Social media marketing is essential to the success of any business nowadays. Because so many people are on Facebook and Twitter, this is perhaps the most effective way to reach potential customers. However, there are a few roadblocks that are often not anticipated, such as:

• Cost of maintenance
• Self promotion
• Original content
• Interactive social media
• Return on investment (ROI)

Cost of Maintenance

People often assume that social media marketing will be free. However, maintaining a social media account for a business takes time and effort. If you have someone managing the accounts and writing posts and tweets, this will cost money. Additionally, you will likely have to pay recurring costs for the technology.

Self Promotion

Many companies also end up being overly self-promotional. It is a common misconception that this is beneficial and will garner business, but the truth is that this will often be a turn-off to potential customers. They want to see that you care about them and their best interests, not just the bottom line.

Original Content

Another roadblock is a lack of original content. If you are saying the exact same things as your competitors or just giving out the generic messages that would be expected from your type of company, this can cost you business. It may be challenging, but make your content as original as possible.

Interactive Social Media

It is important to make social media accounts interactive. Customer interaction is a major part of the goal, as these interactions will often lead to business. You should make an effort to keep customers interested in what you have to offer, and make an effort to answer their questions. Many companies fail in their online marketing strategy when they become lazy in responding to their customers' questions; customers tend to lose interest in the business and the campaign when that happens.

Return On Investment (ROI)

One of the most important roadblocks involves ROI, or return of investment. It is important to know just how effective your online marketing strategy is. Many companies will just look at the number of followers on a Facebook or Twitter page, but these numbers do not always tell the whole story. It is important to know not only the number of followers, but also how many people are actually being reached by your content marketing strategy. From here, you can see the truly important number – how many of these individuals are actually becoming customers.

As you can see, there is a great deal to consider when formulating a social media marketing strategy. This is a very important part of any marketing campaign, due to the ubiquitous nature of social media these days. It is important to keep all of the potential roadblocks in mind, so that you can avoid or get past them. This way, you can maximize the success of your business.

Anyone in the business world knows how important online marketing is nowadays. With the advent of mobile devices, people are spending more time online than they ever have before. Now, they do not have to wait until they get home to their computers to go online; they can go online from virtually anywhere as long as they have a tablet or smartphone with a connection. If you are lacking in your online marketing strategy as a business, you are missing out on the opportunity to reach a lot of people. If you are trying to improve on your online marketing strategy, there are many ways that you can go about this. However, it is important to remember that in order to truly be effective in online marketing, it is necessary to stand out among the competition. You will not achieve a lot of business success if what you have to offer is not unique and is being offered by all of your competitors. It takes both talent and vision to make this possible.

If you read The Marketing Media Planner blog, you can gain a good amount of valuable insight that may help you with your online marketing. Darren Tunstall, the owner of the blog, has used the techniques that he shares in his own business ventures, and he has achieved great success with these techniques. If you apply them to your own content marketing strategy, you just may achieve a great deal of financial success as well. The Internet is growing in importance in everyone's lives, and knowing how to optimize your content marketing strategy and how to perform effective social media marketing are key in achieving the maximum amount of success.

In order to succeed in a business, you obviously need to have a talent in terms of what you are offering your clients. You need to be able to offer them something that they believe is worth paying for. However, this is not all that you need. You also need to have vision in order to be successful. You can have all of the talent in the world, but if you do not have any ambition and do not have a clear goal of what you want your business to become, your chances of success will be much smaller than if you have a clear vision of your business's future. You should figure out where you see your business in both the short term and long term, and outline what needs to be done in order to get there.

You can learn more about the importance of talent and vision, as well as how to develop both of these, through the work of Darren Tunstall.

If you are in charge of an in-house marketing department for your company, own or manage a marketing agency or an SEO company, or work as a web designer or developer, the Marketing Media Planner blog could be a great help to you. If you have a WordPress blog, content marketing could very well be your key to a future full of more successful blogging and an improved online marketing strategy.

Learning from an expert in the field of blog commenting, article marketing, social media marketing, press release marketing, and video marketing can bring about a better understanding of the prime demographics that are so important to any marketing efforts. As a successful author of the best selling book entitled “SOLD! A Proven Social Media Strategy for Generating Real Estate Leads”, is an expert in online content marketing strategies. I also produced millions of dollars in closed transactions in the field of real estate using blogging and social media. My marketing media plan is the key to understanding content and getting a handle on your prospective customers' demographics, so that you can deliver to them relevant content that they can grow to count on from your site.

The key to a cutting-edge content marketing strategy is personalization and customization, which means that you have to let your customers know that you have a solid understanding of their lifestyle and view them as individuals. For example:

• The iGeneration represents people born during the Internet era. Their parents are more tech savvy and accepting of Internet technology and social media marketing.
• Gen Y (aka millenials) grew up with early computers and are extremely responsive to Internet campaigns.
• Gen X are sometimes overlooked, all 44 million of them. They were born from 1965 to 1975 and are currently embarking on peak years for earning and buying. They also tend to be tech-savvy with a serious love of shopping.
• Boomers are people over 50. Many online marketers simply forget to target them, but they are currently outspending other generations by $400 billion annually, so be careful not to call them “old”.
• Octogenarians, born between 1909 and 1945, should not be forgotten either, since they have pensions for spending and a tendency toward being particularly loyal customers.

No matter which generation, or combination of generations, you're targeting with your online marketing strategy, you probably know that the usual marketing tactics, such as television, radio, magazines and newspapers, are less relevant these days as Internet marketing all but replaced them. That's why it is so important that you, as a savvy marketer, build up your brand by connecting with your target audience and create a more recognizable brand with a proven online marketing strategy.