There are all kinds of different marketing techniques out there.
Just the ones that relate to the Internet and social media are numerous: content marketing, social media marketing, email marketing, blogging, search engine optimization, and the list goes on.
How can you tell these forms in marketing apart? Where does one end, and where do the others begin? Can you have one without the others? Let’s find out.
To start, think about the Mississippi River.
Why Marketing Is Like the Mississippi River
Now, I’m not trying to change the subject. Really, think about the Mississippi River. It begins in northern Minnesota and travels southward, until it widens out in the Mississippi River Delta and hits the Gulf of Mexico.
It has tributaries: Ohio River, Missouri River, Arkansas River, and several other major rivers. It’s a massive thing, a changing thing.
But it is one river.
Now, imagine that the Mississippi River is marketing in all its variations. Can you have the Mississippi River without one or two of its tributaries?
Absolutely.
Do all the tributary parts feed into the river and add something to it? There too, we have to answer absolutely.
And is it sometimes very hard to tell where one technique begins and another ends? Yes.
There is plenty of overlap. So marketing is the mighty Mississippi, and content marketing, social media marketing, and all the other forms are its tributary parts.
What is content marketing? Read our post to find out.
There’s Marketing and There’s Social Media Marketing
According to the American Marketing Association, marketing is defined as “…the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.”
According to Techsperts, marketing is getting the word out. Social media marketing, or SMM, is using a variety of social media platforms to spread the word about your company or product.
Usually, this means directing them to your website. SMM could include the big-name players like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Google+.
It could also mean targeting specialized social media outlets like Foursquare, Tumblr, and Pinterest.
Your goal is not just to set up a social marketing presence, but also to engage other social media users and get them talking about you.
These days, it’s not just about likes and retweets. There are searchable social media outlets, and those have to be taken into account as well.
In other words, your audience is expanding.
How to Start Social Media Marketing
Aside from the basics—set up your account(s), do research on your target audience—what can you do to get your social media off on the right foot?
Build A Strategy – It may be fun (or not, depending on your view) to post pictures and updates all willy-nilly throughout your social media. But don’t. If you’re not investing actual money, you are at least investing time, so make it count by creating an overall outline of your goals and what you can do to achieve them. To help, here are some tips from Entrepreneur and Search Engine Land
Connect, Connect, Connect – Reach out to your customers and listen to what they say. Reach out to important social media mavens and expert bloggers—the ‘influencers’ who drive curiosity and therefore, traffic, to other sites. And learn from other successful brands.
Invest In Unique, High-Quality Content – Content is still king. It’s what keeps people interested in your page and coming back for more. It’s what represents you and establishes your industry cred. And it really should be unique to each of your accounts. However, cross promoting between your blog, your Facebook, and your Twitter accounts is a good thing.
And we have one last word of advice for social media marketing: don’t expect instant miracles. It takes time to gather momentum, but it can result in a loyal and interested following.What’s up in your personal technology world? If things aren’t running quite as smoothly as you’d like, give Techsperts Services a call!