Page 39 - Social Media Marketing for Dummies

FIGURE 1-6:
Advertising
on CNN.

Consider this: Promotions are primarily about incentives that are designed to
stimulate the purchase or sale of a product in a given period. Promotions usually
take the form of coupons, sweepstakes, contests, product samples, rebates, and
tie-ins. Most of these promotions are designed as one-off activities linking the
marketer to specific customers. However, by deploying social media marketing
concepts, you can design promotions that require customers to draw in their
social influencers, whether it’s to participate in the contest or sweepstakes with
them or to play an advisory role. By designing the promotion to require social
influencer participation (it needs to be positioned as friends participating), the
specific promotion may get a lot more attention than it normally would have.
What’s more, you can now design promotions geared directly to driving social
influence among people in a given network. We discuss promotions in Chapter 4.

Taking Social Influence Beyond Marketing

As we hint in the earlier sections, the benefits of social media marketing extend
beyond the core domain of marketing. If you harness the power of social influence
marketing to change other parts of your business, you stand to gain the most. You
can use SMM to mobilize groups of people to take specific actions, make market-
ers better corporate citizens, and further social change — and through those
efforts, enhance a brand, too.
CHAPTER 1 Understanding Social Media Marketing 23