About Me

Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Len focuses on helping small and new businesses succeed through developing appropriate marketing and sales strategies. Len enjoys mentoring, relishes in getting both arms and feet wet in addressing technology, marketing and sales issues. He understands the drivers impacting business results for today and tomorrow including time-to-market, time-to-revenue, marketing, sales channels and social media.

Wednesday, June 2, 2010

Why Your Small Business Needs to Look at Social Media as a Marketing Strategy

If you still think that social media is not relevant to your small business, think again. Marketers are discovering that social media represents a significant avenue for getting to potential customers. This is particularly true if your company is in a technology field.

R2i, an Internet marketing company, reports in a recent survey that 61% of U.S. marketing professionals it interviewed used social media for lead generation. In that same survey 27% indicated that they used social media to monitor online conversations about what was being said regarding their products or services.


What makes social media like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and MySpace so attractive to marketers who are looking for quality leads? After all, these are social networks, not business networks. It is precisely the social aspect that makes these sites valuable. People reveal information about their interests, what they do for a living, what they read, their hobbies, personal stuff that can help marketers build strategies for creative approaches. Social media isn't a hard sell place. Marketers who recognize the nascent customer, the one who is not going to buy today but who can be reached over time, will be able to develop qualified prospects in employing the right social media strategies.

Those strategies employ cause and emotion more than price and promotion. So think about what you are marketing and who your customers are (a typical profile or a number of typical profiles) and do a little experimenting on a social network if you haven't already.

If you do your homework you will soon find many more reasons to deploy resources to social media to help you generate revenue. At worst you will find out what your competitors are or are not doing in the social media space.