Social Media Marketing Strategy

This is a seven step guide to creating a social media marketing strategy to reach more customers and drive greater on-line awareness for your brand or product. For a business to really capitalise from social media, it needs to build a clear search and social media marketing strategy that takes into account what are the goals, what are you trying to achieve, who are the target customers are and what is the competition is doing. Social media marketing can be defined as the use of blogs, articles and content marketing, white papers, video and images to share on social networks to raise awareness to pull in the web traffic and prospects. Most Pinterest infographics I come across mainly emphasize on how much Pinterest users make and how more men are joining the network. Do you care about these statistics? I don’t really care about them. I actually find them a social media marketing applications little worrisome because if more men join the network it might evolve into something I don’t like. Choose the best platform for you: There are hundreds of social media platforms, and new ones spring up all the time. Take the time to investigate the different options, paying particular attention to the sites your customers and prospects frequent the most. You should also find out white platforms your competitors are on as well. When starting out, focus your time and effort on a maximum of five social media platforms at most to avoid diminished returns and burning out your employees.Make your profiles fan friendly: After you sign up for a social media profile, make sure to dress it up. Choose visually appealing cover photos that represent your brand. Don’t just take a marketing using social media picture of the outside of your office. Instead, showcase your business or products and people interacting with them. Take the time to fill out all fields and forms, and keep your content consistent across different social media sites.
Create a social media policy that fits your goals and your company: You need to be aware of privacy issues, confidentiality restrictions, monitoring procedures, IP protection and other legal considerations. It’s also important to give los angeles social media marketing your employees guidance on what is and isn’t acceptable, and a carefully crafted social media policy protects you, as the employer, if something goes wrong.Make a commitment: You should post fresh content at least once a day on all of your social media pages. Try posting at different times to see when you get the best response.Keep everything professional: Your social media pages are an online reflection of your company; make sure that they are projecting the right image. Keep your language and interactions professional at all times, and don’t post personal messages under your company profile. social media marketing university review Steer clear of controversial topics or discussions, and never let your emotions get the best of you.Promote interaction: Engaging visitors is the best way to grow your audience and, eventually, your customer base. Start discussions, host contests and ask questions to spur communication and comments.Grammar counts: You want to attract attention online, but a stray typo can attract all the wrong types of attention. Make sure to carefully proof all of your posts before hitting the send button.Use great images: Images result in a 98% higher comment rate than text alone, so be sure to include a relevant image in all of your posts.Be responsive: It is important to acknowledge all comments, whether they are positive or negative, as soon as possible facebook social media marketing to show your followers that you care about them and their opinions. If you receive positive feedback, offer a thank you in return. If you receive a complaint or negative comment, don’t let it linger – let the visitor know you are working on the issue. If a comment is particularly sensitive or controversial, ask them to send you a private message or to call you.

