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How to Use Social Media in Launching a Product

social media goals

Social media gives you the opportunity to connect and engage with people with minimal effort and limited budget. If you are on the lookout for a creative means of launching your product, you might want to consider using social media.

In this article, we’ll give you a list of ways on how to use social media in launching a new product. Read on as we give you a few suggestions that will help you with your next launch.

Teaser campaign

Before the launch, try to think of creative ways that could hint your followers that something big and exciting is coming very soon. This will spark the interest of your audience.

Months before the launch, you can post random images that could be associated with your product. Also, feel free to use code names in all your updates in order to create a buzz within the online community.

Create a video

Social media provides business owners to easily connect with their target audience. Why not take advantage of this opportunity and create a video that is focused on the need you wish to address while providing a hint at the solution you wish to offer.

Create a founder’s list

Create a list of people who shows interest in your product and would want to learn more about your launch. Create a special page where you can direct these people to. On this page, consider placing an option where they can sign up for special updates.

You main goal is to gather a group of people who have shown interest on the teaser and video that you have posted. You can ask for the help of these people to spread the word about your product later on.

Behind the scenes

After creating a founder’s list, it is important to provide them something substantial that would keep them interested in your campaign. Creating a personalized video and giving them a peak of what’s happening behind the scenes will get them excited about the launch.

Encourage people to spread the word

Building a loyal fan base is one of the key advantages of social media. When the time is right, you can ask for the aid of these people and encourage them to spread the word.

The simplest and fastest way of doing this is by creating a clickable tweet. You can use ClicktoTweet to do this.

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Benefits of Social Media Marketing

There are a lot of blog posts and articles which stresses the importance of
integrating social media into your marketing strategies. Most people believe that
social media platforms provide a great impact on a business’ lead generation and
sales.
Listed below are some of the benefits of social media marketing. Keep in mind,
though, that these benefits may not be seen overnight. You have to put in a great
deal of effort and wait for a few months in order to see significant results.

Communication
Social media platforms are created in order to share information and interact with
other people. To maximize your marketing efforts, it is best to develop a social
media marketing strategy that would encourage your followers to interact with you.
This has to be a two-way communication.

Networking
Social media does not only help you extend your reach and build new relationships.
It’s also a great place where you can deepen and maintain the existing ones.

Build a reputation
As a business owner, you know that having a good reputation is one of the most
important ingredients to success. While your marketing efforts are focused on
maintaining what has been created, social media marketing makes these benefits
more pronounced.

Drive traffic
While driving traffic to your site is the main reason why you decided to create a
social media account, this comes as a great bonus. You can post a link to your
newest post and see people click the link and visit your site.

Promotion
Social media platforms are also a great avenue for promotion. Promote your brand
or your newest products, provide information about them and increase awareness
about your brand. You can also use social media to promote your events. Capture
people’s attention, create buzz and invite them to attend your event.

Extend reach

There are millions of users who access their social media accounts on a daily basis.
With this, it would be easier to reach as much people within a single post.
With over 150 million registered users, Twitter has been named as the 9th most
popular website on the Internet as of May 2011

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Is Your Facebook Contest Special?

Any company can give out free gift cards or electronics, so that really is not enough to hold the attention of social media users anymore. What is taking your contest to the next level? If you are running a contest, you must make sure your contest stands out among the rest. Here’s how:

Do your users have a reason to keep coming back to your page? Include your fans and contest participants in every possible step of the contest. Brands often do this by allowing the fans to vote on a winner, respond to a question, or  answer a poll. Get creative here and choose what seems most relevant to your brand and product.

Consumers are constantly interacting with social media on their mobile phones. This means it is vital to take advantage of location. Urge users to check-in on social media when they are interacting with your company’s physical location. Offer some sort of incentive such as a discount, a charitable donation, a few points in a contest, etc.  Getting social media users to check in not only allows you to generate more traffic, but also creates a deeper user interaction (physical and digital).

Would other social media platforms be appropriate for your contest? Your contest may be Facebook based, but ask yourself if the nature of your contest could be enhance on other platforms. For example, say you are the marketer for a line of gluten-free butter and your Facebook contest asked users to post pictures and recipes of things they made with your butter. In this case, it would make sense to start a Pinterest board, displaying the recipes.  Using more than one social media platform can allow you to reach a larger audience. The key here is to make sure your second social media platform is relevant to your contest.

