Gies a Snog Doll – eh?

Social media marketing is not a sales pitch; it is a forum for finding your customers and courting them so they will come to love and adore you; it’s a relationship that needs nurtured and is more high maintenance than you’re used to – but you know she’s worth it.

Please learn quickly that it is a social transaction. You don’t go up to someone and say “Gies a Snog Doll! Eh?” I am still coming across businesses that use networks and blogs as somewhere they have to do the direct sale – before they’ve even got to know the potential customer. That’s right, it’s a courting game; if you remember your school days it’s not something that happened instantly – unless you caught them in a weak moment but even then that was something you only ever heard about – never witnessed.

People often say they don’t have time, so they’re happy to pay someone – this is the penny dropping moment when they realise that time is money. Can I also tell you that TRUST is money too. Trust is hard currency. Building a relationship and developing trust can take a long, long time, it’s a big investment. One of the best ways of developing a trusting relationship with someone you’ve never met is doing something off the wall, getting their attention, make them smile and hopefully laugh – touch a nerve that has lain buried for a long time so that when you hold their hand they’re not going to slap you in the face.

To make Advertising work with social media successfully you need brilliant creatives, not necessarily people that know the product or the service just people that think a little differently and without the big heavy sales pitch. People that know the right questions to ask and how to implement them – people that can integrate a campaign into an existing strategy. Now you want me to list those agencies that I think are getting it right – not today, another day maybe.

So if social media marketing is not for selling why integrate it?

Social media is a communication platform – so your Facebook page, staff Twitter accounts, Linkedin Groups, Youtube Channels… are all speaking to different audiences – they are all the disco’s you attended as a kid whilst sharking for that one girl. However all roads should link back to your Blog – your Blog is the central voice of the business – it also holds links to your website, your shop; your sales message is there but not front and centre. It’s your guardian – your parents, it scoops up all the nonsense and explains or makes excuses for all the other platforms. (I’m sure you also get the reason you are using all these platforms is that when people look you up in Google it pushes your competition off the page.)

Please excuse the poor metaphore, just consider that at the disco you didn’t go up to a girl and stick your tongue down her throat – at least not the girls I knew.