Most people’s perception of social media marketing is all about posting on Facebook, tweeting on Twitter and gramming on Instagram. But this is just the surface layer and hidden beneath it are layers of a strategy that focuses on target audience, marketing objectives, creating content that engages and choosing the right social media channel.
You might have already realised by not having the proper social media marketing strategies in place, it will not give strength to your social media networks. By having a well thought out strategy, you’ll see a successful increase in your ROI even with a small investment in place.
Let’s go through the five steps of social media marketing.
Step #1: Know Your Target Audience
By knowing whom you are going to target your media activities to will shape your marketing and content direction. You will need to research and understand your audience’s buyer persona – their age, demographic, location and interests. If you understand your audience correctly, you will increase loyal fan followers that eventually help in creating lead generation.
Step #2: Define Your Marketing Objectives
Different people have different objectives in social media marketing. Some will just focus on communicating with their customer, some will use it to educate the customer, and others will use it to create a fan base or increase lead generation. Set aside some time and figure out your marketing goal, but remember it has to be specific, measurable and achievable.
Step #3: Creating Engaging Content
Always keep in mind to create content that your audience will like, share, download and view. Content in forms of photos, videos, ebooks, and text should always aspire to be interesting, educational and emotionally so that it tugs at the hearts of your audience. You will see a conversion increase by doing so.
Step #4: Choosing The Right Social Media Channel
Warning – if you select the wrong social media channel, it will waste your time. Using all of the social media channels will not always work equally across each network. For example, if most of your audience are active on Facebook but you spend all your marketing strategies on LinkedIn, your resources and time are focused on the wrong social media channel. Just like targeting your audience, you need to target the right social media channels where your potential audience is spending most of their time on.
Step #5: Measuring Your Outcome
Most social media networks will give you insights of all of your marketing strategies to determine the success of your marketing goals. You can easily track your performance based on your ongoing activity over time and your campaign focused events. By measuring you social media outcomes, you will learn what was successful, what wasn’t and act on how you can improve next time.
Lastly, remember carrying out your first social media marketing strategy will not always be successful. There will be hits and misses. Learn to keep testing and testing and soon you’ll master your social media marketing skills. Being patient and keeping an eye out on trends will go a long way.
