Social Media plays an important role in every sphere of Blogging. Bloggers promote their articles in a number of social networks in order to get traffic. Advertisers use parameters like number of twitter followers, number of Likes in a Facebook Page, etc to evaluate the blog before advertising in it.
So can’t it help you in marketing your products?
Definitely it can play an important role in marketing as well as increasing the sales of your own products or affiliate products.
Here are 6 advantages of using Social Media for marketing your products or services:
Social Media has Great Potential
The figure below shows the number of registered members (approximate) in the following social networking sites:
- Facebook – 800 million
- Twitter – 175 million
- Google+ – 50 million
So can you imagine the potential of these social sites?
It provides a great platform to market or promote your product. You get different kind of people in these sites and thus you can promote a number of products based on the interest of the people.
Social Media is viral in nature as well. I mean if someone finds your product interesting, he/she may “Like” it, or +1 it or tweet about it; thus you get free promotion about your product or service.
Customers can Interact with You Directly
The problem with squeeze pages or newsletter form of marketing is customers cannot interact with you directly. You may have a FAQ section for answering most of the common questions that may arise. But this is not enough. The person may have certain questions that are not listed in your FAQ. Thus, even if he/she is interested in buying the product, he/she may opt out and as a result you lose a potential customer.
Social Media can play an important part here. The person, interested in buying your product, can directly interact with you either by sending you messages or by chatting with you. At the time of conversation with the customer, you also get the chance to convince him to buy the product using your communication and marketing skills. Thus, you can clear all his doubts and convince him to buy the product.
Understand your Customer
You must try to understand the needs of the customer. You should not promote a product that your customer doesn’t like. Thus you need to interact with them to understand them properly. Social media provides you this opportunity. Try to ask them questions or start some kind of polls to understand their needs. Ask them about their interests and try to promote products based on their interests.
Target the Right Customer
You may start to sell a product that is made for women in the age group of 20 to 35 or something related to web designing or some eBook related to animals. Now if you promote it using your blog or newsletters or using a squeeze page, you are never going to get much success. Reason is your blog or email list consists of different kind of people with different age group, with different interests, etc. Some of them may not even like you promoting such products and may even unsubscribe to your newsletters or may stop visiting your blog.
Social media helps you to target the right customers for your product. You can create Facebook groups or Google+ circles with people having common interests and promote products based on those interests to them. This increases your chances of selling the products.
Use Videos to Market the Product
YouTube is ranked 3rd in terms of traffic according to Alexa. It gets millions of visitors per month. So why not use it for marketing your product. People prefer to watch a video rather than reading a review about the product. So what you can do is create a video about the product and publish it on YouTube with your affiliate link. You don’t need to create a great video. Just make sure you perfectly market your product in the video. Add some of the basic information in the video like what the product is all about, its benefits, some testimonials, special offers or discounts(if any), etc.
Use the perfect title for the video and make sure to add relevant tags to it. Once you have published it, you can share the video link in Facebook, Twitter or Google+ as well.
Learn from Your Competitors
Many of your competitors may have already started marketing their products in various social sites. Being a newbie in this area, you can learn a lot of things from them. Try to do some research like what social sites they are using, what are the methods they use, what is their success rate, etc. This way you will get a clear idea about using social media for marketing your products.
I tried to explain the advantages of Social Media for marketing your product. Hope you liked the article and benefitted from it.
Did I miss anything? If so, feel free to add it in the comments section.
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