Perhaps you've heard great things about Social Media Marketing and what it'll do for your business. Maybe you've already started developing a plan for how you're going to gain leads and visitors through social media marketing. And that's great. No really, it is. Social media is a powerful marketing tool, and if your social game is on point, you're going to see some good results.
But there's one thing you need to remember if you’re going to be successful. Effective social media marketing is not a standalone discipline. Maybe that's a controversial statement to make. I'm going to stand by it, however, because I've witnessed it firsthand working at Struto.
What do I mean by saying social media isn't a standalone discipline?
In B2B marketing, social media is one just marketing tactic within a broader marketing strategy, and not a campaign all by itself. Test the idea for yourself: Are you running social media with the end-goal of generating likes and shares, or do you use social media to move the needles of traffic, lead generation and conversion?
That's right, social media success can be an effective tool to support your overall marketing campaign goals and objectives, but it's not a goal in itself.
It stands to reason then that social media needs to be informed by a well thought out marketing strategy and executed within a digital marketing campaign with established goals, and not executed without the support of an inbound marketing strategy.
So, What Does a Solid Social Media Marketing Plan Look Like?
An effective social media marketing plan is one that works towards the achievement of your business's overall marketing objectives and goals. It works alongside other inbound marketing activities, delivering measurable data, along with contributing to lead generation and conversion and boosting engagement with not only prospects but customers as well.
Key Elements to Developing a Social Media Strategy
Your Buyer Persona
Your buyer personas, or target audience, are responsible for driving all the marketing decisions you make. This goes for an inbound marketing strategy, and is certainly true when creating a social media marketing strategy. Before jumping into any social media activities for your business, you need to ensure your buyer personas are well-researched and clearly described.
This allows you to target your content, whether curated or created, and to ensure it's relevant and helpful to your fans and followers.
Your Overall Marketing Goals
Social media marketing done correctly can do wonders for your website's traffic and lead generation. But to decide which social media marketing activities will bring you the greatest amount of wins, you need to be able to look at your overall marketing goals, and then decide on social media marketing goals that support them accordingly.
Remember to develop both your inbound marketing and social media goals around a SMART framework. This means they need to be specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and timely.
Your Budget
While it costs nothing to create a social media account, social media marketing does require effort, which relates to labour costs. Creating content and taking the time and resources to maintain your accounts will have an impact on your marketing budget and the portion of it designated for social media marketing.
Additionally, social media advertising can be a valuable tool if you have resources within your budget to allocate towards it. If your overall marketing goals are best supported by the addition of paid advertising on social media, you can add it into your social media marketing strategy, provided your budget will allow for it.
A personal approach
On social media, you deal with people, not businesses or corporate entities. There is no need for corporate language, even if you are the social manager of a major corporate conglomerate. I’m not saying you should discard proper, professional use of language. Rather replace industry specific jargon with a relaxed tone.
People use social channels for recreational purposes. Communicate with your audience as if you are having a conversation with them. Having a personal touch to your brand builds trust between you and your followers.
Entertaining or Educating your Audience
People visit social channels to become informed about current topics, for entertainment purposes or to rant and rave about what the Kardashian family has been up to lately. They certainly don’t go there to become a subject of marketing.
Never force your marketing message down someone’s throat. Do what all successful inbound marketers do and attract viewers to your page with entertaining or informative content. If your content has any value to the reader, they are likely to interact with it and will most probably share it.
Focus on educating people with your message. They will regard you as a trusted source of information and will returns if they ever have any queries related to your industry.
Alternatively, entertaining people also works like magic, but constantly creating entertaining content can be challenging. Having a mixture of both is the magic formula.
By solely promoting your product or service, the entire time will drive your visitors away and prompt people to unfollow you. You want to expand your reach not limit it. Give the people what they want.
Become a Community Contributor
Correctly utilising social groups has unprecedented value for your social strategy and overall marketing goals. For instance, Facebook and LinkedIn both have groups consisting of people interested in specific topics. Go dig between the thousands of groups. I’m confident you will find a group of at least 100 members sharing thoughts and ideas on a daily or weekly basis about a subject that closely relates to your product or service.
