Why Social Marketing is so Important Today

Marketing includes things such as blogging, social networking, Web 2.0 and so on. It is more than trying to sell a product. When you are a social marketer your goal is to really get to know your customers in any way you can. Your goal is to become a trusted person to them.

Let's look at the Internet as it pertains to selling things online. In the past the emphasis was on driving traffic to a website. Your goal is to make a sale. The best way to do this was to drive as much traffic as possible.

Today, what is happening is, there are people coming on the Internet who have really never used it in the past. They are accessing information in other ways beyond just search engines. This means that if you want to get their business you have to be available to them in other ways beyond a search engine such as Google.

Paid advertising still does work, because there are people that use search engines. However other things such as blogging, social book marking, social networking, and these sorts of things, are an important part of successful Internet marketer's promotion efforts.

Are you familiar with My Space? At one time this was the largest social network online. Now there are networks that have become more business oriented such as Twitter.com and Facebook.

Your real goal in social marketing is to try and influence a person's ideas and thoughts. You do this by providing quality information to them and to be available to answer their questions.

This may not sound any different than email marketing used to be in the past. The real difference is that with social marketing you allow people to interact with you in a different way than they ever could with email marketing.

For example, when you blog, you can include video and audio, which enhances your visitors experience. You can also add things to your blog such as a place for your visitor to add comments, or vote on polls. Contests are another way to make blogging interactive and a big part of social marketing today.

The bottom line with social marketing is that you can make money, but you take a more long-term approach to making a sale. Whereas in the past your website was there to convert your visitors into customers, today you personally interact with them as a big part of whether they will become a customer or not.