Market your products and services for Free

 by Karthik

Asymmetric warfare a.k.a guerrilla warfare is a means for a smaller force to overwhelm and ultimately win over a much larger and well organized conventional army.

You must be wondering what the earlier line has got to do with marketing. Well, marketing is a kind of battle in which the success is defined by two factors: identifying and then gaining the devotion of your target audience. Traditionally more resource spent on marketing used to translate into higher probability for success. But organizations with smaller or no budgets for marketing had a hard time ensuring their marketing message did not get drowned out by their larger peers.

Twitter can be that tool that can be used by even smaller organizations to reach their target audience and gain their devotion (or following in twitter terminology). And it is FREE!!! And guess what, larger “conventional” companies are realizing, more spending on marketing doesn’t mean more clients. Focussed and smart spending does!

In this article, let us get you started with twitter to market your products and services. Using twitter you can send short messages to masses of people. People can opt to follow you on twitter (meaning, they want to hear what you have to say). Each message you send in twitter (known as a tweet) can be at most 140 characters long. This makes it a very good tool to keep up and communicate the latest trends in your product or service. It operates in real time and is best suited for today’s busy pace.

Here are the five simple steps to get you started for twitter marketing

1. Open a twitter account (at http://twitter.com) and network with people (Quite obvious )
2. Search or target on the twitter platform for people that fit your niche, and start following them. This will encourage them to follow you.
3. Send out regular tweets, it can be of personal nature too, like what you had for lunch. It encourages others in your network to get to know you.
4. Build genuine trust and interest by giving free no strings attached information/products/software. This will lead to more people following you. and interest by giving free no strings attached information / products / software. This will lead to more people following you.
5. Instant gratification: Well wouldn’t we love to know how our target audience react to our marketing message. Well in twitter you get that instant tweet back. Analysing the tweet backs gives us a lot of insight. The number of tweets can tell how successful the marketing was while the type of tweets can tell us how the market is reacting and so on.

There is a note of caution when using twitter. Never assume that twitter marketing is all about bombarding people with direct messages. It will not only scare people off and you will be labelled as a spammer.  Give and receive. Give 80% useful information and 20% marketing your own brand. The 80% will help you get more followers. The 20% will spread the word for your brand!