If you have been doing business online for even a minimal amount of time, you have heard about the importance of social media marketing, but there is little talk of creating a social media strategy that will serve to leverage success for your business. What your business products or services are, and what your goals for each campaign are will be the determining factors in what the best strategy will be.
Research is the best step to take before creating any sort of strategy and that is no different for social media strategies. Specifically take some time to see who is talking about your brand online or the products and services your brand offers to see what social media sites are the most active in these specific discussions. These will be the social media sites where you want to focus most of your efforts because they are all ready proving to have at least some of your target market interested in talking about what you offer. When you find out what the most active social media sites are for your own brand, check to see what social media sites spend the most time talking about your competition. They will probably be similar, but you want to make sure your online presence is evident where potential customers might decide to purchase from your business instead of your competition.
When you have defined the most important social media sites to become active on, you can define specific goals for social media marketing campaigns. The most common campaign goals include creating more sales, enhancing brand reputation, increasing brand exposure, and customer loyalty. What goal you choose to start with first will determine what strategy you decide on whether it is social media advertising, boosting your brand through a contest to get new social media followers or some other type of promotional event.
When you know the most active social media sites for your business’s target market and you have a clear idea of what goals you would like to accomplish, your social media marketing efforts will have a much higher rate of success. Finally, make sure to run analytics for every social media marketing event your business pursues so you can replicate, adjust or cease activities depending on their effectiveness. This makes it much easier to continue to fortify your overall success with social media marketing efforts.
