A social media marketing strategy is for everyone no matter how big or small your company. But whether social media tools works for you or not depends on how clear you are about what you want to achieve. You need to understand your target audience and how they use the Internet to successfully promote your business. Traditional marketing methods have to be in sync with your social media marketing strategy for it to be extremely effective.
Social Media Marketing Strategy
An occasional blog or post on Twitter does not qualify as a Social Media Marketing (SMM) strategy. To get tangible results requires time, energy and most importantly, a well defined strategy. Businesses that do not have big marketing budgets at their disposal can benefit from social media. They just need to know how. Before you get down to creating a Social Media Marketing strategy, figure out your goals. Do you want to increase traffic? Improve customer service? Or increase brand awareness? Once you’ve got that figured out, make sure your target audience is online. If they are, where are they? And how effective can you reach out to them?
Build Relationships
The key is to build online relationships. Whether you tweet on Twitter or build a community on Facebook, you have to get to know people and ‘converse’ with them without promoting your product or service. Help them out with ideas, answers or resources. Once you’ve built a strong link with them, then you can ask them for their opinions or feedback. This will provide you with valuable insights and can help you fine tune your marketing strategy. Web 2.0 is all about engaging with people and blurring the demarcation between seller and target audience. User generated news destinations on Digg, micro-blogging on Twitter or video sharing on YouTube, is about sharing and having a constant dialogue that benefits both parties.
Measure Your Success
The next step is to keep at it! Don’t get discouraged or expect to see quick results. As with any other relationship, forming bonding take time. Having said that, make sure you have a system to track results. Monitoring results is imperative to know how well your Social Media Marketing Strategy is working. Know which metric will do the job for you – an ROI calculator, Google Alerts or back links to your website?
Here’s a look at some social media tools which you could use as part of your SMM Strategy:
- Viral Marketing: If you’ve got content that has the X factor and will generate a lot of interest, get it out there! Make sure that it’s ‘found’, so that it can be spread further on through social networking sites, word of mouth and email. This works like a charm!
- Twitter: Know what people are saying about you and your product or services or become an invaluable resource for others. Build a strong identity to boost brand awareness and your reputation.
- Links: Use links to enhance Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Make sure to have many links that point back to your site. Remember, links are often archived, which means they remain on the World Wide Web forever!
- Content: Ensure that your content is optimized with the targeted keywords for search engines so that it could be searched easily.
- Arrange an offline event: This brings your online relationships and potential clients into the ‘real world’ where they can interact with you.
As you can see, social media marketing takes a lot of planning, time and effort to get results, but once you do there’s no looking back! Just constantly fine tune your strategy to incorporate what you learn as you hone Social Media Marketing into an art!
If you enjoyed this post, please share it with your followers on Twitter! I appreciate it, and I’m sure those who get it as a result of you sharing it will appreciate it too!
P.S. Be sure to leave your comments while you’re here. I always look forward to your thoughts and feedback. So I’m listening… Drop me a comment.
Related Posts
Increase Traffic Through Social Media Campaigns
Social media has become part of our lifestyle for most of the internet users today. There is no doubt that social media is the new web power. It has all the ingredients that can make the web the best thing that internet can ever present. The social media has enabled us to communicate effectively and […]What Makes A Successful Social Media Marketer
The success of any social media largely depends on the way social marketing tools are utilized. In the world of social media marketing, many people have been unable to get the desired result. The most common mistake they commit is that they utilize the social media tools in the wrong way. Those who have been […]Using Facebook As A Branding Strategy For Your Business
Are your business connected to the social media revolution? If you want to stay ahead of your competition and allow consumers to interact with your brand, social media is definitely the way to start. This is a long term marketing strategy as it takes time to build a community. If done correctly, social media helps […]Keeping Track Of Your Social Media Campaign
Social media is a new phenomena but it has developed quickly over the past few years. It is a mixture of sociology and technology and it uses the people as its subject. The evolution of social media has taken over the industrial media which includes TV, newspapers etc. The era of industrial media is about […]
I have been often hearing people asking this question, “Why should I use social media?” This reminded me the time, 5 years after the Internet boom, where everyone were asking “Why must I own a web site?” This also brought me back to an old question “Why should I email you when I could just […]