Assuming you have already identified your sales goals and target audience, here are 6 tips to help you grow your sales through SMM (social media marketing).

1. Choose social media outlets
Social media profiles like Facebook and Twitter allow you to share short posts and link to articles and share photos. A blog allows you to write industry articles and share your expertise with an audience. Look at your target audience and consider their needs and habits. Use these factors to determine how to proceed.

2. Blog & converse with customers
Starting a blog gives you a platform to share your collective expertise. Sales experts and business executives can share their insights and knowledge that will interest and inspire their audience. But writing great content is worthless if you aren’t getting people to read it. It is imperative that you promote your blog. Encourage commenting and respond back. Share your post through other social networking sites and promote it everywhere you can. Email signatures, business cards, invoices, Twitter & Facebook are all places to share your blog.

3. Create Social Profiles
You need to determine what social profiles you are going to create. You need to consider what profiles your target audience is using. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, SlideShare and YouTube are a must for most businesses and a great place to start.
 
4. Make press releases work harder
Press releases are typically used to spread the word about company news. However you can do more with them. Incorporate your keywords into your press release and add credibility by referencing your sources and quotes. Content should be compelling and well written. Once you have a finished product promote it everywhere. Post it again on your blog and link back to your site. Also share the press release with social media. Encourage others to share it. As long as you’ve used an interesting topic people are likely to help you spread the word.

5. Incorporate social media everywhere
If you are using social media to increase sales you really need to get it working hard for you. Put Twitter and Facebook share buttons an all of your business articles and web pages. If people are sharing your content and site with others they are really expanding the reach of your message. RSS feed buttons should be in place on your blog and easy to find. The easier it is for people to keep up with you the easier it will be for you to make the sale.

Also, start incorporating your Facebook Fan Page and YouTube URL’s into your offline marketing as well. A lot of Fortune 100 Companies no longer even advertise their direct website in television commercials and focus primarily on Facebook and YouTube to where they want to drive their traffic.

6. Evaluate and adjust
With any marketing strategy there will be things that work well and things that need work. Google Analytics is a good place to start measuring success. Additional tools like bit.ly, Klout, Social Mention, Addictomatic and HowSociable will help you get the big picture.

These tips can help you create a complete social media strategy. There is power in information sharing and your social media marketing plan can help bring great success to your company.

Every social media marketing campaign needs to have a defined voice. The voice used in the social media world should reflect the same feeling your company uses for your website, any written materials, email campaigns, press releases and any other document by your company. It is important for your marketing to have a cohesive feeling throughout and all are intertwined.

In the event that several people participate in your social media marketing campaigns you need to make sure they all understand how best to represent the voice of your company.

For some companies it may make sense to allow all employees or executives within the company to participate in the social media posts. If they will be sharing personal reflections and interests in the business and industry they should sign their name to the posts. This allows for the writing styles to differ but the overall voice of the company should be upheld.

Allowing employees to participate in the social media marketing can help increase the content on your social media profiles. It is very important to create a social media policy document that outlines what can and can’t be said when representing the company online. The best social campaigns we have seen are typically those that have several voices contributing to the conversation – from marketing to sales to upper management and even your IT department.

The point of SMM is to expand your communications with your audience. Simply advertising the benefits of using your business and it’s services is not enough. Pushing your company will not get your any followers. When employees point out their recent industry findings, ask for customer feedback/opinions and share industry news it can make for a really interesting and vibrant social media page.

However you handle the social media marketing in your company keep in mind the voice behind your brand and carry that through your SMM efforts.

The idea of “blogging” can often be overwhelming for some business owners. Those that are less internet savvy may see it as a challenge they do not want to face. However if you’re letting your concerns hold you back from blogging you’re missing out on a fun and easy way to add valuable content to your website and improve your search engine optimization. There are several marketing studies available online that show a direct correlation to the amount of blog content to number of leads/sales generated. More Content = More Leads/Sales.

If you’re not sure where to start with your blog here are a few helpful blogging tips to get you started.

Blog theme – Your blog needs a centralized theme. This will determine what you write about. Typically it is best to classify your genre and write within that scope. The search engines are constantly trying to figure out what your site is all about so that it can display your site pages within the search results. Writing within the niche you serve helps not only the search engines, but can position you as an expert in your field.

