Posted by Ed Loessi on April 6, 2011
Last week there was a great article in eMarketer titled SMBs Turn to Social Before Search. Based on the stats and questions raised there is continuing evidence that social media marketing is becoming a dominant force for all types of marketers in particular those who are blending social media and location based marketing .
Two key points from the blog post jumped out at us:
“US small businesses recognize word-of-mouth as the top way their customers find them, followed by the internet and search engines.”
“The reliance on word-of-mouth—likely along with the low cost in dollars of participating—has led small businesses to make social media their No. 2 online marketing effort, after company websites.”
As we’ve noted in several posts word-of-mouth is and has probably always been the best form of marketing available, happy customers love to talk and increasingly love to share via many social channels: Facebook, Twitter, foursquare etc.
The key things for harnessing the power of social media, word-of-mouth reliability and location based marketing are as follows:
- Make sure you are active in the top social media channels: Facebook and Twitter
- Actively share and promote special deals and offers across both the social and check-in services
- At each touch point offer the ability to further connect i.e. on Facebook suggest that people follow you on Twitter and check-in for deals on foursquare, your goal is to complete the circle knowing that you have many ways to reach out to a customer depending on what social platform they are using at any given time.
In summary, it’s clear that word-of-mouth is still the key driver of new customer acquisition and the most convenient form of word-of-mouth is social media. So, if you are focused on getting new customers to your physical location then you need to blend your social media marketing strategies with your location based marketing strategies so that word-of-mouth can translate into new business.
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