5 Essential Elements of Effective Social Media Marketing
Amanda Zarrella
Founder |Social Media Marketing Specialist | Graphic Designer & Editor | Trainer | Speaker & Internet Marketing
Most of us know that if your potential customers can’t find you on one of the mainstream social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube or LinkedIn you are missing potential leads.
Mastering the art of communication through social media is no easy feat. Generating effective content for your social media channels that align with your company marketing strategy, targeting correct audiences and analysing the results to improve and maximise impact can be quite challenging.
Here are some pointers to get your social media on track.
Lack of Clear Goals: If you’re sharing content on any of the social media channels without a clearly defined goal, then your efforts are most likely being wasted. With social media or any marketing that you do for your business, you need to choose an intended outcome! Are you looking to increase traffic to your website? Looking to encourage people to sign up to your mailing list or tip series? Are you looking to improve your company’s brand awareness online? Your goals become the target that you aim for and without them, you might as well be walking blinded folded.
Poor Sense of Direction: Strategy matters with social media and you have to find one that works best for your business. Many a time I have seen businesses putting a lot of time and effort into their social media marketing without having a plan or map on how they are going to put into practice on how to do it with an end result in mind. Hire an expert to help you create an effective strategy!
Defining Your Audience: Before you start connecting with people via social media, you have to first understand who these people are and where are they, what social media channels are they on. Find out what motivates them, what problems are they running into and how can you help solve them. These key elements will help you develop and share content that is significant.
Track & Monitoring Success: Monitoring social media activity is paramount. I can’t emphasize enough how important this step is. Without it you are not monitoring what works and what results you have achieved. Monitoring social media activities means listening to what people are saying about your product or service and what they are talking about within your industry. There are plenty of FREE tools available to give you some basic measuring to start with and once you feel confident you can start to look at more comprehensive ones.
Lack of Investment: You’re not investing. It goes like the saying… You reap what you sow. Advertising needs to be a key part of your social marketing budget. Whether your audience is on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn. Building your audiences and driving sales leads to various social media channels is paramount. (Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn Ads) Social advertising improves in terms of campaign performances, and more and more advertisers are increasing their spend levels year on year.
The above points are essential to make your social media marketing work. Clarity on the first two points is critical to enable you to map out a plan on what you are going to do and how you're going to get there.
We always start by looking at the digital marketing journey which consists of 3 basic steps a) attracting b) retargeting c) converting. ?? Call us on 01424 868001 if you'd like some help mapping out your digital journey.