These 7 basic steps can help you launch an effective social media strategy to increase brand recognition, website visitors, and sales leads.
The first step in any strategy is to define your goals and objectives: You can’t plan a trip if you don’t know where you’re going. The most common business goals for social media are to increase brand recognition, website visitors, and sales leads. All social activity should lead back to those initiatives.
Here are seven pillars of a social media strategy that drive real business results:
1. Accurate Social Media Profiles
Regularly audit your business social profiles, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter, to ensure they contain the most recent and relevant information about your company and align with your marketing campaigns. They’re like mini-websites and are often your first impression with potential customers.
2. Use Mostly Value-Add Content
Sharing your expertise, opinions, and feedback on social media helps potential customers start to understand who you are and what you do. The trick is to share information that’s interesting and of enough value to capture their attention.
Self Promotion: If you always blab on and on about all the wonderful things you do and how great you are, it’s a real turn on off.
Value-Add: If you share a lot of information about how to help people improve their lives or be better at their jobs, your potential customers will likely see you as a credible, knowledgeable resource. And when the time comes, you’ll be top of mind.
To get the best results, most of the value-add content should be on your website. Promoting other people’s content (or “curating content” as it’s called), shows you’re a well-read and knowledgeable resource in the industry, which is good, but it doesn’t drive people back to your website.
3. Promote Blog Articles
For each blog article, write five compelling alternate titles to publish on your social media channels. Then you can promote the article 5 times, each in a slightly different way. You don’t want to say the same exact thing over and over. Then publish the social media posts periodically over time.
4. Promote Content Offers
For maximum lead generation, promote content offers on your website such as ebooks, webinars, and guides. Once on your website, the visitor fills out a form to receive the content he/she is interested in, and the sales team gets a notification of the lead. The more content offers you have, the more opportunities you have to drive people from social media to your lead conversion landing pages.
This strategy to works best when you regularly add more content offers to your website to keep the audience engaged with fresh information.
5. Consistent Social Publishing
Auto schedule the blog article and content offer posts to go out every day. The number of posts per day depends on the amount of content available.
If you have a large content library or are writing a lot of new content, you can publish more social posts per day or week. If there isn’t much available content yet, post less frequently. Avoid bombarding your audience with the same piece of content over and over in a short period - try to space things out.
The key is to be consistent. Publish social media posts at regular intervals.
6. Monitoring and Responding
Social media is supposed to be a two-way communication. You talk and listen. Monitoring and responding to relevant social media activity helps you start one-to-one relationships with potential customers. As a bonus, you’ll stay educated about the market, in tune with industry trends, and have a deeper understanding of how to add value to your target audience.
7. Measuring Results
Use metrics to find out if you’re achieving your goals and objectives. Regularly looking at the numbers will let you know which social media strategies are — and are not — working for your business.
What it Takes for Success!
A high-performing social media strategy requires targeting the right audience, writing interesting content that aligns with the buyer journey, writing catchy titles and social posts, creating eye-popping graphics, linking content together to create a story.
All of the elements of a digital marketing plan are tightly knit together, so what I like to say is that you need, "One ring to rule them all." (I'm a Lord of the Rings nerd. LOL) Often, companies will have a lot of scattered marketing vendors, and the strategy becomes disconnected and results lower than what they could be with a more cohesive approach. Building a successful social media strategy starts with the right team. Here are some ideas on how to choose the best strategic marketing leader and team for your growth plan.
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