Social Media Marketing Campaigns That Work

If you've read my post 'But They Like Pies..' you'll understand where I'm coming from here. If not, I suggest you take a couple of minutes to read the post and then head back here when you have the time.

Go on!

Okay, here goes;

The two important things Frank understood about marketing campaigns were who his customers were and what his customers wanted. Sounds simple. It is if those customers are right in front of you like Frank's were in their thousands every Saturday afternoon. He had a captive audience right..?

But you don't, right..?

So you have to understand how to target your customers and how to run an effective marketing campaign to attract those customers to view your product or service. Simple..? Not so.

This is the part most people never get and never will. You've only got to spend a few minutes on facebook or Myspace these days and you'll see every other networker selling their perfect lead generating systema and telling you how they know this will work because they spent thousands of dollars and learned the hard way..blah..blah..blah! Turn the record (showing my age here) over!

I recently carried out a very simple marketing campaign on facebook to illustrate this point. If you haven't seen what I did go to the facebook group LET'S TAKE THE MONEY AND RUN..!!!
Here's a brief outline for you to reinforce the strategy loud and clear. I hope this will give you a few ideas for your own campaigns.

LET'S TAKE THE MONEY AND RUN..!!! was put together to target a specific customer looking to make a fast few dollars without too much effort. The reason I targetted this niche was product based. The product was a second division social media site put together to try to steal some of the MySpace and Facebook market share. The site was never going to compete in my opinion so there was no point in me trying to market the product as superior (great functionality, fantastic groups etc etc). what the site had was a three dollar gift to anyone referring friends. A bribe so to speak.

So the campaign was simple;

1. Target customers looking to smash and grab..(Join, tell a few friends to join, make a few hundred dollars in the process and never use the site again.) By the way, the site had FREE sign up and took less than five minutes to enrol so was perfect for this campaign.

2. Teach these customers a simple step by step duplicatable system to follow and get them to pass on the same information to their friends (and do this fast as like most facebook users they were likely to join the group and never come back). I did this with ten simple topics posted on the groups discussion board.

3. Profile the group to make this strategy clear to all. I decided NOT to promote the site at all (even though I would ultimately benefit from anyone signing up beneath me or my enrollees). Visit the group to see how I do this if you haven't already done so.

4. Use facebooks viral marketing platform to market this to a large audience.

Why do this..?

The long term strategy!

The long term strategy here was two-fold;

First, I wanted to see who would follow the simple system I had set up in the group. Who was teachable in short and who wanted to work with me. I decided rather than chase people to work with me on a project with real value and one where I would be investing a lot of time to offer a no risk, simple system which anyone could follow for FREE with a small investment of time and effort. I guided the whole process, produced scripts, action plans and ten very simple steps which I posted within the group to show people how to promote this opportunity at no cost or risk to themselves. I gave them quite a few tools to build a business online in a matter of minutes and then sat back to see who would take them from the bag. And a few did. And many more didn't as you'd expect.

Second, and more importantly, I wanted to see what movement we could get from one social media site to another. Why? because of the long term plan to move customers to ZenZuu (a new social media site which combines facebook, MySpace and some elements of E-Bay all under one roof). I'll talk more about ZenZuu in a later post but for now take it that the site is worthwhile and I needed a strategy to promote it and move socialisers across the web 2.0 pass.

Marketing is as old as Adam and you only have to look in the big book to see that telling someone to do something is the worst possible approach. Tell them to do the opposite and you'll get results; Eve taking the apple, Pandora's box, the list goes on ..wet paint! don't touch!

So, I used a very simple marketing approach within the group LET'S TAKE THE MONEY AND RUN...!!! to move people across to the site by telling them not to go there, in fact don't even follow my link to the site, follow your friend's link and then take the money and run..don't hang around!

Did it work..? what do you think.

But for ZenZuu I needed a different strategy, a long term strategy to take people there, convince them of the value and keep them there for the long haul. So, I needed them to trust me, to understand that what I would show them would have value and that I had the knowledge to be able to teach them how to attract their own followers to the site.

How did I do this..?

You'll have to drop back in to find that out when the campaign us well under way.