Social media has become a powerful channel to display your brand’s strength. Social media marketing is the keyword for creating relentless brand awareness and recall. It serves as a channel for attracting and retaining customers, new and old. Consumers flock to social websites to engage, interact, influence, and remain connected.
With websites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and apps like Instagram and Snapchat flooding our lives with updates from all corners of the globe, social channels are superb platforms for brands to touch base with their consumers, that too at a personal level.
If you are looking to attract and engage customers and convert them into revenue generators, having an effective social media presence is not an option any longer. It is a necessity. Today’s consumers to a large extent judge the authenticity and credibility of a brand based on its social media presence. Customers want to interact with brands, which in turn have online users to vouch for their credibility. Hence, online social presence becomes extremely essential for customers and companies.
You need to chalk out a clear, goal-oriented social-media plan. It can be daunting to create a whole marketing strategy at one go. But here are a few pointers that will help you begin your journey:
Set your business and marketing goals
Your goals are the primary reason you would want to undertake business activity. Marketing objectives will relate directly to your business goals. If your overall business goal is lead generation, you need to define how many leads you have to generate before you consider that goal a success. Marketing objectives define how you get from Point A (an unfulfilled goal) to Point B (a successfully fulfilled goal). You can determine your objectives with the S-M-A-R-T approach. Your objectives should be specific, achievable, relevant, measurable, and time bound.
Choose the right channel
Defining your goals leads you to the next important step of formulating your overall social marketing plan. You need to appropriately choose the social media app that you would focus on. If you are an FMCG business, selling shampoos, would it not be better to focus your message on channels like Facebook or Instagram rather than LinkedIn? Similarly, if you are a digital consulting firm, LinkedIn will be the appropriate choice to reach out to your target audience.
Identify ideal customers
Choosing appropriate channels goes hand in hand with identifying the ideal customer base. You need to have an accurate customer profile. Create ideal buyer personas to help you target the right customers. When you know your target audience’s age, occupation, income, interests, pains, problems, obstacles, habits, likes, dislikes, motivations and objections, then it’s easier and cheaper to target them on social or any other media.
Know your competition
To make the most out of your social media strategies, you need to be abreast of what your competitors are doing to engage the audience. Start by compiling a list of at least 3-5 main competitors. Search which social networks they’re using and analyze their content strategy. Look at their number of fans or followers, posting frequency and time of day. This way you not only are better able to understand the pulse of the market but also you can learn about new methods and ways to engage the audience, and this way you can tweak your strategies to include better plans and tactics to engage the audience.
Identify your KPIs
Like any other campaign, it is of utmost importance to measure the progress that you are making with each step and every penny of investment. Identify your key performance indicators. You need to clearly set in quantifiable terms what your Media Planning Software seek to accomplish. And this should be measured at frequent intervals to give you a heads-up of what you are doing right and what needs improvement in terms of social media engagement and conversions.
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