In this digital era, social media marketing has become an essential tool for the success of any business. In the past few years, social media has changed the way businesses communicate with their customers and the general public. It has been seen that 27% of total time spent by people online is devoted to social media. This has made social media a powerful medium for brands and marketers to reach out to their customers.
About 93% of marketers admit that they use social media to promote their business. While everyone knows the basics about the most popular social media – Facebook, Twitter, Google+, YouTube, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Vine, Instagram and others, there is much more to them than simply creating a buzz. Social media platforms have evolved tremendously since their inception and the viewers have become more knowledgeable. You must know how to take proper advantage of all the built-in features of each platform for your marketing efforts to succeed.
But before you jump into social media marketing, here are 10 essential steps that will guide you in planning out your social media strategy and help you to connect with your customers successfully.
1. Create a solid brand identity based on your values and vision, and weave a compelling story around it
Who doesn’t like a good story? Consumers today are sophisticated and smart and want meaningful information. If they get that, they’ll connect instantly with a brand. For this, your story must be relevant, consistent and clear and must be woven around the values and theme you want to convey to your audience. They become your brand’s identity markers which your audience latches on to.
The article Your Brand Narrative in TalentZoo.com suggests, “When writing a story for your brand, consider what you hope to accomplish when the story is finished. It’s important that you create brand narratives that buttress what you want consumers to feel about your product.”
This is the most important step in the marketing of any brand. A clearly developed brand identity will go a long way in engaging your customers. You have to ask yourself these questions:
* What is your theme and the core values of your brand?
* What message do you want to convey? Does your brand improve people’s lives?
* Who is your target audience?
* How your brand started and what hardships you had to face along the way?
* How can you incorporate all this into the story of your brand?
* What message do you want to convey? Does your brand improve people’s lives?
* Who is your target audience?
* How your brand started and what hardships you had to face along the way?
* How can you incorporate all this into the story of your brand?
Remember, your narrative should be compelling and have an emotional touch which your consumers can relate to and it should be “bite-sized” which they can easily digest. It should also be easily sharable on multiple social media platforms.
2. Identify your target audience
Many businesses commit the mistake of arbitrarily deciding their target audience. Marketing targeted towards such an audience will be a wasted effort. Although everyone wants to reach as many people as possible, it will take a lot of time and money. Instead, if you define a target audience who will be interested in your products and focus your efforts on them, it will help you to make optimum use of your resources.
Here’s how you should go about it:
* First determine what is unique about your product or service, why should people buy it from you and whom you want to sell it to.
* Once you have answers to that, do some research about your industry, market, competition and potential customers.
* Focus on your primary market and develop your customer profile based on demographic information (gender, age, location, marital status, income etc.) and physiographic information (hobbies, interests, lifestyles, behaviors etc.).
* Find out which websites and social networks they usually frequent and how they do it. This will help you to deliver your message more effectively.
* Keep yourself updated on the latest industry and market trends and monitor the situation by tracking website visits, clicks, shares, information requests, sales and such things.
* Once you have answers to that, do some research about your industry, market, competition and potential customers.
* Focus on your primary market and develop your customer profile based on demographic information (gender, age, location, marital status, income etc.) and physiographic information (hobbies, interests, lifestyles, behaviors etc.).
* Find out which websites and social networks they usually frequent and how they do it. This will help you to deliver your message more effectively.
* Keep yourself updated on the latest industry and market trends and monitor the situation by tracking website visits, clicks, shares, information requests, sales and such things.
3. Define and set clear business goals
The next essential step now is to have a clear strategy for social media marketing. If you want to generate leads and drive sales from social media, you need a well defined digital strategy that incorporates social networks.
You need to set goals based on the following factors:
* At what rate do you want to grow your subscribers, followers or fans across various networks?
* How many comments and shares do you want to generate for each network?
* Based on your social activity, how much traffic, purchases or other engagement would you want?
* You must take the S.M.A.R.T. approach for your objectives – make them Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Time-bound.
* You can measure your brand success with each social media and adjust your approach accordingly.
* How many comments and shares do you want to generate for each network?
* Based on your social activity, how much traffic, purchases or other engagement would you want?
* You must take the S.M.A.R.T. approach for your objectives – make them Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Time-bound.
* You can measure your brand success with each social media and adjust your approach accordingly.
4. Find and use the platforms that your target audience is using
Social media is the cheapest and most effective way to reach out and influence your target customers. But how can you reach them? For this, you need to first identify which social platforms your target audience is using and start using them. Do some research and find out the social media platforms where more of your customers can be found.
Remember, each social network has different user demographics and you must choose the networks based on your potential customers.
For example:
* Facebook is the most popular social network with 67% of internet users using it. 60% of Facebook users are women.
* 53% of Twitter users are men and 47% are women. 74% of Twitter users are between 15 to 25 years of age.
