously mentioned Twitter, YouTube, Stumbleupon, LinkedIn, Facebook and Digg along with Flickr, Technorati, Newsvine, Del.icio.us, and Reddit. Go to each individual site, take a look around and see what other people are doing with it. It might just inspire you to jump right in and start getting noticed.
A great place to start is this article by social media marketing guru Muhammad Saleem, ‘The Social Media Manual: Read Before You Play‘. DoshDosh also has an excellent rundown of the benefits of social media marketing along with some tips on how to use it.
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