Social media should not be an after thought when developing your business or organization’s marketing strategy. Instead it needs to be an integral part of all your various marketing efforts.
The first component of developing a marketing strategy (with or without social media) is defining your target audience. You have to know who you are speaking to in order to provide them with meaningful information.
With our focus on social media and marketing, you need to define your overall objective.
- What goals do you hope to accomplish with your social media presence? For example, do you hope to enhance your brand image or generate sales leads?
- How do you plan to funnel the leads once they visit your website, visit your business, call, interact with you?
- Do you have a plan for how to respond to questions, queries, complaints?
With goals determined, it’s a good idea to begin establishing your presence on multiple social media sites. This allows you to maximize your outreach.
Once your profiles are set up and you’ve begun sharing content, don’t post sales pitch after sales pitch. Use your social media presence as a way to connect with your audience. Share content and helpful information your followers will want to view and share.
Engage and interact with your followers, as well. In addition to obtaining feedback from your customers, you want them to feel like they can have a conversation with you. This keeps followers interested in you and your brand.
Finally, make sure you step back and took a look at what you’re doing and how successful it is. Determine what content is getting shared and what’s getting ignored so you can make adjustments accordingly. Metrics are necessary to ensure your campaigns are data driven, and not just based on a hunch!
Including social media in your marketing strategy is about being able to adapt and make changes. Social media is not static, so you need to be able to respond and make changes when something isn’t capturing your audience’s attention.
