With the personal nature and rapid growth of social media, businesses have realized a more powerful form of marketing that beats network marketing and traditional advertising combined. Social media marketing can drive substantial traffic and sales leads to your website increasing earnings as well as giving your business much needed exposure. Just like with other marketing strategies, you will only reap benefits if you carefully plan and implement a social media marketing strategy. Like most businesses do, placing links to all social media sites in the world will not automatically result to success.
The real power of social media lies entirely on social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and MySpace. Social networking sites have been become a part of people’s daily lives. Thus, investing time, effort and money on social networking sites is ideal. Social media strategies can reach a bigger and more global audience. Similarly, starting a social media campaign isn’t that costly compared to mainstream marketing and promotion campaigns. For that matter, most businesses allocate a portion of their advertising funds to social media strategies.
The great thing about using social media is that a company has great flexibility in what it wants to do to connect with an audience. Social media allows a company to customize the experience that a customer has, and allows a company an unparalleled opportunity to really connect with customers. The following are effective steps on how you can integrate social media strategies in your business:
Set Goals
Clearly outline your goals and analyze if you can afford the time for social media marketing. It is about forming and retaining human relationships and this requires commitment as opposed to running ads on websites. It’s at this point you might consider hiring a social marketing manager if you are not up to the task.
Research
Thoroughly research on the social media platform you intend to use. Just because Facebook has more users, it doesn’t automatically qualify as part of social media marketing strategy. Afterwards, you might realize you can get better results with smaller social media sites that are in tune with your business. You should also consider how well the platform lets you integrate with users and the level of automation they allow. Automation in social media marketing saves time while increasing throughput.
Start your campaign
Launch your campaign not by spamming but by following conversations aimed at forming relationships. When running a social media marketing strategy, you need friends or followers that trust you. You will not get them by jumping into conversations and posting irrelevant information about your business. Doing so will result to you being labeled a spammer, something you don’t want in any marketing strategy.
Measure success and make adjustments
Once you have established trust from friends, and social media traffic is flowing your way, measure your return on investment. Your social media marketing strategy might be a success but might not be meeting your end goals such as sales generation. At this point you need to make more adjustments like examining why you have such a high inbound rate and low click through rate.
Improve and keep changing with the trend
What works this season might not work the next. Social media is a hungry crowd that needs constant feeding. However, if you keep feeding it the same thing; it will look for something more interesting elsewhere. Keep a close eye on trends and exploit them.On the other hand, it isn't always a bad idea to offer exclusivity to those who follow the business online. By giving special deals to those who follow online, or offering coupons exclusively online, it can make those following the business to feel special. It can lead to a special bond between those who follow online and the company and lead to a good base of loyal customers. This can not only lead to customer loyalty, but can encourage a larger following online.
Social media is a great tool to use in order to gain a larger market share and to solidify the brand. A good social media strategy will allow a company to interact with its customers and allow that company to refine flaws in products, offer great deals to consumers and build customer loyalty. This does nothing but increase sales and exposure for the company.
Source:
http://www.convinceandconvert.com/social-media-marketing/develop-a-social-media-strategy-in-7-steps/
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