Social media marketing has become the most important medium of marketing now-a-days. More and more business owners are taking advantage of this medium to create brand awareness about their products and services. Marketing and promotion via social media is very cost effective than the traditional mediums. The return On Investment (ROI) is also higher than the traditional mediums. Therefore, it is no wonder that more and more companies are leveraging upon this medium to increase their business.
Companies are now hiring Digital Marketing experts to do the job for them. Some have even set up separate departments for Digital Marketing. However, just because a business has an online presence and just because they have a Digital Marketing department does not guarantee success. Not all businesses use the social media effectively enough to see any growth. A campaign using the social media can be carried out very badly that is destined to fail.
There are 8 key factors that must be kept in mind in order to run a strong and effective campaign in social media.
1. Serve the Community
Most of the business owners when they venture into the social media come with the intention to make more money by increasing sales. They only look for ways to serve themselves and their business. It would be accurate to call it shortsightedness. Such businesses are not very successful in their campaigns which also affects their growth.
Businesses should do some research to find out in what areas their target market is interested in. They should try to offer useful information and links that will help their target market in these areas. This can be done by delivering posts and links that educate, entertain, inspire and inform. Doing this will develop engagement with their market their which is the key in any social media campaign. Once this engagement and trust is built, people will be interested to learn more about the business and its offerings.
2. Direct the traffic to your website
The ultimate goal of a social media campaign is to drive the web traffic to your website. It is very important to design and build a website that will hold the attention of your customers. It is the website of the business owner that remains the most important sales tool.
A business owner might succeed in engaging their customers by running a very effective social media campaign. The customers as a result might be interested to know more about the company and the products and services it is offering. However, if the website does not contain the information customer is looking for, they will lose interest and as a result of it will not buy.
Spending time and money on creating an attractive website will be very beneficial from a sales point of view.
3. Use third party tools
There are many third party tools available on the internet that can help to create a good campaign on the social media. These tools are great time savers and help to stay organised. These tools will also tell on a real time basis how and where the campaign is heading. Some of these tools are:
Quill Engage: It is a free tool that gives you accurate date about the website’s traffic growth and decline. It will help to know where the traffic is coming from and which posts generated most traffic.
Post Planner: As the name suggest it allows you to plan your posts on Facebook. It is a very effective tool in scheduling items in bulk for later posts. It gives you the peace of mind from keeping a track of your daily posts and updates as it does it for you.
PhotoSync: It allows you to quickly send photos from your mobile device to your computer within the same WiFi. The photos can then be edited on PowerPoint or Photoshop and sent back to the mobile device. It can then be uploaded on social networks.
4. Using Niche Social Networks Sites
Not everyone uses the same social media as people have different tastes. There are umpteen number of social media sites that are popping up that target a particular niche. In order to reach out to a large and targeted number of people, businesses have to have presence in these niche social medias as well. Therefore, not doing so will result in the loss of a lot of people who do not have their presence on the popular social media sites.
5. Create a Blog
It is a great place to write articles to promote your products and services. Blogs give business owners an opportunity to talk in detail about what they have to offer. This has become an integral part of social media marketing campaign. Hiring a good content writer will not be a bad idea. The job is only half done is the blog posts are not promoted on every online avenue. Moreover, doing so will improve the visibility of your blog and increase traffic to your website.
6. Engage with people
Businesses should spare time to connect with the people in their community. Posts on the social media should be able to engage the people. Activities like replying to tweets and commenting on Facebook posts will keep the people engaged as people like to be listened to.
7. Offer something different
There must be something that a business offers that others in similar businesses do not. Thinking about that, one think that sets the business apart from others and highlighting it will definitely give the business an edge.
8. Study your competitors’ strategy
It is more than likely that a rival business concern might be running a similar campaign on the social media. It would be very informative to take the time out to study their strategy. It will give an idea about the changes that need to be made in order to compete with them.
References: Hubspot, socialmediaexaminer