* Pinterest is predominantly used by women while Google+ is mostly used by men.
* You have to decide your approach based on your target audience.
* Facebook is the most popular social network with 67% of internet users using it. 60% of Facebook users are women.
* 53% of Twitter users are men and 47% are women. 74% of Twitter users are between 15 to 25 years of age.
* Pinterest is predominantly used by women while Google+ is mostly used by men.
* You have to decide your approach based on your target audience.
5. Understand how the social media platforms work
In your social media marketing, you will be using several different social media platforms. Here you will post content and interact with your customers. Each platform has its own unique rules, benefits and drawbacks. It is very important to understand how each platform works, what is the difference between them and how to use each one to make your marketing efforts successful.
Each social media platform has a different way in which you can present your content and you have to restructure it to suit each platform. Content categories include blogs, social networks, microblogs, social bookmarks, photo sharing and video sharing. Each of these platforms caters to a different set of audience which you need to keep in mind while devising your e-marketing plan.
For instance Twitter is a microblogging site, YouTube is a video sharing site, Google+ and Facebook are social networks and so on. So Twitter which is restricted to 140 characters, is good for press or keeping your audience up-to-date. In comparison, Facebook is good for building personal relationships with customers through posts and videos. Google+ connects you to all the Google services and also has hangouts for conferencing and active communities for sharing.
Using these social media platforms properly will go a long way increasing customer engagement and strengthening your brand.
6. Integrate social media with WordPress
As you know, social networks such as Facebook and Twitter provide tremendous opportunities to make your brand reach out to thousands of people in a flash. Just like the search engine traffic, social media traffic is also huge but to get the advantage of this traffic you need to build up your presence in the social media and also make it easy for users to share your content with others.
The best way to do this is to integrate various social media networks into your website. For your social strategy to work, you must at least integrate the three most popular platforms Facebook, Twitter and Google+ into your website but you can add others too – those where your potential customers tend to hang out more.
Some social media buttons come built into the website template, but most WordPress users install plugins that automatically embed sharing buttons/links on your website page. There are a lot many social media plugins available that will enable you to share your article on multiple networks by way of sharing buttons, follow buttons, comments, widgets etc.
Of course, you can also integrate social media manually. Though tedious, it will give you more control over the services that appear on your website.
7. Create a schedule for your posts and updates
Once you have created a post you want to publish, you select the social media networks where you want to post them. Now you have the option to post it immediately or to schedule it to be posted later. Various free, low-cost or premium social media management tools such as Hootsuite or Buffer help you to schedule your posts for each platform in such a way that they produce the maximum effect.
Creating a content schedule will help you to manage your content effectively and save your time and resources in the long run. It will help you to spread out your content over a period of time and keep your readers engaged, increasing their interactions and involvement.
8. Automate social media efforts wherever needed
Many times, social media tasks are repetitive, take up much of your time and you have to juggle everyday to complete them. It is only natural that you go in for automation. Scheduling of posts on social media as mentioned above is one example. You can also opt for auto-responder emails in case of certain site interactions or automate your video postings. Using plugins and widgets in your blog is also automation. This way you will save our time and energy, only take care you don’t spam.
9. Use social media analytics for insights
Social media analytics is a powerful tool that gives you an idea about brand awareness based on audience interactions and behavior across different social media networks. Analytics give you data about your social media activities and you can draw insights from this data to manage your social media marketing effectively.
Several free, low-cost or premium social media analytics tools are available that give you clear insights about your social media activities. Some of the popular free analytics tools available include Google Analytics (with its new social reporting feature), Facebook Insights, Twitter Analytics and SumAll.
Analytics will help you to measure your business’s performance on social media by collecting data and understanding the trends, opinions, attitudes and preferences of your consumers that will help you to predict their behavior and make smart decisions based on them.
10. Turn insights from analytics into actions and profit
Once you get audience feedback and analytics report, you can use them to adjust your tactics for the current on-going social media campaigns and determine the course of your future campaigns. It is not as if everything will work ideally for the first time. If you find that some aspects of your strategy are not working well, change your tactics and introduce some new changes which you think will work better.
This will improve your marketing efficiency and give you better results. It will increase your ROI which is the bottom line for determining the success of your digital marketing strategy.
To summarize
The above mentioned elements are essential for any business to create an effective and profitable social media marketing strategy. Most important is creating a strong identity for your brand based on your values and vision for your company. Next is identifying your target audience, people who will respond and interact positively to your content. Higher the user engagement, higher is your brand lift which will ultimately help to generate sales.
Well, these two are essentially the main pillars of any social media marketing strategy followed by other essentials, not that they are any less important. However, no social media strategy is carved in stone. Once you start walking down the social media path, after taking care of the basics, you can make necessary changes to your strategy along the way.
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