Don’t pitch – The point of a blog is not to make a sale. Your blog is a great tool to position yourself as an industry expert and leader. Share your knowledge with the world and end it at that. At the most, at the end of your post, a small link to a Free Offer of some kind should be fine.

Good title – It sometimes takes as long to come up with a good title as it does to write an entire blog post. This is because your title is the best chance you have to catch your readers attention. Make it count! The title of your blog post is the 1st thing that the search engines will see. Incorporating some good keywords here makes a lot of sense.

Content length – Blog posts are typically brief, 300 words is good. But don’t write much less because what we have found, for seo purposes, content is more effective if the content is 300 words or more.

Bring something new – Your audience has a lot of choices out there. Give them a reason to read your blog. Share new and cutting edge information. Make it really valuable and readers will come back again and again.
 
Quality – Check your spelling and grammar before posting. No one wants to read poor writing.

Frequency – When you are just starting a new blog it’s very important to post on a very regular basis. Shoot for 3 posts every week but as little as a few each month can hold your readership. If you don’t post enough people will lose interest.

Share you Opinion – Share your opinion with your audience in a clear and concise way but keep your outlook positive. Don’t bring anger and negativity into your blog posts, it will turn away readers.

Follow these tips and you can have a bustling blog in no time.

If there is a market for your company, what kind of competition do you have? What are your competitors doing and is their business successful? Understanding the potential market and competition will ultimately make you more informed and more likely to be successful. Marketing online is very difficult if you don’t understand what your competition is doing. Getting to #1 in the search results may not even be possible depending on the keywords you want to target.

Speaking with someone who specializes in internet marketing consulting can help you realize what needs to happen for you to grow your business online. I highly recommend that you at least take us up on our Free WSI WebScan offer. This free report is invaluable and will show you how your site is currently performing and what you can do to improve it.

If you are providing a product or service that is in high demand it is important to keep in mind that if you’re not getting your target prospect’s business, someone else is. Marketing online you have to expect to compete heavily to attract customer attention.

As your website grows in popularity you need to ask yourself:
1. How do I grow my relationship with my current customers and visitors?

2. How do I increase my customer base and convert prospects into customers?

3. How do I make sure my current customers are happy and stay with me? If you are selling a product or service that typical is a one time sale, think about how you can upsell something else to increase sales more easily.

The first thing you want to do is build a database with contact information for all your current and prospective customers. Communicate with these people through email and social media. Build relationships and loyalty through communication, promotions, discounts and benefits. Keeping contacts engaged and happy is a great way to get them to spend money with you.

Organize a search engine optimization campaign so that your customers find you when they are searching for products or services like you offer. Then build a website that is filled with valuable and keyword rich content. I can’t stress this enough, content is king in the online marketing world. This will ensure that your website ranks well with Google if you are targeting the right phrases and writing good quality stuff.

Ultimately you need to grow and build relationships as well as nurturing your public appearance to ensure success marketing online.

Proper web development has rapidly changed over the past few years, but many of the fundamentals are still the same, but believe me when I say this, very few “web designers” understand anything about how to build a website that performs for a business. Why don’t most web designers know how to develop a site correctly? – Many web designers come from graphic design backgrounds and know next to nothing about business. Unless you can give them very clear instructions on what you want, you are going to miss the boat. Make sure if you are considering hiring a company for web development that they have a strong understanding of marketing principles and understand how your business operates.

The more time you spend enhancing your website for conversion and making it user friendly the better return you will get from any online traffic you are driving to it.

Understanding the role of your website is key to successful web development.
For most the main goal of their website is to act as a sales tool for their services and products. But your website can do so much more then process leads/orders.
 
Here is a list of things your website can do if the web development is done properly:
1. Act as a forum for discussion and a resource for consumers.

2. Engage customers and build their interest in your company and product.

3. Collect names and email addresses for interested consumers to build a relationship with.
4. Take those leads and build a database of targets to communicate with.

5. Encourage and partake in sharing information through blogs, social media and RSS feeds. Reach out to people and encourage them to reach back.

