Mixing Email and Social Media Can Be a Nightmare on Marketing Street
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iContact |
Small businesses can no longer afford to market by email alone, industry experts say. They need to add social media marketing to the mix, but juggling both can be a multitasking, multi-application nightmare. There’s now an all-in-one digital marketing platform available that lets businesses conduct their social media and email marketing from one application.
iContact has added social media marketing functionality to its eponymous product to enable businesses to directly publish, schedule and track their social media marketing efforts on Facebook and Twitter , either as stand-alone campaigns or integrated with their email marketing campaigns. It eliminates the need to log into Facebook or Twitter to conduct multi-channel marketing campaigns.
The web-based application also provides a social analytics engine that enables businesses gauge the effectiveness of their social media marketing, including the number of likes, comments and retweets. Its social scheduling feature makes it possible for users to log in and input all of their social media posts at one time and schedule them to be published at a specified future date.
There's no question that social media has joined email as a permanent feature in the marketing mix. According to a recent industry report, 88 percent of marketers view social media as a key component for increasing brand exposure and reach.
"We feel we are addressing some of the pain points for small- and medium-sized businesses," Jeff Revoy, iContact's chief product and marketing officer, told BusinessNewsDaily. "Social networks continue to grow and transform business communications, yet businesses have lacked the insight and capabilities to utilize these channels to their full potential. iContact’s new social media marketing
solution provides valuable insight into which channels, content and messages resonate most with key audiences. We are providing the foundation for businesses to have more meaningful social media interactions with the customers and constituents."
The company is looking at adding additional social media networks such as LinkedIn and Google+, Revoy said.
Pricing begins at $10 a month for up to 500 subscribers and scales up to $699 a month for 100,000 subscribers, with a 15 percent discount for annual subscriptions.
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Reach BusinessNewsDaily senior writer Ned Smith at nsmith@techmedianetwork.com. Follow him on Twitter @nedbsmith.