The whole concept behind Facebook contests is to increase consumer brand interaction. Remember that anybody can make a Facebook contest, but your goal is to expand that user interaction as far as possible. Think of ways to take your contests to other social media platforms, physical locations, and beyond.

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Use Your Employees As A Social Media Resource

Say you are in the market for a new car. Who do you consult for car buying advice? It is likely you go to a family member or friend that is auto-savy. They can tell you everything they know about car companies, makes, and models. Inadvertently, your friend is a brand advocate for the car they end up recommending. This is more powerful than any advertising campaign because your friend or family member is a source you believe is trusted and credible.

Brand advocates are essential to success. Who is advocating for your brand? Advocates give their friends, families, and colleagues advice. Companies should always be looking for brand advocates.  Often, the most obvious brand advocate gets overlooked – the company’s employees. Recall in the scenario above you went to your auto-savy friend for car buying advice because they are knowledgeable about the field and you trust them. In the same sense, it is likely your employees know more about the company and the brand than anybody else. In other words, your employees are credible sources and experts in the field. Whether you sell shampoo, vitamins or windows, use their knowledge. Position yourself on social media as an expert in your field, where friends and followers can come to for useful information about your product or service in general (not just specifically about what you are selling).

When you are stuck for content to post, it is a great idea to use your employees as a social media resource. Ask them how conversations go when they are discussing work with a person they just met.  Is the new person interested in your employee’s profession? What kind of follow up questions do they get about your field? Has your employee encountered any general misconceptions about your field?  The answers to these questions should be shared on social media and used for blog content. Ultimately, share these conversations on your social media sites.

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Drive Customer Loyalty

Your customers are already in the door.  How can you benefit from this?

To drive customer loyalty, you must reward your customers. Foursquare, the leading location based social network, offers a great medium to connect your offline and online audience. Foursquare allows users to check into locations on their mobile phones. Then, users can share that location with friends on other social media platforms, such as Twitter and Facebook. Your company can benefit from these check-ins. When users’ friends see where they are checking in to eat and shop, they are more likely to follow suit to eat and shop there too!

Your goal on Foursquare should be to connect your customer’s online habits and offline habits. You can do this by offering deals and specials on Foursquare. Use specials to attract new customers, and reward loyal existing ones.  Personalize your rewards to your customer. For example, to reward a first-time customer, award them a free cookie on their first check in. To reward a frequent customer, offer them 10% off their bill every third check in.  Use a combination of different specials to encourage a growing clientele and satisfy returning customers.

You must claim your business’s location! This makes checking-in easy for your customers.  Make sure to claim ownership of your physical location. If you do not see your business listed, you can access Foursquare from your mobile phone and select “Add this place”.  Provide as much relevant information in your profile as possible – this will help inform your current and future customers.

It is likely that your client base is made up of different kinds of customers. The loyal customer, the trying it out customer, even the out-of-town customer. Personalize your specials so that each customer experience is unique!  Your customers are your business. Reward them!

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Using Twitter As a Reactivation Strategy

 

 

 

 

While Twitter is great for sending out messages to a mass audience, its main strength to marketers is in its ability to build one on one relationships.

What marketers should strive to do is deliver campaigns in the public timeline when there’s an opportunity to get the audience’s attention by utilizing the @mentions feature. @mentions lets users put the @ sign before a username with a message that goes directly to that user’s homepage.

After the user sees that tweet, they either can reply, retweet, mark as a favorite, or ignore it. This is where an intimate relationship with a consumer can begin or be renewed.

To develop a Twitter reactivation program, start with an initial test group. Keep in mind that these campaigns will happen in a public timeline, so do not flood the stream with span-like behavior.

When choosing your test group, remember that it’s recommended to use a maximum of 30 total outbound tweets a day from any account. If you have an account that currently has high volume of outbound tweets for customer service, perhaps use one account for customer service and one for marketing.

To match email addresses to Twitter users, you can import your email list to a gmail account and upload it from the “find friends” tab of the “who to follow” tool on Twitter. You can then choose to follow all the matches, or save them to a list. Because you want to keep your following and follower counts in check, don’t automatically follow everyone. Try instead to save the matches in a private list.

Also consider using customer relationship management platforms, like Salesforce, to help maintain your lists, manage and analyze campaigns, and export campaign messaging for uploading to a Twitter dashboard like HootSuite.

 

 

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