So you have a social media page to help market your business - now what? Do you have a plan together for actually reaching your audience so they know you’re there?
The truth is, social media will not work for your company on its own.
You need to have a good strategy for brand building as well as finding and reaching your most likely audiences, especially now.
As social media marketing becomes more important and more challenging every day, use these tips to create a strategy that will get you results.
1. Identify Your Marketing Goals
Whether your prime goal is to increase followers or sales, know from the start what you want to achieve with your social media marketing campaign.
Only then can you make the other decisions necessary to do so.
Set attainable goals at the start and you will see more success from your efforts.
2. Research Your Audience and Your Competition
Beyond the general research you do on your target audience, research demographics related specifically to the use of Facebook and the other popular social sites.
Find out which sites your audience engages with the most so you know where to focus your attention.
Similarly, you’ll also want to research direct competitors to see how and where they are targeting and engaging audiences on social media.
3. Identify and Monitor Your Marketing Metrics
To gauge the success of any marketing campaign, you must identify the way you intend to track it.
This is no different with social media campaigns. Look beyond just follower count as this actually tells you very little.
Instead, monitor more important engagement metrics like clicks, reach, social interactions, organic and paid likes, and more that tell you what your followers are actually doing while engaging.
4. Generate, Curate, and Circulate Great Content
Create a variety of text and video content focused on your audience and their needs.
Offer relevant curated content from other sources to add variety and build your brand even further.
Remember that engagement is the goal when posting your content.
Post content that will generate comments, shares, and other engagement.
5. Engage with Your Audience
Once your content is getting response and viewers are engaging with it, be sure to engage back.
Post content at times when your target audience is most likely to see it and start interacting.
Keep up with comments, shares, re-Tweets, and more; acknowledge these posts.
Strike up conversations with commenters, answer their questions, offer them help, and stay active to further build brand awareness and trust.
6. Monitor and Modify Your Marketing Campaigns
As with other types of marketing, good monitoring provides you with the knowledge you need to improve your campaign.
Using the metrics your set previously, monitor the type of results you are getting from your plan and modify as needed to expand reach, improve targeting, and make other changes.
The great thing about social media advertising platforms is how easily they can be modified and tracked, enabling you to experiment with different focuses and parameters.
Social media marketing is really not much different than other types of marketing in how a campaign works.
They require goal setting, research, and testing just like other campaigns.
The biggest difference is what you do with your social media pages to get the most reach and response from your audience.
Generate a strategy that includes the above 6 steps and you should see the results you want from your social media marketing campaign!
