Out-Spending Is Out, Out-Engaging Is In

The internet, along with the onset of social media, has become the great equalizer. Long gone are the days when you had to outspend the competition to outsell the competition. There use to be a time when all you had to do was figure out how many units you wanted to roll and multiply it by your advertising cost per unit to figure out your ad budget. Small stores just couldn’t keep up because big stores could afford to spend, it was a viscous cycle.

Of course, that’s how it used to be, now its who is out-engaging who. Smaller stores, through market engagement, can now compete with larger stores and affect a change so radical that they can now outsell them. Social media allows us to join communities and engage our markets like never before. Social media, by its very nature, is viral and by tapping into its viral nature each one of us is able to generate buzz like never before.

While implementing a successful social media strategy is no small feet, it’s one that, if planned properly, can have outstanding effects on your bottom line. Social networks, blogging platforms, forums, and video sharing sites give the average internet user powerful new publishing tools that can get their voices heard. Social media is an unstoppable wave that will either crush you beneath it’s weight or lift you to new heights, the choice truly is yours.

Conversations are happening all day every day, about anything and everything, but most importantly they are talking about you, are you even listening? It’s in those conversations that the true power of social media begins to show its self. Typically, people talk about how bad an experience is before they talk about how good it was. That’s the reason why you should be engaging your market daily because if you don’t, you have no control over what’s being said.

By implementing the proper strategies, and engaging the community in a positive manner you can, in effect, have them do your marketing for you. Just look at what Ford did with the Fiesta Movement. They found 100 agents to give Fiestas to for 6 months but were required to go on one mission a month and had to blog and create videos about their experiences. On a smaller scale, you could do the the same thing in your market. You could have people submit videos about why they should be chosen to go on a mission. Once a few winners are chosen they are given a car, a tank full of gas, maybe a little cash and a mission to accomplish, such as driving until they run out of gas. Of course ,they would have to blog and create videos about their experiences. All of these blogs and videos are then voted on and the winner gets to keep their car. Of course this is just a brief example but the amount of publicity and market engagement that is possible through a campaign like this is priceless, not to mention all of the free media coverage.

Ideas about what you can do to elicit the help of your community to market for you are endless! The idea is to get them to create content about your business, whether it be video, blog posts or both.

What ideas can you come up with? Respond in the comment section below.

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