Social Media Marketing Strategy – Why you need one
Creating an online marketing strategy is vital when making the decision to add social media to your marketing campaigns/plans. A plan is needed to assess the viability, know what steps you will take and to aid you in staying focused on your goals.
Your plan can also help you save time by ensuring you follow a systematic approach to the time you will invest in social marketing and networking online. The social networking part can easily take you off track and eat up your time if you do not pay attention to the overall picture of what you are trying to accomplish.
Here are the basics parts to any social media plan we help clients develop:
Assess
Look at what is available in your market, what competitors are doing and find out if your customers in fact using these social media channels. These answers may help you determine your purpose for using social media and your goals. Learning where your market is online will help your determine what social media channels to use.
Goals
Set at least 3 SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, Timely) goals and create an action plan to help you reach these goals. What steps will you take to reach these goals.
Content
Set a plan for what content will be published – blog posts, tweets, facebook page updates, youtube videos. This plan should include the topic of content and also how often and via what channel it will be published
Keywords
Part of the content planning would be finding the keywords your customers use when searching for your service or product online. If your business has some technical jargon that customers rarely pick up on – it is unlikely that is how they will search online for the solution to their problem (your service or product). It is imperative to find keywords ( use Google’s Free Keyword tool to help with this) they are using and add these targeted key words into your content..
Optimize
Look at all the platforms available and link them together as much as possible to help you save time. ie. Link your blog to twitter and your facebook page so when a blog post is published it will automatically feed an update to the other networks. Be certain to make a flowchart so you understand what automatically goes to what network in order to avoid any cross posting.
Track
As much as you can track your results do it. Keep a record of your contacts/ facebook friends/page likes/twitter followers/linked in contact /newsletter subscribers and results on Google for your name, business and keywords. Check the results every month and see how it changes. Read the analytic reports on your website and adjust keywords/tactics to fit with what is working well or not form these reports. With social media marketing, businesses may set goals related to brand identity and levels of engagement.
Schedule
Take time to schedule in all the aspects of your plan and work at it to keep on top of it and following the plan. Stay focused and use your time wisely.
Even if you are not writing a formal plan, at least address these areas above so that you can remain productive and effective with your time investment in social media marketing. Feel free to download our Setup Guide to help you create online profiles that will work for you not against you and then you are ready to implement your plan.
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