The secret to incorporating social groups into your strategy is to become a part of the group. Become a valued contributor, sharing your thoughts and opinions. Once group members discover that you are a trustworthy source of information, they will interact more and will click through to your website.
Becoming a part of a community gives you a better idea of the specific needs of certain individuals. If you have the solution to their needs and they regard you as trustworthy, you can guarantee yourself a lead conversion.
Paint a Picture
Imagery has always played a major role in social communities, but the use of images has never been more important than now. With the tremendous growth in social media users over the last few years, the amount of posts created are mind-blowing. On a daily basis, 500 million Tweets are sent, and 70 million photos and videos added to Instagram. For more fun social media facts, click here.
With such a massive amount of posts being published each day it easy for your tweet or post to disappear between the millions of other messages. You need your message to stand out above the noise.
A great trick to make your post stand out is to add a relevant image to your post. The image must be relevant and not enforce clickbait mentality. Doing so can only hurt your trustworthiness as a brand, causing people to unfollow you, hide your posts or worst case scenario report you as spam.
Consult with your designer or take a look at your brand guideline document to see the type of images that goes well with your brand. You do not want to hurt your image by using low-quality images. What you want is high quality, attention grabbing images that will stand out above the rest.
Stick to Specific Time Slots
The times you choose to post on social media are key when it comes to seeing success in your efforts. There are certain times that are optimal for seeing a return in engagement on your postings, and these vary from channel to channel, business to business and buyer persona to buyer persona.
If you're just starting out, you can following simple guidelines like posting on Facebook are in the afternoons late in the week and on weekends, and on Twitter during a workweek is between 12-3 p.m. However you ultimately want to use your social analytics to determine your social media sweet spots - those times when your target audience is most active and engaged.
Create a Comprehensive Calendar
If you're like me, getting busy with work often means you miss the opportunity to maximise your social media scheduling - things crop up, you keep saying you'll get around to posting a bit later and the next thing you know you've missed another opportunity. If you struggle to juggle your workload, creating a calendar and social scheduling system is the answer. Using a marketing software platform like Hubspot is an excellent way to not only schedule (and track) your social media activities, but also many of your other inbound marketing activities as well.
Never Miss a Chance to Monitor
Knowing when your readers or customers mention you on social media, or when a target audience member engages with you is vital in ensuring you make the most of social media strategy. HubSpot's Social Inbox allows you to set up streams to monitor for mentions, based on keywords or terms, specific brand or product mentions (even competitors). If you aren't a HubSpot customer, you could use tools like Hootsuite or Mention.com to make sure you're not missing an engagement opportunity.
Promote Brilliant Content
Your content needs to be exemplary. It's as simple as that. It's your ability to create content that captures the heart of your buyer persona and lets them know you get their pain points that'll see you enjoying better engagement on social media. So when you craft your content, stay buyer persona-focused and work towards creating the type of content that people love to share.
Once you've got your content creation on track, it's time to get promoting. These means sharing your content out on a regular basis and sticking to your scheduling to ensure your content gets the exposure it needs.
Keep Up the Conversation
Engage, engage, engage! Too many businesses fall into the trap of spamming their content on social media and skipping on fostering meaningful engagement with their target audience. If you're monitoring your social media well (see point 5), you'll soon spot opportunities for engagement with your followers, and it's up to you to grab them with both hands!
Use #Hashtags Carefully
Hashtags are everywhere - and they're a big part of social media that you can't afford to ignore. They're normally used to tag content . Unfortunately they're often used incorrectly, which completely defeats the purpose of using them in the first place. Each social media platform has a best practice for using hashtags - and most have guides to help you through using them correctly.
Some general guidelines include the following:
- Don't overdo it - less is more
- Don't hashtag everything
- Don't create overly long hashtags
- Do create relevant and unbranded hashtags
- Do be specific
Having a marketing strategy in place is crucial to seeing your social media marketing succeed. If you're already well underway with your marketing and you're looking to get your social media marketing on the go, here's how you can create a social media marketing plan. Need a little help? I'm here to answer any questions you might have about inbound marketing or social media. Just ask away!