Understand your social media goals

As with any planning in business, the first thing anyone needs to do when creating a social media marketing strategy is to understand what you want to get from it?. What are the goals (traffic, leads, likes, buyers, SEO) so you know disadvantages of social media marketing the purpose of your social media efforts. For some businesses it is to do with creating or raising awareness of a brand or product. For some companies the focus will be on generating leads, increasing sales or driving website traffic. Larger companies many look to social media to build customer loyalty, increase community size or use as a communication channel. The key point here is the goal for your social media strategy has to go beyond simply gaining Facebook likes and Twitter followers. The above examples are only a few areas a business could focus on, but depending on your resources a business should ideally focus on one primary or one secondary goal. Remember if you do not have goals, targets and measures of success then in all likelihood you hotel social media marketing are not going to accomplish any meaningful results from social media activity. Use it as a marketing tool: Social media should be part of your marketing strategy; but not all of it. Use social media pages to promote your company by linking back to your website, to event invitations or to other social media pages. Create a social media policy that fits your goals and your company: You need to be aware of privacy issues, confidentiality restrictions, monitoring procedures, IP protection and other legal considerations. It’s also important to give your employees guidance on what is and isn’t acceptable, and a carefully crafted social media policy protects you, as the employer, if something goes wrong. Fashion blogs and “internet-famous” influencers are one of atlanta social media marketing the most important resources when it comes to decision making for consumers. In fact, over the last 5 years the fashion industry has been turned upside down by digital media. Bloggers, vloggers and fashion influencers hold a lot of power.
Whether working with an Internet marketing firm or trying to figure out social media marketing on your own, the defining phase helps clarify the strategy ahead. This is where all the research comes together to paint a clear picture of how to do social media marketing how social media fits into the Web marketing plan.A social media marketing plan will have many goals, from high-level goals of the overall strategy to incremental goals based on timelines and by social media tactic. For example, the goals of a Facebook advertising campaign will be different than the goals of building a community within Facebook – however, they will often overlap.This is the phase where an overarching strategy and all its tactics are laid out and worked into the Web marketing plan. Big companies will often need to include key team members from each department that social media marketing trends touch the site, and the business goals of each, to ensure there is harmony in how social media marketing will be approached company-wide. At this stage, it’s appropriate to use analytics-type tools to set benchmarks for social media marketing and how it relates to your website through measurements related to traffic, links and conversions, for example. This will help reveal how the plan is panning out. These key performance indicators will show if social media efforts made an impact. Now that the strategy is in place and the team members are standing by to implement it, (from a team of one or two in a small business operation to a team of many in a large corporation), it’s time for the hands-on, in-the-trenches action. Consistent communication social media marketing new york between everyone involved helps to ensure that the plan is followed, discoveries are shared and brainstorming is facilitated to keep the strategy fluent and able to adapt to the new information uncovered. The strategy becomes a working document, as social media marketing needs to be adaptive to the circumstances.

Create measurable targets and objectives

The second step is to now set clear targets and objectives based on the goals you have set. Remember the “S.M.A.R.T” method, so make sure your social media goals are Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Time based.Let us social media marketing pdf take the example of a business with a social media goal focused on increasing sales, then you might decide that the target is to generate an additional fifty on-line leads a month via landing pages, whitepaper or eBook downloads. If on the other hand, the goal set is to create brand awareness, then a target could the number of times your brand is mentioned on the social media networks per month. Also worth noting at this point, your goals, targets and objectives for social media should be directly tied to overall business goals, and they should be achievable. Goals without targets, actions social marketing media and activities are just wishful thoughts. It is important to make sure the objectives are time limited. For example, you need to achieve a 100 percent growth in on-line leads generated within the next six months, not at some vague point in the future. Now that you have set the targets and objectives you need to make sure you can measure them. There are lots of social media tools to track and analyse activity and quantify your progress. These tools like Klout, Google Analytic, TweetDeck, Buffer or Social Mention to name a few, can let you know when your progress plus they will also help you to identify any trends early and adjust your activities if you have to. According to experts, the industry has become “democratized” meaning that the power is in the hands social media for marketing of the social media consumer.Social media marketing is a discipline that requires research, planning, strategy and tracking in order to ensure a solid return on investment, in terms of time and money. As an evolving discipline, there are numerous concepts, tactics, tools and opinions on the best way to approach it.
The beauty of social media marketing is that it's meant to be customized. What works for one company, may not work for the next and so on. The audience -- the community of the brand -- ultimately drives the strategy. Knowing this is social media marketing course the first step to successful social media marketing. Whether partnering with a Web marketing firm or tackling social media on your own, here are some general guidelines that give some insight into a few of the major components of a social media plan.Depending on the industry and size of a company, social media needs vary. Some companies need social media for commerce, others for community building and some for b2b social media marketing customer service or internal affairs. The type of social media marketing a company engages in is largely driven by the goals of the target audience or Internet marketing plan. If you’re the driver in the research phase, meeting with key stakeholders in your company from various departments can help uncover companywide business goals that can be facilitated through social media marketing. Smaller companies can undergo the same exercise, perhaps with fewer people and outside consultants that can help add clarity. Whether a large or small business, asking current and potential clients social media marketing plans and customers what they want from the brand can also be a very helpful exercise. Some additional steps in the research phase can include assessing current social media usage to see how resources are being spent and allocated. Collecting and compiling this information upfront can help the Internet marketing firm you partner with, if you choose to do so, to suggest social media marketing that will help achieve business goals.Once research is handed social media marketing podcast over to the Internet marketing firm, it can begin to do research of its own using analytics and an arsenal of tools that will help a uncover where a brand's community lies and how to best engage it based on defined business goals.