Note: Our seven sickly cows articles are a series of posts dealing with moving past the bad economic conditions that defined business since late in 2008. In particular, we are talking about marketing for an emerging economy. This is the final article of the series. If you would like to read the previous articles, click on the links below.

Week 1

Week 2

Week 3

Week 4

In my last article, I talked about the emergence of the new media. Electronic marketing is a place where you should invest your time and resources. However, it is easy to imagine that e-marketing is all there is to making a sale. It is not. Relationships with your customers are still a key to keeping them coming back to you over and again. In fact, it may be more important now than it was in the seven fat cow years prior to the Great Recession.

Social media marketing is at the center of the new media. It is all about interacting directly with your customers and the prospects in your target market. It allows them to engage with you in an open format. In particular, it allows them to post comments about your company, its products and services. The premise is that people following your social media posts trust the comments made by "real” people more than they do your marketing spin. It is a grass roots effort to uplift the winners and call out the losers. There is really no place to hide when you are using social media as a marketing tool. Comments from followers can be brutal, which has led some companies to avoid it altogether. I would suggest you take a different approach here. I would propose that every time you get a response from someone on social media, you reach out to them with a human touch, whether they have left a positive or negative comment. If you look at each post as an opportunity to engage on a personal level with a customer or prospect, this creates a feeder forum for your sales team. Isn’t marketing all about creating open doors for sales?

Take this one step further and try to engage personally with every person who follows you on social media, not just the commenters. Isn’t this akin to social media stalking? If social media followers were a private list, you might have a case. But social media profiles are there for public viewing. Take advantage of the media and attempt to make a personal connection with these people. They obviously have some interest in your company and what you produce or they would not have followed you. Use this as a list of leads. That could mean you call on them. Depending upon the medium, it more likely means you will message them within the same social media site. I have found followers to be more accommodating when I reach in this way first. The first contact may be nothing more than a thank you for following our company and giving them my contact info. Here is the bottom line about marketing and sales: people still like to buy from a person and a company they know and trust. This is a universal truth in business. Humans like to do business with someone they know.