Social Media is so broad that many businesses are kind of lost when marketing their products and services online. There are many techniques on how to market your business online. One of it is social media marketing and advertising. The following are list of benefits you can get by doing social media marketing and advertising.

Benefits of Social Media Marketing and Advertising

Company Branding Increase

Increase of branding awareness to online community is probably the best benefit in social media marketing and advertising. Here you can easily promote your products and services without doing the traditional advertisement and cold calling. With social media marketing and advertising you can generate more feedback, discussions about your brand, services or even your very own company online. This promotes free publicity as the customers and prospects will spread your advertising message to other online community, friends and family members. This method definitely works faster and more effective than the old method I mentioned earlier.

Huge Traffic, Quick Response

By using social media marketing and advertising for you business, you can share articles, blogs and other content about your products and services to other content-sharing sites like Delicious, Digg and Technorati. It will quickly generate a large amount of traffic especially if the content you shared is new to the public and possess rich information about what you are selling, may it be products or services. Another good thing about sharing content websites is that they let you have a link in the content that will be directed to you home website.

Cost Efficient, High Return

Social media marketing and advertising provides almost the same result than the traditional online marketing techniques. Although there is a big difference between them and that is how much you can get in return from what you have invested within the time frame. Social media marketing and advertising proves to have higher returns for lower cost which is the basis of profiting from a business (Low Cost – High Return).

Search Engine Rankings

It is part of social media marketing and advertising that getting high traffic from other sharing sites, means you will generate more back links to your site. Back links benefit you in improving your search engine ranking. Higher search engine ranking means more visibility from search engine users which depends their choices on SERP or Search Engine Results Page.

There are more social media marketing and advertising techniques you can use to get more benefits from. And those techniques will be discussed on our next post.

If have your own business and wanted to start with your SMM and Advertising right away you can visit and signup for free at V Network.

Social media marketing is the latest craze in online marketing. It involves the promotion of your site or business through social media channels. It is a very cost effective yet very powerful strategy what can get you links, attention and enormous amounts of traffic.

No other promotional method can compare to the cost-benefit ration of social media marketing. With almost no cost you can easily obtain large number of visitors, with high probability that a significant portion of them will visit the website again. As a matter of fact, social media marketing is a very universal approach; it can make any website, not just business websites, profitable over time.

Indeed, the potential benefits of social media marketing are epic, and will be great waste if not exploited. In spite of these, there are still those who are unable to benefit from these massive potentials. Such people can be categorized into three classes; the ones who know little or do not know anything about social media, the ones who are interested but don’t know how to utilize it and those who don’t believe in the worth that a social media strategy can convey to a site or business.

The Value of Marketing through Social Media Websites

Creating link baits at popular social networking and social bookmarking sites and being able to bring such baits to popularity can get you two big benefits: primary and secondary traffic and high quality links.

Primary and Secondary Traffic

Primary traffic is the huge amount of visitors that come to your website directly from the social media websites by clicking a link you or another user of that social site posted. Secondary traffic is referral from websites which found your site, page or content interesting and placed a link to your site in their site. Such link is considered an inbound link of you site and it will serve as a channel that will send visitors to your site.

Primary + Secondary Traffic = Community/Supporters

Skeptics cite poor bounce rate as the main argument in using social bookmarking or social news sites. Hence, they claim that such sites will only provide your site with nothing but useless traffic as most of the time visitors will only click a specific webpage and then click away. Well, such claim is usually true.

Saying all traffic from social sites is worthless is exaggeration. If your site has good content that appeals to the interest of the general public your presence in social sites is likely to become stable. And after stability is reached, there will surely be a handful of users that will begin to follow your site for updates. Detractors also pay no attention to the power of much targeted secondary traffic. General sites or blogs in the same niche will link to a story that’s well-liked on social sites, because it adds value for their readers or users. This is done normally on a daily basis for most.

Primary traffic does come in very much larger volume than secondary traffic. Secondary traffic can be considered more valuable if you prefer quality over quantity. Yes, secondary traffic is of far superior quality than primary traffic because visitors coming from links on other websites bring people who are likely to be interested in your content. Such links prove that others acknowledge the worth of your site which also at the same time builds your brand thus leveraging your product, people who get to read your content and end up liking it will likely recommend it to others.

