One of the staples of online marketing is social media marketing. No business, big or small, can ignore it. It is used avidly by all businesses to increase their following, generate leads and get them converted to higher sales number. But becoming a social media marketing is no easy feat. A difficult and challenging task; it takes focus, determination and a vision of the bigger picture to succeed. If you have all these ingredients; we assist you in your endeavor by giving you some vital guidelines to ace it in record time. Stay hooked!
- A clear vision
The very first thing you need is a clear vision without which everything will fall apart. This implies brainstorming with your team and specifying what you need and want to achieve from social media. Goals could be like increasing your brand awareness, increasing and sustaining website traffic and increasing the website stickiness and building strong engagement with your audience. All these are strong goals that make social media, a strong supportive measure for your website.
- Build a solid plan and strategy
It is again a crucial step which might take a couple of days. Here, you and your team come up with all kinds of ideas and strategies and how to pan it out in the social media. Here, you need to decide on your target audience which may be of a few different types and might need segmentation later. Knowing your customer profile is important as this can help you create killer and specific content that caters to their needs and impresses them to no end. Knowing your target audience is simply vital for success. ‘
Once you have decided on your target audience; then you need to look at social media platforms and decide which would serve you best. For instance, Facebook has higher female demography than males while Pinterest has over 80% of its users as female. Knowing your target audience will help you choose the right platform. It is always more effective to focus on just two or three social platforms instead of all.
- Create a content calendar
Next, you must chalk out a content calendar. While doing so, you must also check out at what your competitors are doing and what is working for them. Tools like Locowise Benchmarking can be used for the purpose. Based on this create a calendar that ensures regular content stream which resonates with your audience needs and demands.
- Chalk out a plan for buy-ins
In business, numbers are everything. It is true for social media as well. Thus, it makes business sense to buy your reputation on social media. The need and the effect of this can become apparent of you get a report created which shows how social media is affecting the company’s sales over the next couple of years. This also helps you build a clear social media plan and its potential success. If you align these goals with your business goals; you can never go wrong.
- Define and set clear content rules
Creating specific content is no mean feat. It is much more than just setting a calendar and regular posting. You must be crystal clear about what your content must have and what it should not have. Creating a set of rules and guidelines for it would make your task much easier. Few suggestions that have proven effective are:
- All the content should be informative, helpful and shareable.
- The content should have something special that flaunts your personality and goes beyond selling your product and services to the audience. The connection and experiences should assume center stage.
- Use content to communicate and engage with your audience. It should listen to them more than promoting your sellable items. For it, you need to make your content actionable for them like posting their comments, experiences, asking you more information, etc.
You can add more guidelines based on your goals and targets.
- Exploit images and video marketing
The success of visual content on social media needs no testing. Exploit it by creating visual posts, incorporating images with content and even imbibing video content marketing. It is bound to attract success faster.
- Ensure superb customer service
You are bound to have your audience interacting with you and you must be ready to provide top-notch service here. Respond to the interactions as fast as possible. Bringing in automation here can also achieve fantastic results. But you must have a solid plan here.
Wrapping up
With all these in place, all you need to do is to work on the way to measure your metrics like the number of shares, click-throughs, conversion rates, follower growth, etc. and how you would be reporting the data. Now, you are ready to go and the success can even take you by surprise! Be prepared!
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