Building the number of prospective leads builds the value of your business. Creating a website during the web development stage that’s set up to grow your business will benefit you forever.

Use your website to share promotions and discounts and pay attention to what works using analytics data. Measure their effectiveness and calculate the income generated from these types of incentives.
When done correctly web development can create an extraordinary tool that will grow your business. Thinking big in the development phase can set the bring success in the future. This all sounds great but it can be complicated for a small to medium sized business to implement on their own. Consider hiring a quality internet marketing company to handle it for you. If you chose the right online marketing company, it will be the best investment you have made in your business in a long time.

Bottom line: They are afraid of the negative things others might say about them or their products.

It is true that a social media flare-up could potentially cause lots of damage to your brand, however, it is not reason enough for you to totally shy away from social media. While there is always that threat of a social media flare-up, it can be overcome—easily, if you are just prepared for it.

According to a recent article by Clickz.com, it is “critical” for companies that maintain a social media presence—no matter how involved they are in it or not—to be prepared for an issue to flare up because “you don’t control the social media conversation.”

For your business or company to survive a social media flare-up, preparing for it is key.

Clickz.com offers these five steps for businesses to follow:

1. Monitor for Brand Mentions

It is important that you monitor what is being said about your service or products, and your name. That means you look at social media metrics and analytics. This can be done by employing certain free services that exist like, Google Alerts and Social Mention.

2. Have a Social Media Guideline

Employees should be made aware that what they do on social media is displayed for the whole world to see, read, or comment on. Your company should put in place guidelines for employees to follow on social media because they represent you.

3. Have a Crisis Management Plan

Having such a plan saves you time, and allows you to go into an automatic, organized, and smooth damage control mode should a crisis arise. Also remember that a crisis management plan goes beyond just “having the name of the PR crisis management firm.” That means you should have “a detailed plan complete with employee names and cellphone numbers across your company”.

4. Have a Contingency Plan

When the PR firm or in-house damage control people are not around, you can still function and deal with the crisis if you have such a plan.

5. Build Your Social Media Audience

Successfully cultivating your relationship with “fans” or brand followers can pay off down the road—especially during a crisis. There may always be people who are waiting to bring you and the company down, but the power of loyal supporters on social media can overcome such negativity. Clickz.com points to the example of Ford’s Scott Monty who “was able to contain an issue due to the support of his loyal Twitter following.”

What this all boils down to is the awareness that everyone should have when using social media.While many of these concepts seem more geared to “big business” they really aren’t. These strategies are relevant for businesses of all shapes and sizes. Companies should be vigilant and ensure employees know they have a responsibility to the company name when using social media.

In August 2010 Facebook passed Google and became the number 1 site visited. During August 2010 Americans spent more than 41 million minutes on Facebook. Social networking accounts for 25% of the time Americans are spending on the internet.

There is no denying that social media marketing has become a tremendous way to communicate with your target audience. And apparently Toyota believes it’s the best way for your car to communicate with you also. 

Consumer Reports is reporting that Toyota has announced that they are building “Toyota Friend” which is an exclusive online social network for Toyota customers.

Toyota demonstrated that a Prius could actually alert the owner that it needed to be charged via their Smartphone. Then after plugging the car in the owner was alerted by the car when the charge would be completed. It wasn’t a plain notification though. According to an article in USA Today the car said “The charge will be completed by 2:15 a.m. Is that OK? See you tomorrow.”

The users of this social media can keep communications between themselves and their car private or share them with other members of “Toyota Friend”. These dialogs can also be put through on Facebook, Twitter and other existing social media platforms.

This new technology is telling us that Toyota understands how their customers prefer to handle their social communications. If you’re not already doing so it’s time to consider how integrating social media marketing into your business plan can benefit you.

Here are a couple of tips to get you started:

Step 1 – To get started on your social media marketing campaign you need to first determine what the goal of your social media marketing campaign is. Some common goals could be, increase brand awareness, build brand reputation, build relationships, provide better support, or increase website traffic. At this time you also need to determine your target audience and do some research to determine what social media outlets they are using. Some markets are tougher than others to gain ground in social media, but I would recommend that every business has some type of presence via social media.

