By now you should be aware that social media is here to stay, and that in order to succeed as a business, you have to take advantage of the marketing opportunities that it presents.
The benefits that your company can reap from using social media are too great to ignore – not only can a social media presence help you to engage with consumers and other companies, thereby helping to foster and grow relationships with them, but it can also help you to build an awareness and loyalty for your brand.
While there are plenty of other avenues to explore in terms of marketing your brand, none are as cost effective as social media marketing – especially when considering the built-in audiences of hundreds of millions of people that many of these social media networks boast. So hopefully, you’re convinced. But what do you do now? The following are the first few steps that you should take to develop a social media marketing campaign.
1. Establish a Team
Running a social media campaign for your company isn’t quite the same as posting to your private Facebook account every once in a while. Social media marketing takes a lot of work.
- You’ll need people who are constantly analyzing your social media pages as well as the pages of your competitors and the habits of your target audience in order to adjust your social media strategy on the fly.
- You’ll also need people dedicated to posting regularly on your social media profiles and engaging with consumers on a daily basis – not to mention people that will write your content.
- Last but not least, you’ll need a team manager who keeps everyone on the same page and makes sure that the information and research that is gathered is used in the execution of the strategy.
2. Set Your Goals
Don’t dive into a social media marketing campaign without a clear goal in mind. Are you looking to use social media to gain more leads? Are you using it in order to increase awareness of your brand? Is your aim to help push new products or services? Are you hoping to use your social media presence as a way to enhance your customer service? Consider what your main goal is before getting started.
3. Decide What Platforms to Use
There are tons of social media networks out there that you can use, which means you shouldn’t just limit yourself to one. Some of the major players that you should think about using include Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+. However, there are many others that may suit your brand better, including Vine, YouTube, Instagram and more. Consider what platforms would best suit your brand as well as what platforms your target audience tends to use.
4. Plan Your Campaign
Once you’ve got a team in place and have established your goals and what platforms you want to use, its time to create your social media marketing campaign. How you plan your campaign will depend a lot on what the goal for your campaign is – are you releasing a new product? Are you holding a sale? Keeping your goal in mind, you’ll need to organize short-term objectives for every social platform you’re using as well as come up with content ideas relative to your campaign’s goal and the different social platforms they’ll appear on. Additionally, you’ll want to make sure that your campaign is consistent across your different social channels. It’s going to get confusing if you’re advertising two different sales on different dates on various social media platforms. This will cause confusion amongst your followers – simply focus on one campaign at a time and market it consistently across all channels.
5. Create an Editorial Calendar
Establishing a calendar for your social media marketing team is a great way to streamline your campaign and help everyone stay on task. Decide the length of your campaign and then decide what days and times that you’ll release new content on your social media channels to help promote your campaign. You should also be clear about what type of content is to be released on what day, such as videos, text, images and more.
6. Use a Consistent Voice
Followers will relate better if your voice has some kind of personality. They don’t want to read posts or content that sounds like it was randomly produced by a robot. However, you have to make sure that the voice you use is appropriate for your brand. For example, a professional and eloquent voice may not work well for an energy drink brand. Make sure the voice you use is consistent over all social channels and content.
Use these steps to help develop a social media marketing campaign for your company.
