Social Media Marketing: The Game Where Everyone Gets To Play Publisher!
November 17, 2009 by Chris Marentis
Filed under Blog
The game in social media marketing is to build authority in your market or niche. Why? To differentiate your business and build a defensible mote that can get you more pricing power, special relationships and winner of the coolest business in your market award!
To play this social media marketing game, you will come to the realization that you are now in the content publishing business. Blogs, articles, whitepapers, ebooks…Phew! We know this is overwhelming for most businesses and marketing organizations. We can tell by looking at your eyes as we explain the social media strategy and programs that your business should launch…yes, we can see your eyes start to widen and a sudden panic set’s in.
Copyblogger has a terrific post The 7 Realities of Social Media Marketing that characterizes this issue well.
Ok, take a deep breath and follow these steps:
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Make sure you have a strong Unique Selling Proposition in your market or niche. A clearly defined positioning will help you think about content strategy and be much more engaging and passionate about your message.
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Don’t sell, teach! The distributed web is a collection of conversations in social media settings where a hard sell will be out of place. The way to get attention is to inform and educate. Should be easy because you are an expert in your market right?
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Use content that answers the questions and issues your target customers are searching for. Do some research to find out what these questions are. Look in the forums they hang out in, Yahoo Answers, LinkedIn Answers, conduct surveys, do keyword research. If you get this right, your will have a content strategy that your customers will flock to read.
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SEO and site design matter! You will need to get your site structure right with landing pages, “link bait” and distributed content all lined up so you get the SEO benefit of this effort and convert target customers to your list.
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Outsource content development and other tasks. Don’t abdicate it, just outsource so you can maximize your internal resources on what they do best and benefit from expert writers, content publishers website designers and SEO specialists.
We are not saying this “new normal” of marketing is easy. But if you plan well, do the research upfront and outsource help you will succeed. Even better, you will get there faster, better cheaper than competitors.
What are tricks that you use to produce and publish great content?
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I'm Chris Marentis, founder and CEO of GenNext Media LLC.
This blog is written to be a discussion about building businesses by bridging new technology with marketing and media solutions. While I have been doing it for over 25 years for Fortune 500 companies, start-up’s and everything in between, I had the benefit of discovering this “new normal” of marketing with many talented people. Please join the dialogue by commenting in the box below.
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