As per the recent studies on Social media marketing methods, around 83 percent of marketers and promoters call social media as a vital tool for business promotion. Today’s marketers are seen getting lured to different social media sites like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, blogs, etc. for their business marketing.
As more and more businesses are incorporating social media strategies for their marketing purposes, hence a need to stress on creating your specific social media strategy has become important. Without having a winning strategy, you are more likely to fall down in your efforts of social media marketing. Creating your own social media strategy could be a time consuming business as it entails comprehensive research, investigative plans and ideas. The below is the list of steps, which you need to consider while chalking out your winning social media strategy.
Define your goal
The basic step is to define your goal. Do you have a goal to create brand awareness, build a buzz, make your own email database, boost your conversions, generate leads, increase the web traffic, and generate more inbound links or anything else? So, whatever is your goal, you are supposed to clearly define it and then jump to chalk out a strategy to achieve this objective.
Carry out the market analysis
You are supposed to know your target market property and then move ahead to make a strategy to reach out your targeted audience. For this you need to research a lot about things like trends, requirements, nature and social activities pertaining to your target market. If you have a well established email database then with the help of some effective tools you can search out your target audience. The tools include Twitter’s follower tool, Facebook Friend Finder, Rapleaf, and Flowtown.
Lay out a proper Foundation
The next step is to lay out a foundation for your marketing campaign. This encompasses the kind of message you desire to showcase about your business, which can attract your target audience. Decide the kind of design you are interested in executing, the color supplementing your logo as per your company’s brand, etc. Also, you need to determine your copywriting maximizing keyword exposure for your company.
Check the networks
Among the different social networking platforms, you need to wisely decide the one which is competent to give maximum amount of ROI for your marketing goal. There are many sites beyond Twitter and Facebook, which you could consider your business promotion. If you hail from music industry, think of considering platforms like Reverbnation and Plannermix. Also, decide the number of social networks in which you want to remain active for your business promotion.
Decide your content
Content is an important step while chalking out the social media marketing strategy. Check which content could be more attractive for your target audience. Decide upon the various available options including personal text content, videos, pictures, blogs, podcasts, trivia, questions, etc. Also, you need to decide upon the stages in which you are going to use any particular content. You can build an editorial calendar for this to make this task simple.
Ways of integration
This step is about deciding the ways to integrate the social media with your current marketing strategy. It is imperative to exploit all the major media outlets at the optimum level for better results. This could include putting social media links on your site, emails, newsletters, ads, etc.
The campaign management
Effectively managing your marketing campaigns plays an important role in getting success. You need to decide on things like, who is going to manage your campaign, who will be doing the posts, who will do the blogging, etc. Secondly, whether you will have one person doing everything or will network with a team for these jobs? Also, you need to decide upon the bookmarking sites for your campaign. Lastly, you need to decide the ways you are going to measure the stats – will it be manual or via any tool like Hootsuite. These are few vital questions, which you need to answer while managing your campaign.
Work out the cost
Though using a number of social media strategies comes for free, however, you need to allocate a budget for professionals accomplishing these things for you. Also, decide between the two options whether you are looking out to hire an in-house team for these tasks or simply want to outsource them. Secondly, you need to define the time frame for which you want results for your social media marketing strategy. So, depending upon these factors, your cost would be calculated.
Final word
These are some of the important steps, which you need to consider while devising a winning social media strategy for your business. You are supposed to give all due attention to above discussed steps in order to reap the benefits from your social media marketing strategy.
Know The Guest Author
Alyssa is a journalist and blogger. She is a contributor to several sites such as Natures One.