Digital Marketing or New Media Marketing is the trend and every entrepreneur started investing their major share of marketing budget for digital marketing for getting more effective results. But the question is about the ROI, is everybody getting the needed results according to their media spent in social media or just investing only.
Here am trying to list out a dozen of social media strategies for more effectiveness and these strategies for success are from the working experience with clients of different sizes and diversified requirements. The below mentioned 12 steps are just the starters for a more result oriented long term digital marketing plan. However, for effective implementation of total online communication plan you need to associate with a professional digital marketing agency.
Strategy without Tactics is the slowest route to Victory & Tactics without Strategy is the noise before Defeat.
Sun Tzu
1. SWOT analysis
First step before initiating a proper social media plan is to understand more about your present status in the market. A clear understanding about your Strength, Weakness, Opportunities and Threats prevailing in the market will give an additional edge on formulating your social media plan. I always suggest my clients to do social media spent only after securing your online position at least to the level of your competition, for that SEO should be the first step before spending a single penny.
2. Be ready ONLINE
Before starting implementing your derived social media plan, you should be ready online with a proper website and all social media widgets. Your website and social media pages should provide a first good impression to the visitors and for that you should be ready in all modes. Both your website and social media pages should be updated with latest and relevant information on a regular basis and also should be dynamic is responding to their queries.
3. Fix your target
Those who start implementing a strategy after fixing their target are likely to reach their fixed target much earlier than the others and that reason you need to think about your marketing and communication goals before initiating social media plan. Your social media plan should be designed as per your long term business goals and that will help to communicate to the target segment thru the right channel.
4. Different Social Media with different roles
What you can do in FACEBOOK will not be the same in LINKEDIN or likewise there are so many social media options and we have to clearly understand each of them and their impact and accordingly steer our social media campaign. When we are implementing our social media strategy we should understand that several of the social media platform are places to exchange with your followers and not for proper branding.
5. Study your competition
Today your success depends on not only your target clients alone but also how your competitors cater to them, we need to check and understand their online presence and market grader before jumping into huge media spent for effective results. We need to have a clear online audit of our competition in a particular market and after getting each of the market grader we need to channelize our social media plan and overcome the competition.
6. Identify your TARGET PERSONA
Your TARGET PERSONA is the peoples who will fall in the bracket of who can be your future clients. By proper segmentization and filtration we can effectively target all our social media spent to that segment and thus can ensure more productive leads and ROI. There exist perception in the market that more leads for the media spent is good, but we need to understand the need of getting productive leads than those irrelevant leads for our solution. These unproductive leads causes lot of wastage of time and money for the stakeholders that are involved in the consumer journey before the actual purchase and if you check the actual conversion, that will not support the media spent. Effective usage of our media spent after identifying your target persona and reaching them will get more ROI.
7. Make your menu interesting
People tend to follow brands who address their pain points and not brands who are trying to sell something. You need to position your brand/services in social media in a way that it will address a specific need of your target PERSONA. Here the content part plays a vital role and there you need to have a clear understanding of the client psychology, listen and answer their questions, it will provide information for you to create more content.
8. CONTENT is the KING
TARGET PERSONA based social media plan is more effective and for that we need to create the content accordingly and explore all possibilities. Write blog posts and social media content, and use a lot of visuals like beautiful pictures, and info graphics to attract more attention to your message. On FaceBook you can be more informal, on Instagram you need to be visual, and on LinkedIn, you need to show your expertise. Be very careful with the message tone, invite the reader to engage and interact with the message.
9. VIDEOS for better reach
Research shows that video content get much better reach than text and image content, this we need to understand and accordingly plan to insert video content in your social media plan. According to the latest online senses, there is a projection that videos will rule the internet traffic and this trend may continue until 2020 or more. Having a good video presentation about your service/product will definitely ensure good reach since viewers will share video more than text message.
10. Ensure effective two way communication
Unlike all other traditional media, social media is a two-way communication platform and that is the charm of social media and at the same time if we couldn’t manage the communication properly, it will have negative impact. All our social media presence should be open to receive positive and negative comments and we should be ready to address each of them effectively. Proper and fast response on social media will increase the integrity of the brand and will get wide spread appreciation on knowing how you are addressing positive and negative comments on social media. Ensure that there is continuous communication with your followers and that will have positive impact of your brand.
11. Keep monitoring the performance card
Social media analytical tools help to track everything on social media, for every media spent we can get analytic reports and understand the consumer behavior and which content gives maximum reach and brand identity. Further, you can identify your website traffic generated from your social media content and accordingly steer your media spent and content. This should be an ongoing practice till you reach satisfactory level of followers.
12. Dynamic approach gives results
Online Digital communication is the most effective way to increase your performance, but at the same time we need to constantly evaluate the results with social media analytical tools and accordingly change our strategies and media spent. To be more precise we need to have a dynamic approach and we should effectively change our online strategies according to how market react and consumer behavior. If we can identify which social media is giving maximum results on particular segment accordingly media spent can be directed and thus the total media spent can be limited to our budget and get the needed results.
The above 12 steps are just starters for your successful social media plan which need to follow the seven course plan of action or more according to the type of product and market scenario. There exist a complete professional set of activities which need to be handled by experts for getting expected results. However, would like to mention that today and in the future your product/service/brand will definitely need to have a professional social media plan for success.
Be with the right digital marketing partner who can develop STRATEGIES FOR SUCCESSfor your service with optimum investment and those who can promise ROI.
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