Saturday, February 20, 2010

2010 - Stands as a Challenge to Marketers?

The thing which a marketer likes to adopt is challenge. Marketers have been treating the challenges effectively for years. Still there are various challenges standing in the way of marketers. Those challenges are the major concerns for the marketers to handle in 2010. Challenges that will most likely perturb marketers in 2010 are classified below:

1. Sustainability: After doing all the hard work in the past, marketers would be very desperate in order to make their customers stay with them. They would be planning strategies how to make their customers happy and make them stay for long as clients.

2. How to generate large revenues? Marketers would be focusing high on out of the box thinking to generate large revenues with minimum investment. They would be thinking for a greater ROI with minimum expenses and it would keep them awake at nights.

3. Would it be possible to keep the traffic up at the social media? This challenge would be on top list of the marketers to handle. Marketers would be thinking hard how to make their social media network robust so that more users interact with our social media marketing.

4. Platform to generate output: Marketers would have their eyes pointed at sales. They would be in the hunt for ground breaking ideas rather than cost effective ideas to increase their sales in order to generate a profitable output.

5. Keep up with the change: With the evolution of new marketing models, marketers’ think tank would be planning how to keep their pace up to the market standard so that they can lead the market.

6. Offering U.S.P against the best offer: Marketers would be thinking how to offer U.S.P against the best offer made by the competitor in order to make prospect/customer/client buy marketers product other than the competitor’s product.

7. What should be the plan of action against competitor? Whether the competitor attacks the marketer directly or indirectly or make a pessimistic comment against marketer, marketer would have something in back up to answer the competitor. Therefore, marketers would be thinking real to make some plan of actions against competitor’s attack.

8. Brand Promotion: Marketers would genuinely think how to run their marketing campaigns effectively to promote their brand. They would be in a deep search to make their brand value stand out among their target audience.

9. Planning marketing budgets: Planning marketing budget would be a critical challenge for the marketer as making the wrong decision against your marketing budget can ruin whole marketing business; therefore marketers would be thinking twice whether investing marketing budget to a certain business is beneficial or not.

10. Maintaining the customer’s loyalty: Marketers would be planning to maintain their customer’s loyalty. They would be searching for ideas how to make their loyal customer happy in order to build a robust relation with them.

Conclusion: One thing for sure challenges are meant to be faced and how effortlessly the marketers can handle those challenges no one can.

Thursday, February 11, 2010

Social Media – A Road to Ultimate Success

One question i.e. definitely going to push one’s mind who wants to develop social media network is: How my social media will be able to interact global users effectively? Obviously its human nature whenever a question arises, he/she starts seeking the answer. Marketing experts have researched on the remarkable success of Social Media and determined that a planned strategy make a social media successful. Strategic planning to run social media should be as follow:

1. First step to success: You must decide your goal before commencing your network on social media. You should have your target audience in your mind to deliver the best value to your social media; therefore you must have a plan of action to accomplish what you desire through social media marketing.

2. Why social media? After identifying the audience, you must be clear why would users interact with your social media? Would my social media be able to make a strong impact among the audience? Therefore, you must watch your competitors businesses carefully; it will let you develop ideas on how to make your social media marketing successful.

3. Give and Take: Don’t promote your business or service only because social media marketing is not just for you, it’s to deliver fun to all; therefore regardless of your business, you must also give technical support, advice or even free stuffs to your social media users and let them share their views on your social media through blogs, forums or other social media tools.

4. Brand Promotion: Rather than being social, you should market specific items through your social media to make sales in order promote your brand effectively. To achieve brand promotion, you must build your connections with partner websites through banners to make prospects reach your social media network. The more ROI (return on investment) you receive, the more your social media is successful.

5. How to make users feel your presence: You should take a step forward to let your social media generate respect among your business partners, potential customers, customers or friends; therefore you must decide whom will represent your social media and how well he/she will represent your business/service to stand out creative in the market.

6. Participation: Your social media network should provide a platform for users to interact with each other and share their views online.

7. Openness: Your social media network should be open for all users. Resources to make your social media open are polls, contests or message sharing online.

8. Conversation: Social media network should provide a communication source to let the users interact online. A tool used for this purpose commonly is a “shout box” for a live chat.

9. Community: One thing that a social media must have is a community. Community is formed by building good relation with the others. More the users are attached towards your site; more are the chances for your social media community to prosper.

10. Connectedness: Your social media should also have useful videos, articles or online blogs to develop connectivity.

11. Sharing: Once you have established your social media presence, you should connect with social media users either through face book, twitter and LinkedIn and participate in discussion forums to know how they feel about social media marketing. It’s a good idea to attend conferences on social media to generate some ideas for your social media network.

12. Updating the social network You should keep on updating your social media to progress along with your competitors. You can post an interesting fact, an article or a blog to keep users stay towards your social network.

13. Where does social media fit? Social media fits into the marketing channels such that what you want to communicate about your services with the users and how well you use those channels to communicate effectively with the users.

14. Success or Failure: If your social media is good enough to develop strong customer relationship and able to generate large revenues for your social media; it means your social media network is a success. Positive comments and reviews about your social media ensure success while improper plan of action to run your social media will definitely result in a failure.

15. Spend more on social media: It’s a wiser thinking to spend more dollars to promote your social media network rather spending money on other advertisements. It gives you a slight assurance regarding the stability of your network.

Conclusion: Following the preceding steps in a proper sequence will gradually lead your social media to achieve success.