DKSP EP04: 5 Steps to an Effective Social Media Marketing Strategy

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In this 4th episode of the DKSpeaks Podcast, we are going to be discussing about social media marketing and how to build a strong and effective social media marketing strategy.

With Google coming up with frequent updates to their algorithm and with the increasing relevance to social media presence and social media signals, it is becoming more and more important to have a strong social media strategy for your business. All the on-page search engine optimization factors are just not enough these days to get ranked on Google. In addition to all the link building that you are doing, it is also important to have strong social signals pointing to your sites, if it is to be considered worthy of ranking on search engines.

This has in fact led to every website owner rushing over to the social media sites and submitting content like crazy with the expectation that some of it will get picked up and shared by people and that it will go viral, sending out strong social signals to their websites. And this in turn will please the Google gods who will then rank their site on the first page. But this doesn’t happen.

People waste their time and money on all these efforts and finally quit, complaining that nothing works.

Why are these people failing?

What’s the mistake that they are doing?

Social media marketing is just like any other project. And I am sure that you will agree that you need a strong plan for any project to succeed. It is no different with your social media strategy. You need a strong social media marketing plan, if you are to succeed at social media.

And creating a strong social media marketing plan is not difficult if you follow these 5 simple steps. In this episode we will learn these 5 simple steps to creating a strong and effective social media marketing strategy.

5 Steps to an Effective Social Media Marketing Strategy – Podcast Notes

These 5 steps that we are going to discuss today is a proven method in creating an effective social media strategy. It is extremely simple and easy if you follow it in the same sequence as we show here. You will get extremely good ROI from your social media efforts if you follow these steps to the T and don’t skip any of these.

So with that being said, let us jump straight into the 5 steps to creating an effective social media marketing plan.

Step 1 – Create a Detailed Social Media Objectives and Goals

This is the foundation of your social media strategy. You need to have a detailed document on your Social Media Objectives and the goals that you plan to achieve.

When it comes to objectives, most people will go about writing down objectives like, “I will tweet 10 times in a day regularly without missing a single day” or, “I will post consistently 5 times a day for the next 5 months”. These are not objectives. Your objective has to be the end result that you want to achieve with your social media marketing plan.

It could vary depending upon what you want to get out of your efforts on social media channels. Your social media objective could be to generate leads, maybe 10000 leads in a month or, it could be to double your sales by the end of the month. Whatever your objective is, you need to write it down in your planner along with clear goals that you want to achieve, so that you are able to track your success.

Keep in mind that these objectives of yours need to be aligned with your long term goals, else you will find yourself running in an entirely different direction to your broader goals.

Step 2 – Evaluate Your Current Situation

I am sure you are doing something on social media sites right now as a part of your social media marketing plan. But it is not effective, which is why you are listening to this podcast.

So before you formalize your new plan, you need to know where you stand today in terms of your social media presence. Evaluate your current situation and note down critical and important aspects of your social media presence today.

It might be important to ask yourselves the below questions –

1. What is your current social media presence? If it is Twitter, what is the numbers of followers you have, how many people are you following, what is the level of engagement with your tweets, how many retweets are you getting etc.
2. Evaluate your current ROI for your current social media marketing strategy. It could be anything from zero to maybe, a trickle of visitors to your websites or, even a couple of leads that you are able to generate.
3. What social media channels are performing well for you? Depending upon your niche and your audience one channel could do better than the other. So it is important that you identify this so that you can optimize your efforts on the most effective social media channels.

Once you complete this step you can move onto Step-3.

Step 3 – Setup Your Social Media Profiles

Each social media site will have a different format of information requirement when you create a profile. Go ahead and start creating your profiles if you haven’t done that already. But if you already have your profiles, follow the below steps to refine them for optimum performance.

Decide what you want to include – Before you start creating profiles or, editing them, write down the information that you want to share and the ones that you do not want to. Social media can prove extremely dangerous if you do not have the right privacy setting in place and hence it becomes important that you be absolutely sure about what you want to include in your profiles and what you don’t.

Do you want to Cross Promote your profiles – Cross promotion of you profiles is something that you would want to decide on. All social media channels allow you to include the details about your other profiles. While this can be a very handy way of cross promoting profiles, you might want to decide if you really want to do that. Some business prefer not to do that because of a consequent reduction in visitor engagement on one social media site due to the other.

Setup a Landing page – All social media profiles let you add your website link. The normal tendency is to include your primary website link so that your visitors can follow it to your website. But depending upon the level of engagement that you expect and the kind of content on your website you might want to setup a unique landing page for each of your social media profiles. It works really well because your visitors will see a customized page which carries over the continuity in engagement.

SEO for Your Profiles – What most people do not realize when creating a social media profile is the fact that there is an element of Search Engine Optimization in the profiles as well. Optimizing your profiles for SEO can help you in a lot of ways including better rankings and more visitors to you websites.

Step 4 – Create a Content Plan or, Editorial Calendar

So the next step involves creating a content plan and an editorial calendar.

Social media is all about engagement and engagement entirely depends upon the quality of content you share on these social media sites. Good content has a tendency to go viral pretty fast and at the same time poor content can prove extremely bad for your website’s reputation.

Most people ignore this step, primarily because of the efforts involved. This step appears to be a very tedious and difficult one and looks safe to be ignored because all it is involves is posting content. And most people feel that posting content is about logging into your account and sharing a piece of article or, picture that you found online.

But one wrong step here could mean disaster for your entire strategy. Posting without a plan could lead to poor engagement because of the lack of schedules and your visitors not knowing when to check for fresh content.

A definite plan and a detailed editorial calendar can help you maintain the sanctity of your social media marketing strategy.

Some of the questions that you might want to ask yourself as part of this step are:-

1. What kind of content do you plan to post on your sites?
2. What is the frequency of social media posting that you want to do?
3. What method of content creation are you planning and who will be posting it? Do you plan to do it yourself or, do you plan to outsource?
4. What kind of promotions do you plan to run to improve engagement to your content?
5. What tools do you plan to use?

Social media works well if you can incorporate a certain amount of automation into it and tools like Hootsuite and Bufferapp helps you automate a lot of the repetitive tasks that you would otherwise be doing manually.

This forms part of your editorial calendar. Your editorial calendar should have details of what content to post, what date, what time and what is the medium (tools or, self) etc. so that you know in clear terms what you actionables are.

Once you have decided on what tools you want to use, you can go ahead and buy accesses, test run them and set it up so that you can start off with publishing your content to your social media profiles.

Step 5 – Review and Refine your Marketing plan

Analytics and testing play an important role in the success of any social media marketing plan. If you do not know what is working and what is not, you will never be able to achieve the best ROI on your efforts and money that you are spending.

You need to know aspects like what kind of content is working well, what is the best time of posting, what is the best frequency of posting, what promotional method is working etc.

There is a lot of statistics that are available with most social media sites and if you spend some time reviewing these and evaluating them, your should be able to refine and tweak your social media marketing strategy in order to get the best ROI for your investment.

Follow these 5 steps judiciously and your social media marketing will never fail.

Tools mentioned in this episode

Social Media Marketing tools –

1. Hootsuite (aff)
2. Bufferapp

You might also be interested in the below tools that help automate content posting –

1. SocialPilot (aff)
2. eClincher
3. Post Planner (aff)

Thanks for Listening

Once again thank you for listening to the show again this week. You can always write to me if you have any questions and I will try to answer them by replying to your emails or, through comments here or, maybe in a Q&A session in one of the future shows.

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