Social Media Marketing is the New Word of Mouth

I recently received this comment from a client in an email.

Jim and I are very "un-techy"  but found that we need to market and use online and social media if we want to survive this fast-moving world of ours.  It is no longer is enough to simply rely on traditional "word-of-mouth" style of advertising, is it?

I sent them a reply with my thoughts on social media marketing: The short answer is “Yes, word of mouth is crucial for developing a client base.”

Part of the new word of mouth strategy is interacting with clients via social media and developing a social media marketing plan.  It’s still word of mouth only you can target more friends, family, clients and all the people that they know via social media forums.

I would start by setting up Facebook, Google+,Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram accounts.  Sharing unique brilliant photos and savvy articles coming off of your main website will create buzz and broadcast throughout your network of friends & family and spread from there.   You can also use Facebook as a social media “get the word out campaign”.  Pinterest.com is another forum to build your campaigns.  Your customer base should just not come from the southwest Florida area, but include the rest of the country as well.  Showcasing your unique products and services should be the dominate marketing strategy.

I would start by setting up a private Facebook account if you have not done so already.  Start adding as many friends as possible using Facebook's friend search feature.  From there you can create a free business Facebook account (check out the video)  and then invite all of your friends to join and support you.   On your business account side you will start sharing articles, photos and videos with all of your friends.  If they like the post they will share it with their other friends and your posts will rapidly spread throughout the social media universe.   It’s a pretty cool thing when it works and your photos, videos and articles go viral.

Also make sure to create a Google+ page and post all of your business posts on it.  The Google search engines love crawling local businesses listed and it will add your information to Google's search engine results organically.

So if you have a unique product and service share it on all social media platforms.

Cheers!