If you want your business to grow, social media marketing is one of the best way to connect with your target audience. When used properly, social media can be a powerhouse that helps to solidify your brand message, create new quality leads, and increase your sales.
If you want to achieve a successful social media marketing strategy, there are a few elements we must first address. This includes creating quality content and ensuring that the metrics prove your efforts are working. We’ll be giving you information that should help your social media marketing campaign meet your goals.
1. Identify Your Goals
It’s a wise move to begin with setting your goals. You should use the “SMART” method to set and keep traick of your goals. This includes being Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely. Identifiying these five elements will give not only allow you to better understand your goals, but to understand why you’re looking to increase your social media marketing efforts.
The next step in this process is to define the “who” of your marketing efforts.
2. Identify Who Your Audience Is
It’s difficult to have an effective message on social media without knowing specifically who you are directing the messaging towards. One way to do this is by creating a buyer persona – in other words, your target audience; who you are trying get to purchase your product or service. Some methods you can use to help you determine who your ideal customer is include reviewing your happy or satisfied clients, identifying your customer’s specific pain points, and survey your customer support team. These efforts are going to help you pinpoint who you are targeting with your social media efforts and what specific topics you will be targeting them for.
3. Identify the Right Platforms
It’s often best to try to cultivate followers on just one to three social media channels. It’s difficult to focus your marketing efforts on more than 1-3 different social media platforms. Additionally, your target audience may not be using every social media platform, but rather primarily using one or two. Therefore, it would be a better use of your time (and possibly advertising budget) to focus on those primary platforms and not on the lesser used platforms.
There’s no question that Facebook is considered the “social media giant,” and of course, LinkedIn is great for a business presence. But in some cases, this may not be where your customers are.
When figuring out what platforms to use, you should be asking yourself, who needs the service or product you have to offer? Also, where are your competitors? For example, the fitness industry is highly concentrated on Instagram and YouTube. Therefore, if you’re targeting people interested in fitness, you probably won’t want to put much time and effort into utilizing Pinterest or TikTok.
Once you answer these questions, you can begin to nurture your own presence on the channels most closely related to your target industry and where your customers will be. Remember, once you discover the right channels, you need to appeal to your target audience with aesthetically pleasing images. After all, you would be more likely to click a link on your social media feed if it had an image that attracted your attention rather than one that did not.
One aspect of having good images is making it clear who you are, which is possible by using your logo front and center in your profile picture, profile banner image, and possibly on the images of links you share. If you’re just launching your website and don’t have a logo, consider using a free logo maker to create one.
4. Set Aside Time or Hire a Social Media Manager
If one thing is for certain, it’s that sticking to a content creation schedule will make your social media marketing efforts far easier. You can create bits of content in advance and share them online every couple days. This, of course, will take some time on your part but it could have teriffic payoffs.
If you don’t think you have time to set aside for creating shareable content, then a cost effective alternative you could consider would be to hire freelance article writers on sites like Fiverr. You can give them an article topic and pay them a nominal ammount per article. Once they’re done writing the article you can then publish it on your website and share it with your followers.
If you already have an established business and a marketing budget set aside, you may want to hire an in-house social media manager. Just be sure you’re not hiring anyone solely based on their rate per hour or if they have a light schedule. It’s important that the person you hire is actually qualified for the job and fimiliar with your industry.
When searching for someone to fill this role, you need to find someone who can think strategically, has great organizational skills, and who has experience with branding. It’s these qualities that will help to ensure your social media efforts are successful.
5. Creating a Successful Social Media Marketing Strategy
If you want to achieve the most success possible with your social media marketing strategy, utilize all the information that has been highlighted here in this article. It may not all be directly applicable to your business, but it all should still give you new ideas to think about.
Don’t underestimate the power of social media – with billions of people online daily, this offers a great opportunity for you to reach out to your current customers and to find new ones who are interested in what you have to offer.
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Author: Kevin Gardner Kevin Gardner graduated with a BS in Computer Science and an MBA from UCLA. He works as a business consultant for InnovateBTS where he helps companies integrate technology to improve performance. He shares his knowledge and expertise not only with his clients but with his fellow bloggers and readers. View All Articles |
