Getting you part with your money is probably the hardest thing someone can do. You have all the good reasons to hold on to your money. No matter how silly or tempting offers are given to you but you have concerns, questions and reasons not to fork away your hard earned money. Most of the e-marketers lose sight of this perspective of the buyers. And thereby they lose them. Writing good articles, promoting your product from the roof tops, announcing offers and discounts don’t fetch results for the simple fact that buyers go through various stages of transition before actually buying. Now if you crack the code and address this issue you are the winner.
There are different levels of transition between the first glimpse of the product and the actual purchase. Every level has its complexities and demands a strategy to address these issues. When resolved, the customer is pushed to shelve money.
· Awareness - here is the customer’s first encounter with your product
· Evaluation - the customer starts considering the product’s benefit for himself
· Preference - even if the customer doesn’t actually buy the product he starts developing a preference for that over others
· Advocacy - here the customer starts telling about the product to others though he hasn’t bought it
· Purchase - and finally the customer leaves all his inhibition behind to BUY it.
Now, how can you think that by simply making a website to showcase your product, you can push through this whole cycle and sell your product or service? Even the ppc or email marketing also limits themselves only to the first level of this purchase cycle. Now what? What should be the strategy to sail through this cycle to win over your customer? Well the answer is to create a social media hub. Social networking is a thing of past. In today’s world where markets are flooded with options and choice how can just creating awareness about your brand can counter the pull factor of other companies. So you have to take your marketing strategy further to get your work done.
Any company, who has a product up for sale, has a community of interest and these are those people who can take your prospective customer to the other levels of transition. For example there is a customer searching for sports car and he gets a link to an article about a new turbo technology that is located on your social media hub. There the customer comes across a blog written by the engineer who has developed this technology and also a forum post by a mechanic who has used that technology.
Now for various people giving their account about the same thing, this is the essence of social media hub.
In the past only the content developed by the company about its product or service would be available to be found through the search. But now with a social media site the company, its employees’ and all those who are directly or indirectly connected to a specific thing can contribute this site. And with thousands of touch points to draw your prospective customer to your site you can help him passing through the purchase life cycle to eventually opting to buy.
Time has changed and so is buying therefore change the rules and tools of marketing strategy. A social media hub is a place for all customers regardless the phase of their purchase life cycle. This is a place to get information, collaborate and contribute. A social media hub provides services like blogs, wiki, forums, users rating and more. It is a in fact a multi-pronged strategy to get you your desired goal -----the sales.
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