Hi folks and welcome to my very last blog on how to be effective in social media marketing! I am going to discuss steps 8 and 9. Thank you for reading my blog and I hope it has helped you’s become more effective in your social media marketing!

8. Integrating with the rest of your digital strategy

Social media marketing isn’t all about brand awareness. More than half of marketers using social media say it helps improve sales, which is why it’s important to integrate social media marketing into your larger digital marketing strategy to get the most out of it.  

Thanks to tracking tools like Google Analytics, it’s easy to attribute web traffic and site behavior to different marketing channels. This data will help you visualize how to make these different strategies work together to achieve your overall marketing goals.

Some of the marketing strategies you want to integrate include are:

• Content marketing
• PPC and display advertising
• Email marketing
• Search engine marketing
• Offline marketing

All of these strategies can work in combination to nurture your leads and help them move down the sales funnel.

9. Tracking analytics

Analytics tracking is one of the most important things you can do to improve your social media marketing strategy over time. Tracking analytics gives you a detailed picture of what kind of content and promotion strategies work – along with the ones that don’t – enabling you to adjust and improve.

So how can you measure the success of your campaigns? While 80% of marketers use engagement metrics (likes and shares) to evaluate success, 56% base social media marketing success on website traffic. You may want to use a combination of the two – the specific metrics you focus on will be relative to your goals (raising awareness might better align with social metrics, while referral traffic is a better indicator of sales).

Here are the most common tools people use to measure social media marketing results:

• Native analytics tools on Facebook, Twitter, etc. (65%)
• Social media management platforms like HootSuite and Buffer (62%)
• Web analytics such as Google Analytics (59%)
• Dedicated social media measurement platforms (22%)

Measuring ROI will likely require you to look at big-picture data, as well as engagement metrics. This all goes back to your original marketing goals and associated metrics – how well have your various social media campaigns helped you achieve them?

Hi guys, and welcome back to my marketing blog! Next on the agenda is steps 6 and 7!

6. Choose your platform

If you want to effectively target your audience, you’ll want to reach them on several different networks – but that said, you shouldn’t plan to have a presence on every single platform. You’re limited by your time and resources, so you don’t want to stretch yourself too thin.

There are a lot of factors you should consider when choosing the right social platforms for your business:

An unactive account for a business on a social media platform looks a lot more unprofessional than not having one on that platform at all. So make sure that you choose the right platform that suits your needs and wants!

Consider the purpose of each platform, and how it relates to your business goals – Facebook’s great for building brand loyalty, for example, while LinkedIn is best for B2B business development. You’ll also want to think back to the demographics of your target audience to help decide which platforms are the most worthwhile.

You need to ask yourself, how active are my target audience on social media? How many profiles and platforms do they use? And what is their most used platform?

7. Producing Content

Your social media strategy will require a mix of content to be successful, so you’ll need to develop a process to create this content, and maximize its worth.

If you want to ensure optimal performance of your content, make sure it’s:

1. Visual – include an image! This makes it more likely for people to share your content. You know what they say, a picture paints a thousand words!
2. Emotional – Create content that evokes awe, excitement, or amusement to encourage engagement and shares.
3. Useful – People like to share content that they think might be helpful or educational for others. So find a way to offer something of value to your social followers.

Hi guys and welcome to my third blog post! This week I am going to continue to talk about the next steps you should make following on from my last post!

4. Build your team!

Your big decision here is deciding if your internal staff will head your social media marketing strategy, or if you’ll outsource the work. It is understandable that all companies, especially smaller ones, may find it hard to accommodate the resources needed to run effective social media marketing campaigns. You could utilize a combination of both internal employees and external marketers – it’s easy to find freelancers who will manage your social accounts online, this would reduce your workload and make it more sustainable.

Don’t struggle, use tools!

Some of your social media marketing tasks will be easier with the help of tools – for example, PicMonkey and Canva are photo editing tools you can use to make your visual social media posts more appealing to the consumer and have a professional finish!

Here are some other tools you can use to simplify social media campaigns for you or your team:

• Blog aggregator tools – Use a tool like Feedly to aggregate all your blog feeds in one place. Easily select content to share with your audience all from one platform.
• Social media automation tools – Use Hootsuite, Buffer, or another tool and schedule your social posts to go out at optimum times. They’ll also help you analyze your results.
• Social following tools – Use ManageFlitter or FollowerWonk to identify and follow your target audience.

5. Research, research and more research!

Once you know who’s going to run your campaigns, and what tools they’ll use to create it all, it’s time to research. The reason why I emphasized this so much in the above title is because reasearch is what will give you competitive edge over your competition.

If you research correctly, find out exactly what resonates with your target audience, when they are most active and likely to consumer your brand and your message, then you can run extremely effective social media marketing campaigns and the results will be clear in your analytics! You should also take this time to identify which types of content generate the best response from your target audience.

In my last post I talked about creating a persona for your marketing campaign and also setting goals. This week I am going to touch on step 3! By following these steps you will be well on your way to creating content and being effective in your social media marketing!

3. Budgeting

So, following on from setting your goals, the next thing you need to do is decide on how much money you want to allocate to your social media marketing strategy. How much of your budget you allocate to social media will depend on a lot of factors. The most foremost factor being what type of company you are. Are you a large-scale business and do you need to get authorisation from people above you? Or are you a small family business with limited funds for marketing? Each different type of business will have different needs and the great thing about social media marketing is that it is very adaptive to all forms of business, whether you have plenty to spend or very little.

Break it down!

Breaking down your expenses and sorting them into easily understandable categories will make it a lot simpler to know where your money is going and how much you want to invest in each category of your social media marketing strategy. Here are some of the areas that you need to have funds to invest in.

• Campaign content
• Paid social promotions
• Social media management tools
• Community engagement efforts
• Analytics tools

Over the next couple of weeks I’m going to write a step-by-step blog on how to be effective in Social Media Marketing. Social Media is an extremely powerful resource for Marketers and can propel a company into the spotlight when used correctly. This will not happen immediately, you have to master the strategic stage first.

1. The first thing you want to do when beginning a social media campaign is to create a persona for this campaign. This will help you to connect with you target audience better through your posts on social media apps and websites. You need to build a persona around who you believe your target audience really is. Start building this persona and have an in-depth look at the characteristics of such, who are they? What are their hobbies? Their biggest fear? Their biggest goals? What are their needs and how do they behave? You need to have a full understanding of the demographics of your audience.

2. Set your goals! Once you achieve step one and you know who your audience are, you then need to begin setting goals. You need to identify key elements of your campaign which you want to focus your marketing efforts on. Specifically, ask yourself, what do you wish to achieve with this marketing campaign? Whatever goals that you decide on. Make sure that there is a way of measuring the success of these goals and whether or not you’ve achieved what you wanted to. Each goal must be measurable. For example, if you set a goal of increasing interaction with your posts on Instagram, this would be measurable through the amount of likes and comments a post is receiving. By doing this you are able to decipher exactly how effective your efforts are and if you need to change your strategy again.

Thanks for joining me!

Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton