Social Media today is not restricted to just people showing their personal lives on an online public platform. Rather it has become a powerful medium for businesses to reach out to their customers effectively. If you are not one of them, chances are that you are missing out on a lot of user-connect opportunities mainly on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest. Intelligent marketing on social media can bring about a lot of positive results including increased brand awareness, loyalty along with potential leads and customers.
For beginners, Social Media Marketing (SMM) is about creating and sharing content on social media to achieve marketing and branding goals at times through paid advertising. This includes posting text, pictures and video content on various social websites to engage the audience. Now let’s delve into how to go about doing SMM
Start with a Plan: In order to execute a marketing objective, it is important that a roadmap is in place that decides the start and ends with tangible results. These include
- Define Results: From the onset, it has to be clear what you seek to achieve at the end of the campaign. This helps avert the chances of digressing from the main goals.
- Define target audience: Once you know your target audience. It becomes easy to plan and focus the campaign on a specific demographic.
- Choose social platforms: With multiple social channels in place, it is essential to identify social media platforms with consistent engagement from your target audience. Else, there is the danger of spreading too thin.
- Preserve tone of messaging: At all times stick to a tone that speaks the language of your audience to maintain consistent engagement. This prevents the dilution of campaign messaging.
Plan Ahead for Content: Once the initial framework is in place, two key elements - keyword search and brainstorming will help crystallize the kind of content that would work with your target audience. Search within and outside your domain on what success stories can inspire your campaign to give it a positive thrust.
Produce Useful Content: Just like other facets of digital marketing, it is important to remember that content reigns supreme when it comes to SMM. Posting on a regular basis with persistent messaging and only producing content with usage value helps sustain your campaign. Keeping the audience interested can be a challenge, but remaining consistent on this front improves the chance of finding a regular audience for your content.
Retain your Core Identity: There are multiple social media channels with its own set environment and voice. Your brand message has to follow certain criteria to remain in tune with your core brand identity. The erosion of your brand identity can be a pressing reality when the brand is not discrete about the realities of adapting to the mood of a social platform. This is seen when brands try to emulate “accidental” successes of a few brands.
Sincere Content Promotion: Once the content has been produced, it should be considered the beginning as your aim should be to reach the maximum people in your target audience. The immediate goal here is to build a loyal following and ensure your content reaches them regularly without a miss. Great content and slight persuasion will lead the way in making the audience enable mechanisms (notification, email etc) to turn them from visitors to regular customers. These very customers would turn your brand advocates in the future.
Keep an Eye on Competition: Your competitors can be your guides’ uncovering “what works” and “what does not”. Keeping an eye on the competition will help you uncover insights into consumer behaviour and elements to be done away with during the course of the campaign. A failed campaign can unravel themes to be skipped altogether. On the other hand, a successful one helps you find new themes that can be replicated with better strategy and vision. A formula for success is rather elusive but finding inspiration among your competitors is about hedging the risk with a known idea.
Embrace Curated Links: SMM is about creating new and original content and garnering followers who in turn become regular consumers of content. However, in the course of time, you would come across brands producing great content within and outside your domain. If you are always on the lookout for interesting and engaging content for your followers by no means you should restrict yourself from showcasing other’s content on your site. In the long-term linking to outside sources improve trust and reliability and you could earn backlinks in return.
Measure Success with Analytics: After creation and marketing, it becomes essential to gauge the result of the campaign. Digital campaigns, unlike traditional marketing, can be quantified and measured. There are tracking processes available within the campaign to measure progress from start to finish. Analytics helps you determine the triumph of a marketing technique and strategies to be avoided altogether. All social media platforms have their own set of tools for analytics, make use of them to know insights into your audience behaviour. These tools help uncover immediate opportunities and chances to fine-tune content for improved results.
Always Be Prepared: The chances of failure outweigh success in SMM and it is not necessary that all things would go smooth as per plan. The team handling the campaign need to be well aware of this and need to be ready to go back to the drawing board. After re-assessing the plan, the process should be about going over the fundamentals and the framework of the campaign to determine where it went off-track. If the team does not see the blind-spots, seek outside help from a consultant to bring in a fresh perspective.
-------Sujit Susheelan
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