Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook

Gary Vaynerchuk is an entrepreneur, a story teller and the CEO and co-founder of Vayner Media, a digital marketing strategy consulting firm established in 2009. From 2006 to 2011, he ran WineLibrarytv.com where he grew the business from $3 million to $45 million in annual turnover. His latest company, Vayner Media, works with Fortune 500 companies like GE, PepsiCo, Green Mountain Coffee, the NY Jets and the Brooklyn Nets to build their brands through social networks. He is the author of New York Times bestsellers Crush It! and The Thank You Economy. Gary Vaynerchuk immigrated from Russia to the United States in 1978 and is a graduate of Mount Ida College in Newton, MA.

Professional boxing is the perfect metaphor for doing business in the social media age. Prizefighters don't walk into the ring and immediately go for the knockout punch. Instead, they first deliver a series of well-planned jabs to set their opponent up. They work at getting the lead-up jabs working so their right hook will then connect when it is unleashed.

This is how you should approach marketing in the digital age as well. Instead of going for an immediate sale the first time a prospect gets to hear about your brand, you should first build the relationship by providing high-quality micro-content with no strings attached. That's the equivalent of a prizefighter's "jab." Once you've delivered a series of jabs, you can then present them with an alluring offer (your "right hook") to buy something you sell. If you've engaged them intelligently, they will then respond to your offer.

businesses today aren't working on perfecting their jabs nearly enough. If you can be a little more patient and distribute stories and content people like using social media tools, your subsequent attempts to make sales will be far more productive.

1. How to market in the social media era of business. Almost everyone carries a mobile phone today and if you look around, you'll find that around half the time people are using their phones they are on social media. That fundamentally alters the dynamics of marketing in the digital age. Social is not only cannibalizing traditional marketing, it's cannibalizing digital media too. Your target market is now mobile — and you'd better be too if you want to have any chance of reaching prospective customers.

2. How to make jab-jab-jab-right-hook work. Every social media platform is different and has its own strengths and weaknesses. To succeed in social media marketing, learn how to use each platform to best effect to deliver the jabs you need. Specifically:

3. Putting it all together — The "Holy Trinity" of social media marketing. To market successfully using social media, three elements are needed — you must have great micro-content placed astutely within the most appropriate context which is then amplified by intense, consistent 24/7 effort. The combined impact of those three factors really brings social marketing full circle because they have always been the formula for winning in any business in any era. Don't leave home without them.