Social Marketing - First, Find Where It REALLY Hurts

Writing by Brick Marketing on Tuesday, 11 of March , 2008 at 7:44 am

Effective social marketing begins long before you ever start the actual social networking, or before you ever link to a product or service.

One factor is absolutely essential for social marketing success. And ironically, it’s a step that most people just skip. The vast majority of people just decide to promote a product or service they like, or an idea that sounds exciting to them. But what they should REALLY do is …

ONLY promote a product or service with PROVEN high demand, one that people are desperate for.

You may be a master of social networking, but if you’re creating a ton of “know, like, & trust” relationships just to promote some “me, too” product, then you have wasted your time.

Or if you have to educate the market about why they need a product, or what it does, then you have a long, long, hard social marketing road ahead of you. If YOU have to create the energy inside every buyer, then you will struggle for every sale.

Life could be easy. Why make it so hard? Why not begin in a market where the prospects already have that energy bottled up inside, waiting to explode?

Best plan? Go to the forum communities that serve your market and see what people are talking about. This is the social marketing homework that can really pay off for you. Monitor these discussions for some period of time. Look in the archives. What do the hard-core widget lovers really want? What about the widget market really frustrates them? What makes them scream with pain?

Network with some of the most vocally frustrated widget-lovers. Talk with them. Get more details of the ideal solution to their problem. Get a deep understanding of what this market is looking for. Then either find or pay for someone to engineer the ideal answer to their pain.

Then go back to your widget-lovers and ask them to be beta-testers. Get them involved in your social marketing plan. Have them tell their friends about your new solution to their pain. Even before you sell the first product, you have a huge social marketing buzz.

When you know you have a product or service that the market craves AND you completely understand their pain and frustration, you have the ability to communicate with your prospects the exact points that will really motivate them. You’ll be able to really leverage your social marketing efforts. Your success then is pretty much a matter of just doing the work.

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Category: Forum Communities, Social Marketing, Social Networking

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