A common mistake made by many who set out to execute on a social marketing strategy is they directly use social marketing channels like Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook and Company Blogs to sell their products by posting them to sites and writing about them.  It may work once every few times but it’s certainly not a sustainable strategy and it’s a matter of time before you start getting blocked or ignored. It’s often forgotten that social marketing is not about direct selling but rather a place for conversation and sharing valuable content. It’s understood that eventually your activity needs to generate sales or business but that doesn’t mean the only approach to achieve that is push your products directly through these channels. For example, if a company which has a product line of tents and camping gear is going to blog about the 5 tents, 2 sleeping bags and 4 other products they manufacture and directly post those products to Twitter, Facebook and other social sites everyday, it’s only a matter of time before it’s looked upon as spam or an attempt to push products at you when you don’t want them. It appears intrusive much like other push based advertising. If the same company were to perhaps focus their blog and content around interesting articles or posts on camping tips, locations, gear reviews, advice and so on that content would not just be easier to sell, but since it’s actually something of interest to campers and outdoors enthusiasts, it becomes a useful online resource for them and draws more of them to the site. If links and advertising on the site draw them towards your products, then the ones who have a requirement are likely to buy without directly telling them to. Whats the solution?

Sell your content & not your product

That can make all the difference in the way you are perceived online and how people respond. All the most successful online marketers have been able to build a loyal following because their content is perceived as useful and not because they have been selling to people directly online. What is important understand to get your content marketing strategy right is to be able to separate intent from your social marketing strategy. Let’s take a look into my thought process while writing this blog post to distinguish intent and strategy.

Confessions

As a content marketer I have a small range of five solutions that I offer to businesses and my intent is to sell those through my website. I plan to use content marketing and leverage social sites to promote my solutions and my intention is to drive as many interested customers as possible towards my website and spread awareness about what BuzzFactory.net does to as many people online as possible. The most obvious thing to do would be to write blog posts about each of the solutions and post them to various social sites and keep Tweeting links to each solution everyday but that is not how the online world works. There is no value in this approach, no relationship building, no conversation. It’s just direct selling and as a social marketing strategy, that isn’t effective.

My strategy is to use this blog and create a resource that would appeal to marketers. Instead of selling my products directly, I write content like this post here which could be perceived as valuable among marketers who are seeking information on content marketing and social media marketing strategy hoping it will drive some of them to the website and attract them towards the solutions. My strategy is to sell and promote this content using social sites as much as possible to build more traffic towards the site and since this is interesting content and not just a sales pitch or product page in the form of a blog post (alright this particular post might be but lets assume the other content on this blog) it is not intrusive push based advertising and still has the potential to draw more relevant traffic and create awareness about the business. If you have come to this post through a link I’ve created trying to promote this post and read this far, half my objective of ensuring you’re aware about BuzzFactory has been achieved. If you go on to the site to explore our solutions, then that was my intent and it goes to show the strategy works.

My intent is to get customers but my strategy is to give users interesting and useful content, build a resource, create relationships, be a contributor to content in the vertical and  start conversations. The “getting customers” will happen naturally  as result of this activity.

So if you find your business blogging isn’t going anywhere despite efforts, people on Twitter don’t seem to want to follow you and social marketing is just not working for your business, try this simple tweak in approach. Create content that will appeal to your target audience and then sell the content not your product.