Ninety-percent of marketers nowadays use social media to help build an online presence. Sales teams use social media platforms to reach their targeted sales goals. Most consumers go online to research about a product. Social media plays an important role in the success of products online.
A huge part of a brand’s success online involves taking advantage of social media marketing tools to conduct research on the market. You have to search for a target audience that will eventually turn into potential buyers. It is also recommended to examine other competitor’s strategy. You need to research influencers that will make your marketing campaign and strategy stronger.
Social media also serves as a venue to publish content. You have to listen to your audiences’ feedback to be able to publish content that would cater to their concerns. Try your best to answer their questions and also pay attention to their behavior online. Identify these important factors first and refine your approaches overtime.
Marketing Goals
You need to set specific parameters in order to attain your goals. Scheduling a time frame for your activities is extremely important in generating sales and leads in the future. Your marketing objectives should define how you will get from Point A to Point B. The S-M-A-R-T approach may be used to determine your goals. Goals should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound.
Specific marketing objectives will help you generate sales and leads. You need to have specific tracking and analytic tools to measure your progress. Don’t set yourself up for failure. Setting an objective will increase your sales by a thousand percent. However, you should choose achievable objectives.
Take time to refine your plans so that they will be relevant to your business. Always ensure that your objectives are aligned to the overall vision of the company. It is also imperative that you attach a timeframe to your goals so you will have an idea when do you intend to achieve them. If you do not set a deadline for your plans, your resources and efforts may just got to waste.
Identify Potential Clients
A business may suffer low engagement if you don’t have an idea who your potential clients are. To be able to target the correct people, you need to be guided by buyer personas. The right people may be found in the right place at the right time.
Having an idea of your potential customer’s occupation, age, interests, income, problems, pains, like, dislikes, habits, objections and motivations will help you target them easier on social media. If you become very specific, you are going to get more conversions on each social media channel you are using to promote your brand.
Strategic Content
Social media and content usually practices symbiosis. Great content is meaningless without social media and vice versa. You have to utilize them be able to convert and reach your targeted audience. A successful social media strategy involves a good content, frequency of posts and right time of posting. Content should always have context and form. Form is how information is presented. Whether it is thru video, images, links and text.
The current platform trends and the voice company comprises the context. You have to create content that is interesting. Whether you make it detailed, educational, serious or funny, it is all up to you. Posting on a specific time in social media also matters. Your post maybe interesting but if you post it at a time where no one is online, it won’t have bearing. Each audience is unique so you need to have a series of tests first to figure out what type of content your audience will like.
It is also important to post frequently but not in a manner that would annoy your followers. This is crucial for increasing your engagement. Although there is more to social media presence than just having many likes and followers, you wouldn’t want users to unfollow you. Fan insights are important to tell whether people like what you are sharing.
Tactics and Channels
There are businesses that immediately create accounts without properly researching about the platform that they will be using. There are certain platforms that can bring the most return of investment (ROI). Research about this platforms first to avoid wasting your time and money on the wrong venue. Specific businesses require different social media platforms. What worked for others may not always work for you. You need to determine which platform best fits your brand.
If your target customers spend most of their time on Twitter and Facebook, then you already have an idea of which platforms you need to focus on. Always remember that you need to be in the platform where your customers are. Other platforms don’t really matter that much. Perform your tactics on these social channels instead.
A sample tactic which is effective is paid promotion or advertising. If your primary channel is Facebook, make sure to invest there to draw more attention leading to increased leads.
Resources
To be able to allot the right budget for your social media marketing strategies, you need to study your plans and tactics. Make sure that your budget is aligned with your objectives and goals. It is important to have a comprehensive list of all the tools you need. Tools such as CRM, social media monitoring and email marketing are costly so you have to allocate budget if you are going to use it.
Outsourcing tools are expensive. You never know if you might be needing a graphic design or video production firm in the future. You also have to include your annual projected cost to have a view on how your investments will affect your budget. There are businesses who start with establishing their budgets first and from there they choose which tools fits their budget.
Other businesses establish a strategy first before they set a budget. If your strategy fees exceed your planned budget then you have to prioritize these in terms of rate of investment timeframe. The plans that would be quickly achieved should be prioritized because they will generate profit instantly. These involves social referral and advertising. Later on you can invest on your long-term goals once your profit returns.
It is important to knowing who’s responsible for your increased productivity in order to avoid overlapping efforts and confusion and. Things will be a little disorganized at first, but with the right team members and time, they will be able to execute their roles and daily tasks and responsibilities that are assigned to them.
A successful team involves people who knows his or her role. It is important to plan the process of execution. It is up to you if you wish to plan weekly or daily. A monthly plan is not advisable since lots of things may come up and you may just end up wasting time trying to adapt to these circumstances.
There are tools available that can help assign tasks to each member and manage your entire team. These are tools that can save you time while helping you stay organized.
A social media marketing strategy may change over time as you move forward. Later on you may will discover that some strategies do not work as well as before. Always be open in introducing changes to your business strategy. It is also important to keep yourself updated with the latest trends on social media.
Doing a little bit of research on your competitors is also advisable. This will keep you appraised of their online activities. It will give you an idea of what online strategies are working. Try to integrate tactics which are successful into your own strategy but never copy their efforts completely.
You may need at least two to three competitors. Research on which social platform they are utilizing. Analyse the strategies they are using and read their content. Keep also an eye on their followers and fans and the frequency of their posts.
It is also a good strategy to pay attention to what type of content they are publishing on their page. Check whether their context is promotional or humorous and how these are affecting the response of their fans. Also study how they are engaging with their customers. You can get a good idea of what page admins are seeing if you observe the rate of customer engagement. This will give you a general idea of how you will compete with them.
It is important that you come across as a real person. We as humans tend to have a higher tendency to follow social media accounts of real people over businesses even if we don’t the people personally. It is important to build a relationship with them. Don’t just preach at your target audience, engage them. This will guarantee that most of them will become potential clients.
If you get them involved regularly reach out to them, it will make them feel special. It will also help if you offer giveaways and discounts to those people who are loyal to you on social media. It is important that once in a while they get something out of being an avid fan or follower of your page.
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