At SociaLNK, our philosophy is to engage and interact in the conversations customers are already having about your brand. This will enable us to be a part of the conversation, to keep things positive, and to remain a factor in the decisions consumers make about your product. Engaging with the customer is much more effective—and more
Paul Hoppe
ethical—than trying to manipulate a consumer’s opinion. Social Media Marketing as a whole is bringing more accountability into marketing. A consumer trusts your business more as a Facebook friend, for instance, than as someone who interrupts a favorite television program to talk about his product.
To assist you in engaging and interacting with your customers, your online marketing agency develops a plan. The first step is knowing who your customers are, how you are going to engage with them, and how they will engage with you in return. If you know that you are trying to reach pre-teens by promoting a new film for that age group, certainly use Twitter to promote the trailers. Next, we create a company blog, profiles on the major social networks, and even a site for viral videos to be distributed. Using the social networks such as Facebook and Myspace will get people talking about you, even if they don’t know who you are at first. YouTube is a place for you to promote by making videos for your customers. This can be similar to advertisements—but the customers choose when to watch them. The final step in engaging your customers is to provide useful and relevant content for your blog, profiles, and videos. If the information is not something about your company and how it relates to the customer, it is merely white noise.
As a customer, how do you prefer to interact with businesses you know and trust?
