Twitter Marketing - The Soft Sell, Sells Well

This is part of a Twitter e-course I am putting together and I thought I'd share some of my research with you.

Twitter and Facebook. Together they can solve some social media marketing problems for you. It can help you change consumer behaviour. Simultaneously you can do so much with it with this marketing tool and yet do it with so little. 140 simple little characters that you must master to say so much in so few words. The question is once you have your audience’s attention how do you maximize the potential from it? Enter Twitter’s big brother Facebook. Facebook gives you the ability to tell a complete story and add a video or photographs. From here you maximize your marketing efforts potential to sell and redirect people to your affiliate marketing link, your website and hopefully your email list. Using a twitter marketing tool like tweet adder can help too but that's for another post.

Social media marketing involves two of marketing’s oldest adages: The 4 P's of Marketing and A.I.D.A. Experienced marketers can skip this paragraph but for those new to social media marketing reading this is a very quick look at how these strategies work with Twitter and Facebook.

The 4 P’s of Marketing

Price, Product, Place and Promotion

Twitter is partially the place where you market and your tweets should only deal with promotion to your twitter followers. There is no room here for the product or price. If you concentrate your efforts here you will most likely be fighting an uphill battle.

A.I.D.A. is:

Attention, Interest, Desire, Action.

Using those four marketing words can you see how it is impossible to accomplish so much in so few characters on Twitter. A good use might be this example:

“I just completed my tutorial on one light portrait photography. [YOUR LINK]”

In this sentence you have brought attention and started to create interest on how you have solved a problem. Twitter is the right place to promote your tutorial, not the software you are trying . to sell. Using that 75 character post you could be selling almost anything photography related, from lighting to your book on photography or post production software. Use keyword-rich tweets too.

Twitter should not be used for selling. I know I’ve tried it and it generally is a hard row to hoe. The only sales effort you should make on the internet is after you have warmed up your audience to the idea that your product is a good value and built the desire to own it. Here is where Facebook can be used to help your marketing efforts. Facebook can warm up your reader.

Creating interest and desire can be accomplished quite well by explaining your product and promote its use as a simple way to solve your customers problem. Facebook allows you the space to accomplish this. Make your page look as inviting as possible and keep the clutter to a minimum. You can feature an article and have it take both columns so you immediately get your reader’s attention.

Desire is now built and reinforced using your product to demonstrate how it solves a problem. Demonstrating time savings, money savings, simplicity, or better results are all of the things you can do to warm up your reader and have the reader become a customer.

Action can be done in two different ways. This is where price comes in as well. I personally would direct my prospective customer to a mailing list sign up. You have done a lot of work to get the customer this far. You have written and re-written your copy, added photographs and taken time to hone your words. If you’re producing a short video you have probably spent all day with retakes and editing out-takes. I personally would not want to send my customer to the affiliate link yet. If you do, you may get a commission or the prospect may decide they don’t want to spend the money today or the seller’s website may be temporarily down. One way or the other, you will never be able to market to that person again. The company offering the product will pay you an initial commission after the buy but that buyer will be on their email list, not yours.

The company now sells more product using offers and promotions but you’ll never see another dime. Therefore the real money is in your email list. Now you own the customer and you can market any number of products to them.

How do you make the call to action and get your reader’s email address? A call to action can be made in your auto responder’s thank you e-mail. Most companies offering affiliate commissions will give you a special code offering a discount tied to your account. Here is how you should market the offer of 10-15% off as a way of thanking your reader for signing up with your list.

A well thought out social media marketing campaign takes time to build. Take that time. Use Twitter tools like Tweet Adder or Social Oomph to tweet regularly for you .Work at a market segment when building your twitter followers. Make the reader feel comfortable though the process and not pressured to buy. After all, the internet puts buyers in the driver’s seat. Use the 4 P’s and AIDA to your advantage and increase your conversion rates up to ten times. Hold the readers hand through the process and they will love you. Push them into something and they will leave in a click. Now go out and make it work for you.