A recent Econsultancy report revealed that 86% of more than 800 companies surveyed plan social media budget bumps in the coming year. Clearly, social media marketing (SMM) is working its way into company marketing plans more than ever. SMM is just as important to the smaller company looking rto market more on a shoestring as it is to a large one. SMM gives businesses of any size an equal voice (or at least the chance to compete equally), which is something that traditional marketing doesn’t offer.
Studies have shown that even more so than television, today’s consumers are turning to blogs and social networking sites for the latest news, reviews, and opinions. Your customers want to have a relationship with you. They’re blogging about their favorite products and live-tweeting customer service experiences, for better or worse.
10 Keys to More Effective Social Media Marketing:
1. Find out where your customers (and competitors) are and set up shop.
Odds are, your customers are already discussing your brand on social networks, whether you’re aware of it or not. Just do a few simple Google, Facebook, or Twitter searches on your brand or product names to find out who’s talking about it and where. Prioritize your social media efforts by giving the most attention to the places where buzz about your brand is the heaviest.
2. Build one-on-one relationships.
It’s a simple concept, but one many companies fail to grasp. By its very nature, social media marketing is about communicating and connecting with individual users, not one-way messaging to the masses. Marketing your brand takes the form of meaningful conversations, answering questions, sharing information, giving honest feedback, and reaching out to potential advocates.
3. Put a human face on it.
Social media is not about communicating behind a nameless, faceless logo. People want to know who they’re interacting with; that there’s a real person behind the wheel, flaws and all.
4. Engage through content.
If you plan to get serious about social media marketing, know that it requires constant care and feeding, and that feeding comes most often in the form of content: industry news, how-to videos, new product previews or reviews, unique offers, podcasts, tweets from conferences, and other brand-centric content that keeps followers interested.
5. Keep it current.
Though blog posts, videos, and other forms of content can have a long shelf life, social media marketing is very much about the here and now. What’s current? What are the issues facing your industry? What’s making news? Can you influence the news? What can we comment upon and answer questions about? The more in-the-moment you can engage, the higher your visibility is likely to be, and visibility is the flashy lure that attracts more fish.
6. Be realistic about resources.
Know that all of this content, care and feeding will require a lot of time and commitment. Don’t bit off more than you can chew. An untended social media effort feels half-baked to users and is almost worse than having none at all.
7. Set actionable goals and have a plan.
Regardless of who within your organization handles the day-to-day social media, their efforts should be led by specific goals. How much time will they commit to social media marketing? How often will they interact within each community or channel? What will it take to generate new content? Set objectives, develop action plans, and track milestones for measuring progress. We recently announced the launch of our new Social Media Strategy service, which helps brands do exactly that.
8. Proactively monitor reactions to your brand.
This kind of “reputation management” gives you a window into what people are saying about your company, your industry, your products, and even competitors. Monitoring can be as simple as setting up Google Alerts, and there are many free or low-cost social media monitoring tools. There’s no shortage of paid, more robust solutions, either, which are a must for big brands and large organizations.
9. Measure your efforts.
Yes, social media marketing can be measured! Start by looking at your web analytics and focusing on things like traffic from social media sources and engagement metrics. Once you have established goals, (see #7) you’ll know better what tools will help you measure those outcomes.
10. Learn from your experiences.
Social media marketing requires a lot of changing on the fly. Be prepared to adapt your action plan to the results you’re getting (or not getting). Don’t think of poor results as failure because with social media marketing, you need to be learning all the time—even when things don’t turn out exactly as you’d have liked them to.
PHANTOM POWER
Marketing by Design
www.phantompower.co
Source: Web Ad.vantage
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