What is Social Media Marketing?

Simple Marketing Now takes advantage of the lessons that social media marketing and social media tools – like blogs, online reviews, sharing and networking – teach us about connecting with customers.  Rather than interrupt your customer, as traditional tools like advertisements do, social media tools engage them in conversation. If you are serious about the conversations, you can remedy the failures of traditional marketing, which is inherently one-way, and establish two-way communications, trust, transparency and authenticity in a group setting. That’s what makes it social.

Now, social media marketing tools aren’t just the latest shiny toys out there. It's not really the tools themselves that are interesting. It's what they do that's important.  These tools enable interaction amongst people. They break down the traditional walls that companies have built between themselves and customers, and which are part and parcel of traditional marketing techniques. They allow us to get to the heart of what matters to your customer, and offer value to them through content and conversation.

If you'd like to assess your readiness, you might want to read through these B2B Social Media Assessment Questions.

Simple Marketing Now can help you with Social Media Marketing

Here's how.

We use social media marketing to evaluate your marketplace and discover:

• What’s happening online? We’ll research and analyze digital dynamics.
• What’s happening offline? We’ll conduct and analyze interviews with core customers [B2B or B2C] and evaluate the brick & mortar expression of your customer experience.

We’ll recommend how to bridge the gaps between online and offline, integrate social media marketing programs with traditional and improve the customer experience.

We can help you educate yourself about the new social media marketing tools available.

• Participate in Social Media and Blogging 101 workshops.
• Learn about developing a content strategy and how to develop and share compelling content relevant to your customers.

We will develop and implement a marketing strategy for your business that includes a blog and social media.

More specifically,

• Create a social media listening strategy
• Implement a blog strategy that supports your business and website goals and helps you get found online by potential customers
• Determine how to use social media marketing tools to support your online presence
• Develop a blogger relations strategy
• Monitor and measure for success

We also offer Blog Coaching support.

It's all customized to meet your organization's needs.

Once you are immersed and comfortable in blogs and social media marketing, you'll be ready to implement:

Social Media Conversation Monitoring

If you want to be involved in social media based conversations, the first thing you need to do is listen to the conversations taking place! These conversations are taking place with you or without you and finding out where and what they are allows you to identify influencers in your community and develop relationships with them [this is often referred to as 'blogger relations']. Listen first, talk second.

Simple Marketing Now will monitor conversations relevant to your industry using eCairn Conversation, a powerful social media monitoring platform, based on content topics you identify and recommend follow-up and engagement with specific bloggers.  

Two steps are involved in effectively monitoring social media based conversations relevant to you:

• Identifying sources to listen to [i.e., developing a database of relevant blogs], map out your community and develop topics to monitor
• Ongoing monitoring of those sources to identify trends and sentiment and engage with influencers

Other Social Media, Content and Marketing Services Offered.

In addition to these popular social media and content marketing products, Simple Marketing Now can provide you with:

Social Media Marketing Training: learn the ins & outs, best practices and how to make sense of the most popular social media marketing tools in use: Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Foursquare... These can be in-person or online and customized for your organization.

Blog Coaching: We have extensive experience with blogs and can coach you on how to maintain a strong blog presence and consistently offer your readers content they value as well as become part of your greater blog community.

Strategic Consulting Services: We will help you integrate social media and content marketing into your overall business so that your marketing works harder to deliver results for you. We help small businesses strengthen their marketing, improve their digital visibility and make use of available online tools to better connect with potential customers.

Pricing for these services is based on each organization's individual requirements.