Have you ever felt you have gotten ahead of yourself on something and failed? Don’t feel too bad! That’s a part of human nature. And, it’s something that marketers often do without even realizing it. It’s no big surprise as to why it happens. The market is constantly moving forward. What works today may not work tomorrow or shortly. This also holds up for a succesful social media marketing campaign.
Worst of all, many social media marketers fail to develop a strong strategy that will help them to attain their goals.
Here’s what you need to understand: social media marketing has its own language. You cannot succeed in it until you learn and master the basics. That’s just the honest truth! If you fail to learn about social media marketing, then the only person you can blame for not meeting your goals is yourself.
If you’re new to social media marketing or need a refresher course, you don’t have to look any further for the information you need to be successful.
What You Need To Understand About Social Media Marketing
Over the last 10 years, social media has gone from “maybe I can use it” to “I have to use it” for all marketing strategies. A 2015 Social Media Marketing Industry Report highlighted that 96 percent of all marketers had incorporated at least one social media website into their marketing campaign.
What is social media marketing then? It’s essentially the key part of your job.
The 2015 Social Media Glossary from Hootsuite says social media marketing is marketers using social media to boost their brand awareness, produce leads, recognize their primary audience, and establish an important connection with their customers.
What does this mean? Social media marketing must facilitate
· Community management
· Social customer service
· Social selling activities
And, it must do this to produce a unified relationship with the company’s customers.
It’s important to note that a sucessfull social media market campaign is combined with numerous strategies.
What Is So Important About Social Media Marketing
Company management often has to be convinced that a social media marketing campaign is the way to increase brand awareness and sales. However, it’s important to note that being social, regardless of the strategy, is necessary these days.
Don’t think so?
Well, then, just think of the ways social media works in your personal life – connecting with loved ones and friends, another way to attain information and more. Now, think of how it can be useful to your business. Obviously, social media marketing can be extremely beneficial. Some advantages to using social media in your marketing campaign include:
· Identifying and learning about your target audience, marketing to them using extremely valuable social media communications.
· Getting in touch with the community and customers, which saves you a plethora of time – no cold-calling or face-to-face conversation.
· Stay in competition with your competitors (who are using social media as well for their marketing campaign).
· Establish and increase your customer base.
· Boost sales and the company’s bottom line
· Can talk about the company’s background
· Reduce the costs associated with marketing (seen with traditional advertisements)
What Are The Statistics Surrounding Social Media
To fully understand how important a social media marketing campaign can be to your company, here are a few statistics to consider:
· 92 percent of social media marketers claim social media is an important part of their company
· 84 percent of marketers have combined their social media marketing campaign with their traditional marketing campaigns
· 64 percent of markets spend six or more hours on social media websites; 41 percent spend 11 or more hours a week and 19 percent spend more than 20 hours a week
· 90 percent of companies claim using social media has helped to boost brand awareness for their company
· 77 percent claim using social media has led to more website traffic
· More than 50 percent of marketers said social media has led to a significant rise in sales
· 69 percent of marketers claim social media has helped to establish a reliable fan base according to Entrepreneur.
· 66 percent of social media marketers notice their lead generation with social media happens with six or fewer hours a week
· FastCompany reports 70 percent of senior professionals find the workplace better when CEOs make a social media post
· According to Forbes, three out of four consumers claim social media makes an impact on what they buy
What Should Your Succesful Social Media Marketing Campaign Consist Of
Now you see the importance behind a social media marketing campaign and why you should create your own. So do it! Come up with a solid social media strategy that will help you navigate the plethora of social media websites to attain your goals.
Bear in mind that a social media marketing plan lays out what you want to do and how you’ll attain your company’s goals using the different social networks. Make sure the plan includes an audit of what the accounts are like right now, what the goals are for them in the distant future and the tools you’ll use to attain them.
- · Come up with your social media goals
- · Carry out an audit of your social media plan
- · Set up or improve social media accounts
- · Check out competitors, clients, and industry leaders’ social media accounts
- · Develop a content strategy and editorial calendar
- · Test, review and make adjustments to the strategy
How Can You Create Your Social Media Goals
It’s not a bad idea to learn how to come up with goals that help your business to succeed. All too often people think goal setting isn’t important or that it puts undue pressure on the business. The reality is that having goals encourages you to strive harder for success.
The S.M.A.R.T goal setting system can help you establish goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, related and time-bound. When your company has no goals laid out, the company has no direction to go.
The S.M.A.R.T framework helps so that you can attain goals before the work has even been put forth. You want goals to that are more about generated leads and website traffic, not likes and retweets.
The Difference In Social Media Strategy and Social Media Plan
Too many people, perhaps even yourself, think social media strategy and social media plan is the same thing. Here’s something to understand: a social media plan will include your strategy as well as the timelines, techniques, budget, steps, responsibilities, roles, etc. These work in conjunction with each other to successfully implement your plan.
Here’s a better way to understand this: a social media strategy closes the gap between where you’re at right now and where you’d like to be. The strategy needs to address the general questions you have before the plan can be put into action. The purpose of your strategy is to do the following:
· Explain what your business goals for social media are
· Examine your present status on social media
· Come up with or better your existing social media profiles
· Create content strategy
· Use tools that monitor your progress and alter the strategy when called for
What Social Media Marketing Tools Can You Use?
Like any job you do, the right tools are the difference between success and failure. And, social media marketing has its fair share of tools that will help you to succeed in your marketing campaign. What kinds of tools can you use to improve your chances of success?
· Hootsuite – This helps with automation of your social media posts.
· Rankspeed – This will help you to find topics that relate to your industry.
· Audiense – This will discover traits in the audience network.
· Klear – This assists you in finding high-ranking Twitter users based on their popularity, activity, and communications. It also helps to better your own status for these areas.
· Zendesk – This site will help to combine and manage help requests and customer service in one area, producing tickets that a support team member will get.
· Manageflitter – This is ideal for following and unfollowing Twitter accounts
· Coschedule – This will help you to create a schedule for all your social media content and posts.
· YouTube Analytics – This offers you an in-depth look at your brand’s video content shared on YouTube – demographics, subscriber activity, channel statistics, etc.
Where You Can Find A Social Media Template
When you decide to become a social media marketer, you may be confused to successfully begin your campaign. After all, social media marketing is in a constant state of motion – always changing, always improving. This is why Coschedule has come up with social media templates that you can alter to work for you.
7 Tips To Ensure You Have A Successful Social Media Marketing Campaign
You may be concerned with the fundamentals of social media marketing and management, but for details to make any sense, you need to have a solid foundation. Consider using the following strategies to increase the chance of success.
· Hashtags for a virtual filing system, and look at the hashtags competitors are using to inspire yours.
· Ask questions that will engage your audience
· Listen to what your audience has to say, keeping track of their conversations
· Offer valuable items to your audience that they’re not able to see elsewhere
· Use Twitter to create relationships to get conversations going about your brand and establish connections with your audience
· Be mindful of the engagement, timing, brand voice and frequency
· Use eye-appealing images, which can garner far more views than just text content
There’s a plethora of information available on the topic of social media marketing, but with the information above, you should have a fairly good idea about the direction you need to take to ensure your campaign is a success.
Do you have a succesful social media marketing campaign going on? Please let us know in the comments below.
