You’re a business owner looking for more effective ways to draw in new business. You’re looking to social media for it’s targeted reach but don’t know where to begin? This doesn’t just apply to business owners, you could be looking to social media marketing for any number of reasons. You read into it a bit, researched, talked with friends but you are still lost on how to take your first step (You may not even want to take that first step yourself).
Theres a so many different approaches you can take and there is not one correct path that will work for everyone but lets get into six steps that will let you rock the launch of your social media marketing journey!
1. Define your Business Values and Goals.
You can’t truly make a social media and content strategy without really knowing who or what you are. As a business, what are your values? Is it reflected in your mission statement and your interactions with you customers? What are your business goals? Are you a million dollar company that wants to get to five million in two years? How will you get there? Is it through more traffic on your website, educating your customers and potential customers, targeting viable leads and getting your name in front of them?
2. Create Social Media Goals that Align with your Business Goals.
Now that you know who and what you are and have clearly defined your business goals, you can create educated social media goals that align with your business. If you want more views on your website one of your social media goals will be to increase click-through rates (CTR’s) and push more people to your webpage. If you want to be considered an expert and thought leader in your field, your social media goals will align with this through educating your audience. What social media goals will align with your business goals?
3. Define your Target Audience and Where They Are.
From a business point of view, your target audience will be in line with your target customer (This may sound too simple, don’t over complicate it!). If you’re the owner of a nursery in a rural area with a target customer age group between 35-65+, you may not choose to focus on LinkedIn as only 18% of people living in rural area use LinkedIn. You may however be more inclined to be on Pinterest as it has a higher rural population of users at 25%, you can appeal to the DIY community, and it is slightly more in use by members in your age demographic. *Stats in this paragraph are from SproutSocial
4. Conduct a Social Media Audit on Your Business and Your Competition.
Are there already social media accounts connected to your business that you’re unaware of? If so, are customers/potential customers interacting with it? The lack of response on your end could have a detrimental impact on your business. Once you discover what accounts are out there, you can decide which accounts to close and what social platforms you’ll be creating accounts on (step 3, where is your audience).
You can also conduct a social audit on your competitors. Are they running successful social campaigns? What is working for them and what isn’t? Is there anything you like about their social presence that you like and can implement into your social strategy? Is their anything they’re lacking that you may gain a competitive advantage on?
5. Create Social Media Accounts.
Now that you have defined your target audience and where they are, conducted a social audit on yourself and your competition, you should have a good understanding on which social accounts you need to focus on. Is your target audience young professionals in the B2B industry? If you answered yes, you may want to focus on LinkedIn a bit more heavily in you social strategy. Will you be providing customer service through social? Twitter is great for customer service! As a consumer, I deal with companies through Twitter rather frequently for customer service. A company that is responsive, polite, and solves any issues I may be having with their product always leaves me feeling positive about them and earns my future business.
6. Create a Content Strategy and Schedule.
There are many prescriptions out there and again, there is no one size fits all option when it comes to strategy. A few options I feel good about are:
The 80/20 Rule
80% of your content should be engaging content (non-sale related).
20% promote a product or highlight an offer (sales).
Also:
50% of content will drive traffic back to your blog (like this!):
25% shared from other sources
20% will support sales through promotions, offers, driving traffic, lead generation, etc.
5% can support your business culture; let your audience know who you are!
To build from content strategy, create a content schedule. This can be challenging at the beginning and you may want to start with a week and build up to a month; whatever works best for you! In your content strategy, you will put together a plan on what content you will create, share, and post throughout the week, its purpose, what platforms you’ll post on and when.
Now that you have absolutely and positively rocked launching your social media marketing journey, heres a bonus tip for you: evaluate and revise your plan as you go! Did you discover that a different age group than you thought was actually your target audience? Appeal to them! Is your audience on more in the evening? Adjust your posting schedule to fit their schedules. If something didn’t work out as you planned, determine why it didn’t and what would work better in its place.
I want to hear from you! What would you add to this list? What works best for you? What questions do you have for me or other readers? Let’s rock social media together!
If you enjoyed this article, please comment, share, like, or reach out to me!
Until next time,
Keep Smiling.
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