Step 2 – Test the waters by starting your social media campaign within 1 or 2 social media sites. As you get more comfortable with these first attempts add a new social networking site to your campaigns. Often times you can syndicate your content across multiple channels fairly easily once you get the hang of it.

Step 3 – Open the lines of communication between you and your audience. Start conversations, get people talking and keep the conversation going. What does your target audience want to hear from you? What will grab their attention and cause them to take action? Start to develop the kind of content that your audience wants from you. Create a blog, follow some blogs, and talk about what you’re learning.

Step 4 – Now it’s time to measure your results. Is your target responding to the posts you’re putting out there? Are they opening a dialog with you? How can you alter your marketing techniques to improve these results? Continuing to hold yourself accountable is the key to a successful marketing campaign. Set goals…reach them…set new goals.

This should get you going with your social media campaigns.

As you can see from the chart on the right, marketing professionals are allocating a good amount towards mobile marketing.

Pierre Far from Google wrote a blog post on the Google blog and specifically discussed the topic surrounding making websites mobile friendly.

Here are the notes from that lecture that I got from seroundtable.com and wanted to share with you:

•Google differentiates between traditional mobile phones and smartphones.

•Google has two bots: Googlebot and Googlebot-Mobile. Googlebot crawls desktop-browser type of webpages and content embedded in them and Googlebot-Mobile crawls mobile content.

•Currently only traditional phones are supported with special useragent strings within Googlebot-Mobile, not smartphones (this may change)

•Google said they “expect smartphones to handle desktop experience content so there is no real need for mobile-specific effort from webmasters.

•It does not mean you can’t serve a special style sheet to smartphones, Google said, “the decision to do so should be based on how you can best serve your users.”

•URL structure: For Googlebot and Googlebot-Mobile, it does not matter what the URL structure is as long as it returns exactly what a user sees too.

•Using the same URL “is not considered cloaking by Google.”

•Mobile sitemaps: you should include only mobile content URLs in Mobile Sitemaps, even if these URLs also return non-mobile content when accessed by a non-mobile User-agent. 

Mobile marketing is fast becoming a crucial part of most businesses online marketing campaigns. I still lump “mobile” into the online campaign terminology because to me its still technically online marketing just accessed through mobile devices.

The important thing to take away from this blog post is that there are in fact 2 separate bots, one for mobile content and one for browser based content. If you are looking to expand your online marketing and opportunities for both paid and organic search, you should strongly consider looking into generating some mobile content and making your website more mobile friendly.

It has become a highly recognizable symbol online but few people know what it really means. The RSS (Really Simple Syndication) logo. Accompanied only by words like “subscribe” or “follow” this logo speaks for itself, or does it?

RSS feeds have become an “everyone else is doing it” cliché on today’s blogs. We assume we need one but not everyone entirely understands exactly what the RSS feed does.

Today’s web savvy prospects have become hesitant to sign up for email reminders or to subscribe for updates from businesses they like simply because of the increase in emails that will result. If you are like most people, we are frantically unsubscribing from every newsletter that hits our inbox to reduce email clutter and overload. For businesses with blogs, readership is the key to success and subscribers create a fan base that you can track and market to. Making the decision to offer an RSS feed to readers is giving them the ability to follow your blog with ease. Your content can easily be shared via a person’s RSS Feed reader, email, or even Outlook has a section for strictly RSS Feeds.

RSS feeds act like a subscription to your blog however there are no email alerts when you post new content. A user chooses a web feed format and then adds their favorite blogs or news sites to their feed. When new content is published on these sites the reader will see the content in their web feed.

By definition this is a form of syndication such as a newspaper might use to publish valuable news from across the country. The benefit of an RSS feed is that it is completely designed by the consumer. They choose their news and information sources and build the perfect news feed for their interests. Also, another huge benefit of RSS Feeds, is that people can easily share your content on their own blogs or share posts via social media and you get links back to your site in a lot of these instances.

Giving your audience the ability to keep up with your content through a web feed is a must in today’s fast paced internet marketing arena. If they like what they see they may decide to sign up for your e-newsletter as well and eventually make a purchase or contact you for more information. You spend a lot of time writing content for your blog and website. Don’t let it go to waste, make it easy for your consumers to follow you and keep up with your content using an RSS Feed.