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The Business Implications of Social Media Marketing In today’s competitive arena, marketing is the essential aspect for every organisation to identify, anticipate and satisfy customer requirements profitably as well as to achieve organisational objectives. Different companies are adopting different types of marketing strategies according to the type & size of the organisation, their products and services and existing competition in the market place.
There are mainly two types of marketing strategies that are used by the different organisations. ??? Outbound Marketing: Outbound marketing includes insides sales, telemarketing, trade shows, seminars, print advertisement, direct mail/e-mail, etc. With Outbound marketing the marketers try to push their products and services to the people who really don’t want the products and services at all. In recent phenomenon, the outbound marketing is getting less and less-effective due to the following two reasons: People are now becoming busier with their tight schedule; block them with caller id, spam filtering, Tivo, and Sirius satellite radio. ??? People now preferring more the internet (web site, search engine, blogs, social media sites, etc. ) to learn something new or to buy the products and services, rather than going to the trade shows and seminars to waste their time and money. ??? Inbound Marketing: It includes search engine optimization (SEO), pay per click, blogging/ blogosphere, social media, targeted landing pages, marketing analytics, etc.
Using inbound marketing, marketers will attract the potential customers rather than going out to unnecessary market place. In inbound marketing, the social media plays a critical role to attract the visitors using search engine, the blogosphere, etc. With a rapid penetration of broadband technology across the globe, Internet is emerging as the most preferred medium among the consumers. Traditional media like newspaper, magazine, television and films, and radio are slowly ecoming less attractive. As Internet became a more ingrained part of the consumer’s lifestyle, consumers were found to spend more time online establishing personal connections via internet phone calls, instant messaging and online forums. The rapid use of internets created another online based media called social media. Social media is best understood as of new kind of internet based media, where human beings discover, read and share news and information and content.
Using online technologies and practices, people can share their insights, opinions, experience and perspectives taking different forms of social media including texts, images, pictures, audios and videos. There are different types of social media, but mainly it is divided into six different types including social network, wikis, blogs, podcasts, forums, content communities, and micro blogging. MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, Wikipedia, Apple iTunes, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, etc are the few examples of social media sites.
Social media is much cheaper than traditional media, enables everyone to publish, share and access information. Looking to the higher investment in industrial types of media, private sector individuals now concentrated towards the social media to publish the information of the companies in a less formal ways that has been traditional in press releases, newsletters, and brochures which can helps the organisation to give a human face and voices to the mass public. Social media becomes a very effective ways to build strong networks of individuals and relationship with them.
In today’s business environment, social media is becoming more and more popular as marketing tools, where the big corporate as well as small and newly established ones can take advantage of marketing techniques to reach a board market quickly in expensively way. In social media marketing, the business people can use web marketing through social media sites with a purpose of promotion of products and services, sharing of new ideas and concepts, raising visibility of the companies’ information, establishing managing personal relationship, branding and reputation of the specific companies, etc.
On the following different ways, the social media marketing can help the business organisation to grow. ? Using podcasts, blogs, references, online audios and videos, messages boards, posts and comments on social networking sites the specific companies can reach to the mass target audience ? Taking an advantage of social media marketing, companies or business individuals simply forms an advertisement that reaches out to the wider target audiences in quick, attract more customers and enhance customer retention at convenient and inexpensive method Small-medium enterprises can afford to promote their products and services on the internet with less capital investment ? Social media marketing plays a role of direct marketing and creates a business too ? It allows people to participate and contribute each other in interactive communities, though company can increase its chance to attracting more clients to come into company’s site and to take a look at what the company is offering ? It helps the company to get best research engine ranking Social media marketing is direct, open and transparent, so more number of people view the brand of the company; enhance brand image of the company in the market ? It helps company to establish strong relationship with targeted clients ? Social media marketing helps marketers to know about the values and needs of the customers while getting an ideas, opinions and feedbacks from different communities ? It assists marketers to know the changing needs in their products and services to get consumer retention and loyalties Though online bases company can provide basic customer services, assisting customers when they have problems or questions about the company’s products and services ? Social media marketing can assist company to know about the products and services of the competitors, their strength, target audience and market positioning ? The company can set a dynamic business strategy/marketing strategy to compete in the market place and cater the targeted market share of specific industry ? The company can differentiate itself with other existing brand in the market Social media represent a promising new line of business. Social media marketing is no difficult task; every one can do it with some efforts and knowledge. There is less entry barriers too. Though, social media marketing is one of the strategic initiatives, involves developing and implementing an online visibility of your business and to create better brand awareness within the online communities. For successful B2B marketing, marketers are enhancing social media to reach target audience, build a brand and engage brand supporters, make money and finally win.