The first part of any successful marketing campaign is to do a thorough analysis of what you are working with and what your goals are. Determining the proper course of action is dependent on figuring out where you want to end up. Is your goal to sell a product? To increase brand awareness? To manage your brand and converse with your audience? Realistically, the answer is “yes.” What I mean is that your social media strategy should be a combination of all of these things.
Social media is unique because it gives you an opportunity to talk directly to your customers, clients, competition and friends all in one place and in the open. You can use social media to humanize a company as well as to nurture your business relationships.
Setting Goals
The first step in analyzing what you would like to do is to set some goals. Break them down into time frames and map goals for each. What are your short term, medium term and long term goals? Once you start examining these questions, you will start to see your plan forming a cohesive structure.
Some potential goals include gaining more Facebook ‘Likes’ in order to initiate more conversation and sell directly to an opted-in audience. Or getting more followers on Twitter for the same purpose. Your goals might also be as simple as getting on Pinterest or Instagram to connect to an entirely different audience. Whether your goals are to get in the game, advance in the game or dominate the game, mapping them out is step one towards building your plan.
I prefer to separate goals into short term and long term to start, then add a few other segment in. Perhaps you define short term as the next three months and long term as five years from now. That’s fine, but where do one year from now plans go? Have a few segments and string them together. Perhaps your short term goal right now is to get a Pinterest account. Then the ensuing short term goal once you have it is to get active on it. Then there will be another short term goal with getting results from it. That adds up to a goal for about six months to a year from now maybe. Create a timeline map and fill in your goals with each platform over time and for your overall strategy in the same times.
Mark Your Territory
Before you can dominate the social media market, you need to make sure you are in it. If you don’t already own the name you want for your profiles, get to getting! Securing your name is an important step in controlling your brand and your message. Even if you don’t plan to use YouTube or Instagram for marketing, sign up and get your name off the market. Not only will this ensure that you own the name if you do decide to market there, but it keeps others, competitors or otherwise from having access to your name. Better to own your preferred username and never use it than to not own it or have control over it.
At this point, you can start to branch out your goals into not just the overall plan, but a channel-by-channel plan. Set your Facebook goals. Create a Twitter gameplan. Build your LinkedIn profile to get it done. Examine what Pinterest and Instagram and YouTube and any other sites might offer your company. If you think you have a reason to be active on a network, set goals and get active there.
Connect
Once you have your profile created, build it out with all of the relevant information. Be sure that your website and links to other profiles are set up and your businesses contact information is up to date. You can create a virtual daisy chain between all of your profiles to alert your audience where else you can be found. Perhaps someone that saw you on Twitter spends far more time on Facebook. Point them over there. Maybe someone who saw your product on Pinterest wants to communicate more. They should not have to jump through hoops to find your Twitter profile or a link to your full website.
Sharing and following should be made easy on your website as well. If you are using WordPress or a similar CMS to run your website, you can likely find a good plugin to help share your information. This site uses AddThis as our main WP plugin to allow you to share or follow us right from the site. Most plugins are pretty customizable and allow you to connect many sites at once. When you have all of your profiles made, you need to allow people to find them. And if you blog regularly (you should – we’ll get to that!), allowing people to easily share what you write is important.
So in step one, we are analyzing what needs to be done to create the best possible social media strategy. You could say we are setting ourselves up for future success. Lay the foundation for success. Set your goals, determine what you want out of social media marketing, reserve your name and create your profiles, then connect them to your main site and each other. Once this is done, the foundation is built to market to your audience. Now all you need is to develop your plan and get some good content out there!
PART TWO:DEVELOP!