Everything You Need to Know About Social Media Marketing

By Chelsi Nakano (@chelkano) Apr 27, 2010 Comments

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Social media works, plain and simple. For businesses, it's a trend that represents a marketing opportunity so huge it eclipses the need for intermediaries by connecting companies directly with their customers. Have you taken a proper look at how best to utilize this phenomenon? Read on, we aim to help you.

SM Marketing Strategies

We're trying not to say "best practices" here (and hopefully you know why), but that's essentially what a study conducted by market research company, Irbtrax, is getting at. Their recent efforts involved taking a deep look into several avenues of successful SM marketing, and according to Irbtrax founder Scott Moir, the digging revealed a consistent pattern of methods.

"This pattern involved three applications," Moir said. "Pre-launch preparation, continued assessments and applying findings in order to make key adjustments at critical times.“

Pre-launch Preparation

Pre-launch prep means starting your implementation process by asking and answering a set of questions in order to surface your individual needs. This approach has been preached by experts as a fundamental part of most areas of implementation, including Web CMS, SharePoint, analytics, automated marketing tools and social software. Regardless of the tool, the number one question tends to be some form of: Who is our target audience?

Daniel Kraus of Leading Results and a speaker at this year's SugarCRM conference in San Francisco made some additional points that were especially resonating during his talk about online marketing success. He suggested defining an ideal customer before the target. An ideal customer, he said, is someone that is profitable, values what you do, refers you, etc. This customer may not be who you had in mind from the start, and therefore would likely have remained an untapped resource.

Irbtrax's other pre-launch prep questions include:

Roughly what percentage of our target market is involved in Social Media?
What are the best Social Media platforms to help reach our target market?
Can we integrate any of the existing online or offline assets we utilize?
What future strategies can jump start our campaign if it hits a ceiling?
What applications are available to help us monitor results?

Speaking to the last question, social media monitoring is — naturally — growing as SM marketing grows. Several tools have already been released this year by top analytics companies, including Webtrends and Omniture (specific to Facebook). Moreover, an entire framework for measuring results in social media was recently composed by John Lovett and Jeremiah Owyang. The report (downloadable for free here) aims to provide a solid foundation for beginning the measurement process.