Writing about the importance of social media in the marketing of massage businesses is a relatively new idea for me. Social media helps businesses as well as the massage industry as a whole. To put it simply, social media is basically any media that people communicate with; it is online forums, social networking sites, blogs, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Youtube and the list goes on. Basically, if you have a business online either as a massage therapist or a business providing massage services, then you are looking at avenues to use social media.
Social media has become a tremendous tool for marketing. Social media marketing finds a great deal of its foundation in the concept of people and relationships. In order to be successful with social media marketing, you must include your target market in the mix. You have to be able to communicate with your target market on a daily basis in order to be successful. Social media marketing is all about relationships. In order to have your target market as a part of your social media marketing efforts, you have to do several things:
- First, you must launch an advertising campaign. This includes an official website or several official sites that are regularly updated with relevant content. An official website is an important strategy when it comes to social media marketing. A social media marketing campaign will be fairly difficult if you don't have official sites to put your content.
- Another way to promote yourself and your business through social media marketing is by offering free content that will be like "free marketing". There is an old saying in network marketing that goes "if people don't see you locally your clients will never know you exist". In other words, no potential client will come to you if you don't give them a reason to. When you give away information online, it encourages your target market to pass those good deeds to their friends and get them to spread the word.
- The final way to market yourself and your business with social media marketing is through email marketing. An effective way to use email marketing is to use your email address and corporate name in your Twitter and Facebook profile; find out what other people in your target market have to say about you, post one of their testimonials, create a contest or offer a free short course (like contest method). In addition, send your list to all their friends that they mention based on the email you send and all of your comments about them on Facebook; this is a way to let them know where you are going so that they can see you up front.
