If your answer is no, you need one.
If your answer is yes, are you sure it is effective as it could be?
Either way, read on.
There are many misconceptions out there about social media marketing. For those who are only using social media as a way of securing more business, it can be a disappointment. Of course, social media marketing can become an excellent way of converting leads and winning more business, but this takes time.
Many fail with social media marketing, either because they expect too much too soon – or because their social media marketing strategy is non-existent or not sufficiently thought through.
Social media marketing is never a quick fix. It is never a cure for all ills or a magical silver bullet, but without a solid social media marketing strategy, it is nothing.
Here’s how you go about putting together a social media marketing strategy that works.
A SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING STRATEGY NEEDS GOALS
All business and marketing strategies need goals. Goal setting is an accepted part of business strategy and social media is no exception. The goals you set will depend on your own needs, obviously, but should always be focused around specific challenges or problems that you are facing: low conversion rate, low website traffic, poor customer service, or poor brand awareness. These are the types of problems that businesses typically come up against.
EMBED SOCIAL THROUGHOUT AN ORGANISATION
Things are different if you are one man band freelancer, but for SMEs and larger brands, it is important that social isn’t just something that is ‘done’ by the marketing department/person. Social media marketing should permeate throughout the whole organisation.
FOCUS ON THE SOCIAL CHANNELS THAT ADD THE MOST VALUE
Depending on the nature of your business and your audience, you will naturally find that certain channels lend themselves to your brand better than others. You will notice that you pick up better engagement on one platform than another. Don’t spread yourself too thin with your social media marketing by trying to have a presence on every network, focus on the ones that provide the most value for you.
CREATE GREAT CONTENT
At the heart of every good social media marketing strategy is great content. Both content curation and content creation need to be consistently on point and relevant to your audience. Remember, it should be all about them, not you. Endless streams of posts with links to your products and services never hit the spot. Your content needs to genuinely interest and be of value to your audience. If a social media marketing strategy doesn’t focus on earning the trust and respect of the audience, it will fail.
NEVER FORGET BRAND AWARENESS
A social media marketing strategy that isn’t winning you as much new business as you would like isn’t necessarily a complete failure. Strong social media marketing will steadily build brand awareness. It will keep your name at the front of mind of your audience.
MEASURE AND MODIFY
Track and measure the success of your social media marketing strategy. Analytics will provide you with little nuggets of data that should enable you to adapt and improve your strategy over time.
Using social media for recruiting is a sure fire way of ensuring an active audience knows about you and your services even if they don’t require them there and then. We call this a passive audience. A passive audience is far more likely to ‘buy’ from you at some point than a cold audience.