No matter where you look, you’re going to find marketing advice in every corner of the web that tells you how you need to take advantage of social media if you want to succeed today. So off you go and now you’ve got your Facebook account, your Twitter account and maybe you even signed up on Instagram and Pinterest too.
But what now? These aren’t your standard web pages. They’re not blogs either. How exactly do you take advantage of social media in your marketing?
Like most things, if you take it one step at a time and come up with a plan, it’s not so overwhelming. Let’s break it down into pieces that you can use to formulate a plan for putting the power of social media to work for your business.
Step 1 – Identify Your Goals
You first want to have an idea in mind of what you want to get out of your social media marketing. Do you want to increase brand awareness? Work to retain customers? Generate new leads?
Decide what you want to achieve and try to set 2 or 3 reasonable goals to concentrate on. If you try to do everything on the fly or spread your resources too thin between many different goals you’ll end up achieving nothing.
Step 2 – Set Clear Objectives
Once you have your main goals in mind, your next step should be to set individual objectives for each goal that you can use to measure success. You’ll also need to decide what tools and metrics will be used to make these measurements.
Each objective should also have a time frame attached. So, for example, if you were working to generate new leads, you could set your first objective to increasing sales leads by 50% within 6 months.
Your objectives should be realistic, specific, measurable and bound by a time frame to keep things on track.
Step 3 – Identify Your Target
It is essential to define as many details as you can about the characteristics of the audience you want to target. You should try to come up with and answer as many questions as you can about your perfect customer.
- How old are they?
- Are they men or women, or both?
- What is their average income?
- Where do they live?
- What are their likes and dislikes?
The more detailed you can get, the better. As you come up with this composite sketch of your ideal customer, you will be able refine your content and target your advertising with incredible accuracy.
