Tips for being Successful Social Marketers
The phrase ‘to market,’ when taken as a verb, goes by the definition ‘to promote or advertise something.’ This ‘something’ can be anything, a service, a product a person or even an idea – the range is endless these days. The action of ‘marketing’ most often takes place in a physical space known as the market, which not coincidentally is the same word in the form of a noun.
In simpler times, a marketplace would be a physical space where goods and services were exchanged between a producer and a consumer for an agreed upon form of payment. The consumer would come, look at what the producers were offering and would buy on a need based basis. However, rapid industrialization has brought the modern world an increased amount of choice and products available in the market. Furthermore, the information revolution has made consumers more aware of what kind of products appeal to them and has changed the dynamics of the engagement between the producer and the consumer..
Going back to the beginning, every sentence has a verb, an action and a subject. The subject here is the person who is doing the marketing. A successful marketer has various qualities and tendencies which make for a perfectly constructed sentence in the world of marketing. Here are some qualities that some of the more successful people in the realm of social marketing tend to have:
1) Looks matter
The first impression is the, for lack of a better explanation, the first impression. It may not be important in other matters, but when it comes to marketing, the idea of selling something through the art of persuasion, the first impression is vital. As mentioned above, the place where exchanges and the traditional market space has evolved. Even if a social marketer is not a direct producer, he or she comes with the package.
The package is a very important here because it’s not merely the product that a social marketer sells – they sell themselves too. So whether it’s a seminar, a door-to-door salesman, a tele-operator or a person who is operating behind a computer screen when it comes to marketing, looks do matter. It’s important to realize that as far as ‘looks’ are concerned, they are not limited to physical attributes.
Looks has everything to do with the senses, a marketer goes about successfully selling whatever it is they are selling by giving the potential consumer the right feel of it. So sometimes this could mean wearing a tie. Other times this could mean knowing how to use the right words with the right body language while maintaining a specific facial expression. When sending an email, the structure of the email matters as well as its language. To be more precise, how a social marketer presents themselves along their product is profoundly important.
2) Believe
When a person is making a sales pitch, if they don’t believe in the value of it themselves, it will not be very successful. Potential consumers will pick up on that feeling, even if it is not laid out on the table. While marketing is all about the art of convincing, what it often overlooked is that the marketer has to truly convince themselves first and foremost. If you do not believe in the product you are trying to sell, chances are others will not either. So in this matter it’s important to truly comprehend the value of your product before trying to convince another person to buy it.
3) Pick your battles
While many marketers primary focus is on making as many successful pitches, what separates great marketers from average ones is that they realize the value of picking a battle. A good marketer knows what is worth spending time on. This comes with a collection of skills that are gained simply through practice and experience: being able to read body language and reading between the lines while engaging with a potential customer.
Sometimes, no matter how good the marketing it, it is not delivered to the right person and is a lost cause. People will only buy and show interest in the things that they truly desire. If more marketers realized this, a lot of valuable time and effort would not be wasted on a lost cause.
4) There is no right answer
As mentioned above, the dynamics of the world have drastically changed, not just in terms of marketing but in other ways as well. It is no longer simple and clear cut, everything has become interconnected with the process of globalization. Marketing is also a part of the evolutionary process that continuously takes place.
Before the internet revolution, marketing was restricted to off-line interaction with the help of advertising and such, and that is what worked for that time. Now, social marketing is becoming popular across the world for both local and international businesses and is being seen as the latest trend. All of these various methods tend to mix with each other and be experimented with to bring about interesting results in the world of marketing.
Most successful marketers will talk about how they try to have fun with their job by being inspired, creative and always being up for trying new things. It sounds a bit like a party but sometimes experimenting and having fun while you do so will bring about results that surprise you and everything else, in both good ways and bad. Marketing is not restricted to that.
For the most part, social marketing is all about trying. Trying to figure out your audience, who would be your ideal customer and finding them, trying not to try so hard and trying to enjoy what you do.