Social Media Marketing Strategy

It seems that businesses of every size and from every industry are jumping on the social media bandwagon. They’re blogging, creating Twitter accounts, and expanding their presence on YouTube. Those who engage in social media marketing (SMM) properly are experiencing the benefits of increased brand awareness, improved relationships with their target audience, higher search engine rankings, and so much more.

Unfortunately, most companies aren’t “engaging in social media marketing properly.” See, just Tweeting consistently and writing a blog now and then doesn’t constitute an SMM strategy. That’s a blind man’s approach to things. Instead, you need to actually sit down and create a strategy with goals and methods for tracking the success of your SMM campaign.

Here’s how you get started.

Set Goals for Your SMM Campaign

Just like any other marketing campaign, when creating an SMM strategy, you need to set goals. What do you want to achieve through social media? How quickly do you want to achieve it? What will determine if your SMM campaign is a success in your eyes?

Typical goals for social media marketing include stronger relationships with target audience, increased brand awareness, better customer service, more inbound links and higher search rankings, and to educate consumers about your company and its products.

Once you’ve set some goals for your social media campaign, you can then create a strategy for achieving them.

Creating a Strategy

To create a social media strategy, you need to first do some research. The more research you do and the more information you acquire, the better able you’ll be to create a strategy that achieves your goals.

Some SMM-related things you need to research are

* Your competition’s social media presence

* What social media outlets your target audience uses

* What strategies companies use to be successful with social media

* What type of content works with each social network

* How long it takes to yield results with social media

* and much more

The whole goal with the research phase of creating your SMM strategy is to learn as much as possible so you can avoid any oversights or mistakes.

Launching and Maintaining Your SMM Campaign

With all of the groundwork in place, it’s time to begin building a social media presence for your small business. Depending on which social media outlets your target audience uses, you need to first create accounts for each of these networks. Once you do this, you need to focus on building relationships, maintaining your SMM campaign on a daily basis, measuring your progress, and adjusting your strategy as necessary.

Let’s take these one at a time.

* Building relationships—Do you know what the keyword is in social media? It’s “social.” You need to be social, meaning you need to engage in conversations with your target audience. Remember, SMM isn’t like typical one-way marketing. In other words, don’t just go on Twitter sending out constant Tweets urging people to buy your products. It doesn’t work like that. You need to build relationships with those in your network. Get to know them. Understand their likes and dislikes. Learn how they communicate. Gain their trust. Social media success depends on how strong your relationships are.

* Measuring your progress—The only way you can determine if your SMM campaign is effective or not is to track your progress. Remember those goals you set earlier? You should constantly be monitoring how your SMM campaign is advancing to help you reach those goals. For example, if your goal is to increase the number of back links to your website, use a back link checker to see if you’re gaining any links. Likewise, if your goal is to improve customer retention, compare your client retention rates from before and after you launched your SMM campaign.

* Adjusting as necessary—If you find you aren’t moving toward your goals, it might be time to make some adjustments. Ask yourself if you’re using the right social media outlets. Is there anything you can do to improve the way you’re using them? Are you focusing on the SMM basics of building relationships? Are you consistently using social media or are you just doing it whenever you have free time? Tweak your strategy until you find one that helps you reach your goals.

Social media marketing isn’t easy, but by setting a sound strategy, you can reap many benefits from it.