High Quality Links

Being popular in popular social sites will grant you a huge number of links. Some of these links may even help you with your search engine optimization if such links are relevant to your site topics. If not, they will still be beneficial in sending you visitors. A high-quality story can realistically gain a hefty number of high quality editorial links, most of which cannot be easily bought.

Links = Better Search Engine Rankings

Your social media marketing campaign will aid greatly in your link building and thus will help improve your search engine positioning. When a website receives a huge number of natural, permanent links from trusted domains, it builds authority. Search engines then trust it and give its pages crawling priority. If you optimize your link-bait and website structure appropriately, you can effortlessly start ranking for competitive keywords, which will in turn fetch in search engine visitors.

Doing enough social media marketing therefore will definitely increase your search engine traffic. It can also be said that these links that generate secondary traffic for you are built on borrowed trust. Many people still think that sites or pages posted in social news and bookmarking sites are just going to be a waste of time.

A new website will usually find difficulty in getting links from sites that are not familiar with it. But announcing your site in trusted news or content resource sites makes getting links a whole lot easier. Always remember however that content is still undoubtedly the king. Make sure your content is informative and interesting as well as fresh and unique.

Lead Generation always takes precedence for marketers. With fierce competition looming around, marketing teams are under tremendous pressure to come up with innovative and effective lead generation strategies to keep an incessant flow of qualified leads through the sales funnel. In addition to this, marketing teams are also required to justify their budgets and clearly demonstrate good ROI.

A successful lead generation seems virtually impossible with these many constraints. However, a well planned framework can cinch a successful lead generation. Here is a step-by-step framework which has proven to be effective for many:

Step 1- Conduct a Lead Generation Audit: Firstly, it is of utmost importance to assess your lead generation capabilities- to understand what methods have been used for lead generation so far, and how efficient or effective these methods have been. Also, does your marketing team have the scope to improve their lead generation efforts, and what skills and resources would be required to generate more quality leads.Your lead management audit should be able to counter all these questions.

Step 2- Plan & Strategize: Once the capabilities have been assessed, it is essential to develop a lead generation strategy. Plan your campaigns and build a lead acquisition model. This model should specify how you will engage the market with your brand, and how you plan to convert them into qualified leads. Therefore a ‘qualified lead’ needs to be defined, for which you need to collaborate with your sales team.

Step 3- Plan Your Communication & Budget: Decide on the channels of communication that would work best for your target market, and come up with appropriate messages that need to be sent out at the right time. Furthermore a budget needs to be drawn at this stage to make sure all likely expenses are covered and approved.

Step 4- Organize Resources, Assign Roles & Responsibilities: Define goals clearly and convey the requirements to your team. Assess the skill-sets of your team and see what you lack. Equip them with the right tools to enhance their skills by providing the necessary training. Standardize a project management policy and methodology.

Step 5- Make Optimal Use of Your Website: Evaluate the effectiveness of your website by conducting a website effectiveness audit to understand where improvements are required. Consider aspects such as clarity of content, aesthetic appeal, brand consistency, user-friendliness etc. Optimize your website content for search engines and boost traffic through intense backlinking activities.

Step 6: Consider Marketing Automation Options: It may be difficult and even expensive to track the effectiveness of marketing campaigns, if incongruous systems are used for marketing, website analytics, online advertising, etc. Having a sophisticated marketing automation tool technology, can automate marketing processes and drive efficiency even in small and mid-sized businesses. So opt for a marketing automation software that can simplify your lead generation efforts to a large extent.

Step 7- Rollout Your Campaign: Begin your direct marketing activities, implement your advertising plan, intensify your call center activities and make cold calling work for you, schedule webcasts, and podcasts to reach out to your market. Promptly respond to the needs of your target market by assessing the performance of your campaign, concurrently making any changes if necessary.

Although these steps can guide you through lead generation, it is always important to keep your campaigns flexible so that you can adjust your messages to changing market trends and demands- and this is the secret component for successful lead generation software!