Tag Archives: Social Media Marketing

What is conversation marketing?

Although the meaning of the term “conversation marketing” is self evident there is lots of confusion regarding what it actually means and what are its benefits. You must be wondering why I am talking about a marketing concept on a content writing blog. Content writing is basically a form of marketing:you communicate your marketing message to your readers so that they do business with you. In the same vein conversation marketing encompasses communication both ways; it is an exchange of ideas in real time. You are not only marketing your message you are also aptly listening to your customers and clients.

But listening and communication doesn’t just happen. Why would anybody be interested in knowing what you have to offer or in communicating what you want to know? To know people better and to make them know you better you have to strike up conversations. Interesting, direct conversations that make people think constructively. When they talk about ideas seeded by you it becomes easier for them to remember you and associate you with the service or product you provide.

These days I am closely observing companies and organizations indulging in conversation marketing through their social media and networking profiles. There are many few who get the hang of it. Most of them simply want to accumulate hundreds of thousands of followers and friends and dump their marketing messages upon them as if they are carrying out the usual advertising campaigns using traditional media channels. What is the use of broadcasting your message to those who don’t want to listen to you or have no idea what you’re saying?

They don’t realize that more than marketing they have to initiate conversations. The marketers call this the conversation age due to a plethora of social networking tools available on the Internet and almost everybody using them. You throw a stone and it will probably hit somebody having a Facebook or a Twitter account. It shows people are desperate to have conversations among their friends and new people to stumble upon on these websites. Okay, let us not use the negative word “desperate” but everybody wants to converse with everybody else. May it be common folks or celebrities everybody is talking to everybody.

Amidst all this talking you rise like an uninvited Sphinx and start blaring out your marketing message urging people to do business with you. Nobody cares. It’s not that people don’t want to buy but when they are interacting among their friends, relatives and the loved ones they don’t want somebody to butt in and make offers. It puts people off.

Conversation marketing helps you get over this psychological hurdle. Become familiar to your prospective customers and clients by striking up conversations with them. You need to be a part of the crowd, while standing out at the same time. You have to be interesting and useful. If you’re simply there to spout your marketing messages nobody is going to follow you unless you are targeting the MLM industry.

When both the sides talk you develop a rapport. People don’t take you as an irritating marketing person when you talk to them about their day-to-day concerns. Of course if you are a bigger company talking about mundane things may not be possible all the time and in this case it is better to stick to your brand but here too you can be interesting. Share interesting stuff about your business. Ask people how they prefer to use your product and so far what has been their experience. Be prompt in replying because people very soon lose the thread due to scores of other ongoing conversations.

The basic idea behind conversation marketing is to familiarize people with your presence without bothering them with too much marketing speak. It is a great opportunity in fact. If you are an adept conversationalist you can quickly develop a following and people begin to pay close attention to what you say and how you respond. The actual benefit manifests when people begin to talk about your product or service among themselves even without your presence. This is the actual essence of conversation marketing — people begin to converse about you or your business and preferably in a positive manner. I will talk more about this in my future posts

My understanding of social media marketing

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It has become a cliché I know, “social media marketing” but then every trend sooner or later, as more and more people begin to adopt it and begin to claim themselves as experts in, becomes a cliché.

As it often happens with me my entry into the world of social media has been a bit lackluster. I have been interacting on Facebook and Twitter and have also been providing consulting services to some of my regular clients but when it comes to my own presence on social media I haven’t been very particular. Actually, the same thing happened with my blog too. When I was helping other people promote their blogs I was totally neglecting my own blog. Anyway, this post is about my understanding of social media marketing.

What exactly is social media marketing? Does it merely mean creating profiles on various social media and networking websites and posting content, and on and off interacting with your friends and followers? This is not marketing, this is simple networking and communication and your mom must already be doing this among her circle of old friends and relatives.

Marketing is a bad word, I know but it is a necessary evil, if you want to call it so. Out of the negative shade it is an activity that makes people aware of the services and products you offer.

Conventional marketing is mostly one-way: you create advertisements for television, newspapers, magazines, and even on the Internet (remember banner and link ads?). You can even publish pamphlets and fliers and get them distributed or mailed. After being exposed to your advertisement people may or may not respond. It depends on how well the advertisement has been created and what is the demand for your product or service.

Social media marketing on the other hand creates ripe ground for marketing. And it’s not just marketing in its pure sense. You may like to call it brand awareness. You don’t necessarily call it marketing because on social media and networking websites people are not very big fans of marketing and business promotion. It happens but it happens in the form of communication. Social media marketing in its true essence means

You remain active
You keep interacting with your friends and followers
You keep them engaged
You inform them
You educate them and seek advice
You let it be known through your fan or profile page what you do for a living and what sort of business to promote
You encourage discussions around your product or service, unobtrusively
You constantly measure response and take further steps accordingly
You reach out to new people and make old people feel valued
So on and so forth

You cannot simply put a page there and expect people to start doing business with you. You need to establish a long-term relationship with them. You have to show them that you are interested in them, that you are concerned about their welfare, that it matters to you how they think and what they think, you are there to help within your means, and in between, if they need something and you happen to be selling it, suggest that they can get it from you.

Benefits of social media marketing

There are many benefits of engaging your present and prospective customers/clients on social media and networking websites.

