Simplify Your Social Media Strategy to Target Leads & Meet Goals
If you feel like you could use a little help when it actually comes to planning out a social media strategy for your website, business, blog, or brand, you’ve found yourself in a neat little place. Strategizing doesn’t need to be complicated, costly, or counter-productive. Follow this advice; take the steps you need to simplify, restructure, or begin planning a strategy that will meet goals and make them realistic to attain.
The 3 Simple Keys to Solidify Your Social Media Strategy
- Figure out your goals.
This is the seed to your success. For the established business, you didn’t get this far without building your brand to what it is today. You know very well that branding doesn’t magically come to existence. It must be created, and it all begins with building goals for your brand. Translate values through your brand image and into your social media strategy. You have a unique position to speak to your customers visually, literately, casually, entertainingly, and personally.
Clearly define:
- What do you want to get out of social media? Sales, leads, traffic, e-mails, customers?
- What kind of following do you envision building for your brand?
- Who is your target market? Where do they spend time online?
- How will you measure your success? In dollars, customers, or simply followers?
- Map out where you will be focusing your efforts.
After getting past the initial step of translating an existing brand image into an online brand in action (or creating a new one from the ground up), you must then break down where you can best take action. This step requires research or expertise on which social platforms are best for what purposes; how far you can spread out, yet still stay within a targeted, interested audience.
Outline your Social Map with these things in mind:
- Don’t be afraid to start small.
- A strategy in action should evoke quality, not quantity.
- Do thorough investigation for all the applicable social sites for your niche.
- If you don’t think you NEED a blog, think again.
Having your own blog on your own domain is a must in order to have a complete online marketing plan that will continue to prosper. Your social media strategy is the arena for the promotional aspect of your online marketing plan, and your blog is the secret media weapon. People don’t want to be bombarded with advertising, but inbound marketing, marketing that solves problems and speaks to readers, will do justice. Your blog content will boost SEO authority and gain organic traffic to your website when it is shared across social platforms. To leverage even further, promote on sites that are relevant to your niche for more quality links and exposure.
To improve your blog:
- Create an editorial calendar for your blog posts.
- Create a promotional calendar for promoting posts.
- Focus on creating content that will naturally want to be shared.
- Make sure people can share with social bookmarking, not just visit your Facebook page.
- Don’t forget to maintain social profiles by relatively following the 80/20 rule when promoting.
- Interact with other blogs by guest posting and leaving comments that add value to the conversation.