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by Juliet McEwen Johnson
More corporate advertising dollars are being spent on social media marketing now than ever before. There are oodles of books, articles, white papers, free reports, webinars, teleseminars, etc. explaining how to maximize your time and money invested in social media, but the whole thing is much simpler than people would have you believe.
What is the price of your product or service? How did you come up with that number? Usually it’s the combination of what it costs you to produce the item with enough profit to cover overhead and pay yourself. Rarely in a store can the clerk explain to you what the price is comprised of, nor can they fully explain the value. Yet on a blog, or in pictures on Facebook, or a video on YouTube, you can explain a fuller, richer story. In your own words, just exactly how you would like to present it. Defending your price can be done better on social media than via traditional advertising. And, it’s free!
The goal of all social media activity is to connect, engage and then move to the next step…of talking a little business. You may have noticed that almost no business is done ON a social network. No-one gets hired on Facebook. They may meet there, and begin preliminary conversation, but real business is usually transacted somewhere else. Whether that is on the phone or via email or Skype makes no difference to the argument: you need to get your prospective customer OFF that social network and into your domain so that you can seal the deal.
A book offers a handy framework. Social Media is a beast that needs to be constantly fed. The voracious appetite for content can seem overwhelming to many business owners. However, the answer is a simple one and one that the History Channel has leveraged to, now, two channels: the “how” of the way your product is made, and the “why” you do it, is just as interesting as the fact that anyone can purchase it for [insert your price.] If you approach your blog as if you are writing a book on your product, the full story would flow naturally. You would have a lot to say, and at the end of a few months, you would have enough material to actually publish a small book on Kindle, or the like. This, then, makes you not only an expert, but the guy who wrote the book on…
Whether you choose to sell that book or just use it as a giant business card is up to you. The point of creating it was simply to give you a structure with which to parcel out your daily social media activity – of sharing your story in such a way as to illustrate the price, and encourage people to come over to your site (virtual or brick and mortar) where you can connect further. Those are the three fundamentals of social media marketing.
About the author