Social Media Marketing is now an essential component of any business’s marketing plan. Anyone with a product or service that needs promoting can turn to smm panel to introduce, share, gain feedback, engage with consumers and ultimately Sell. Ask any business owner, what or who are your best quality leads and they’ll likely say ‘referrals’. Referrals are generated from one person sharing their experience with another person within their SOCIAL circle.
And this is the power of Social Media Marketing. By placing yourself or your business in a social space you increase your chance of receiving more business due to someone finding, searching for, reading about or directly being referred to you. But like any marketing platform there are always certain principles to adhere to and pitfalls to avoid. In this article we’re focusing on the 4 steps to success in Social Media Marketing. Any well planned marketing campaign must begin with the question, who are we targeting? If you are an accountant and you market yourself to teenagers how successful will your campaign be? You have to know who is likely to want or even better; NEED your product or service.
Once you work out who you’re targeting, EVERYTHING in your marketing material, whether online or offline must be in total alignment with this target market. This includes the fonts used, images, language style, colours, offers and overall psychology behind your campaign. Each of the four main Social Media websites lend themselves to different marketing opportunities. Depending on the type of campaign you plan to initiate will determine which Social website will be most suitable. The four most popular Social websites are Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn and Twitter. If you plan to use all four sites to market your product or service, it’s essential to have a thorough understanding of each to ensure your campaign will be successful.
Without an offer or incentive a Social marketing campaign falls under the category of ‘branding’. And how can you measure branding? You can’t. A successful marketing campaign either online or offline should be measurable. If you put ‘x’ amount of time or money into a campaign it should return a measurable results in dollar terms or leads created.
Qualify – not everyone that comes across your offer will be qualified. In addition to needing the money to pay for your product or service, they must also be motivated to take action today (or whichever timeframe suits your business model). A successful Social Marketing campaign must have one or more strategies in place to ensure the target market follows your sales process.
What does your marketing funnel look like for each strategy for each Social Media website? Will you have one strategy that simply triggers interest in the prospect by having them visit your website? Will you have another strategy that goes right for the sale? What about an email marketing strategy that allows the client time to build up trust and motivation to purchase your product or service? Will you have a follow up telemarketing service to increase the conversion rates of leads that come through?