You create relationships instead of customers and clients
You actually interact with people as an individual
The communication is more focused and targeted
It is an ongoing process so there is greater brand awareness
People become more familiar with your presence and may even respond better to your conventional advertising campaigns
You can develop a stand-alone platform to launch products and services
You can obtain instant feedback and react accordingly
If there is a public-relations problem you have a ready-made communication tool with you through which you can reach hundreds of thousands of eager listeners instantly
You can educate people with real-time interaction
You can analyze the metrics of conversion with greater and more predictable accuracy
You can show your human side to your customers and clients
You can strike up new, amazing friendships
You can get new product ideas by carefully listening to your social media audience

There can be many more benefits but these are the immediate once that come to my mind.

So should your organization invest in social media? Again, “invest” sounds a bit mercantile but what I mean is investment in terms of effort and money. Of course as a busy person you wouldn’t like to update your Facebook and Twitter accounts multiple times a day and beside you need to be very careful about what activities to indulge in through your social media presence, especially if you are representing your business. You have to define guidelines and you have to strategise your activities. Although social media marketing is an ongoing activity you have to move towards long-term and short-term objectives. Your every single posting and interaction must take you one step forward towards those objectives.

For this, you need help. You will need professional help: people who know the inns and outs of social media and who can take positive decisions for you. This is where investment comes in because you will have to pay them for their time. Social media is fun only as long as you’re doing it for yourself; if you want to do it for others you expect decent compensation because it is a serious job. The person, after all, represents your business. Everything he or she says reflects upon you (your business); hence, it requires lots of maturity, experience and tact to interact with your followers and friends on social media on your behalf. I will be writing more about this in my forthcoming blog posts.

Content marketing doesn’t stop with n number of webpages or blog posts

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Whenever I tell this to my clients they think I’m trying to get more business from them, which is true, in a sense, because if I’m telling you to get more content from me, and that too on an ongoing basis, I cannot afford to provide it for free. It’s like, getting solar panels installed on your roof is a good step because once you have covered the cost of installation the power you get is practically free (and you save your environment from getting more polluted).

So, it doesn’t make sense to grow cynical if a solar energy company asks you to buy solar panels from it simply because it would mean it is trying to do business. Anyway, the point of this post is not that. I think generating content on an ongoing basis must be a conscious choice and being a savvy business person you should be able to decide for yourself.

Having said that, if you’re getting 20 articles or blog posts written and after that you think that your content marketing campaign is over you need to rethink. Millions web pages are being generated on a daily basis. At least 500-1000 among them are lapped up by search engines, bloggers, website publishers and social media/networking users to promote and spread. These are the top ones that attract the majority of the traffic of that particular day.

For how long can you sit on the laurels of those 20 articles or blog posts? The reality of the current state of the Internet is that you constantly need to publish new content in order to stay in the game.

You want people to keep coming back to your blog or website. You also want social media/networking users to continuously promote your content. You want the search engines to keep on crawling your website/blog so that whenever you are making new offers or updating your content it is indexed and reflected in search results very fast. You want to cover as many keywords as possible in order to increase your targeted search engine traffic. You also want to build a community around your product or service so that people not only buy from you they also promote your business through word-of-mouth marketing.

This requires ongoing content publishing.

Both people and search engines are constantly looking for fresh, topical content to learn from and to promote. They are not going to highlight or promote the same content again and again.

You need to provide them fresh content.

Publishing new content on an ongoing basis doesn’t mean that you do it every day (although this is preferred because you accumulate more content faster). There are many clients who prefer just one blog post every week. Some go for three blog posts. It depends on their budget and the requirement. There are many types of audience and some audience do not appreciate receiving fresh content everyday.

So quantity is not an issue here. The issue is continuity. Publish less content, but keep it going. It is like business marketing. Do you stop after a single campaign? No you don’t. Companies keep coming up with new campaigns in order to draw new customers and clients. Content marketing is also a part of that process.

What comes first, content writing or social media?

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Social media marketing these days in an integral part of business development: it is just a matter of who realize it and who don’t. Some online marketers even compare the indecision about investing in social media marketing to that initial phase when people were not sure whether they should get a telephone connection for their business or not.

But what exactly is social media marketing? It is constant interaction with your present and prospective customers and clients (on websites like Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr) and not only your customers and clients but with all those people who are interested in your brand and your philosophy while not being interested in doing business with you. Why bother with people who don’t want to do business with you? Word-of-mouth marketing: they may not want to do business with you but they may know somebody who would and they would like to recommend you due to the level of familiarity you have sustained through your social media marketing effort.

Aside from regular interaction you need to post lots of content on social media and networking websites. It doesn’t do much good to your brand identity and reputation if you simply get content from other websites and blogs and keep posting it under your profile. Then you become just another user who simply wants to spend some time on Facebook and Twitter sharing “interesting stuff”. People begin to respect your opinion only when you have your own content on your website/blog. This is because expressing your thoughts and sharing your knowledge shows that you are confident and knowledgeable enough to articulate your opinions and experience openly and be open to scrutiny. This is how true interaction begins: you post links to your own content and then your friends and followers either forward that content to their own friends and followers or they expressive opinion.

So should you write content first or launch your social media campaign first? You can do one of them or you can do them together, simultaneously, it depends what approach you want to follow. My personal preference would be to maintain a balance. Both the activities take time and effort, and also expense, if you’re going to hire people to write your content and manage your social media profiles. Companies and individuals that build their presence based upon their opinions and knowledge need to have lots of content in order to have a solid social media presence. You also need content if you intend to spread awareness regarding your product or service. You don’t need content much if your audience is not the reading types.