Don’t Do Social Media Marketing On The Fly: 4 Tips to Develop a Winning Strategy

I’m sure you’ve heard it before – you need to have a social media strategy for your business. Love it or hate it but it’s an important way to reach and engage with customers. Another important aspect of having a solid social media strategy is that it can affect your website’s ranking on search engines. Google looks at everything a business is doing online, and social media marketing and search engine optimization (SEO) really go hand in hand.

Learn How to Plan and Implement A Winning Social Media Marketing Strategy

Not too long ago, you’d get away with tweeting a few times here and there, put up some content on Facebook and maybe like or share a post on LinkedIn. Complex search engine and social media network algorithms now take a look at everything you do online. Based on the quality of your overall digital footprint, these algorithms decide whether or not your content reaches your target audience. The more effort you put into posting high-quality and relevant content to social media platforms, the more successful you’ll be.

If done right, the reward for implementing a powerful social marketing strategy can be tremendous and support your company’s bottom line to unseen levels. In this blog post, I’d like to discuss the importance of social media as part of your overall digital marketing strategy. I’ll also share four tips on what you need to pay attention to when getting started with your social media effort.

Four Things You Absolutely Need to Do

Let’s briefly discuss four components that are absolutely crucial to the success of your social media strategy:

#1. Understand Your Audience

Knowing which sites your audience visits regularly, reading what they post and evaluating social media metrics will all give you insight into your audience. You can learn about what problems your audience is having and address them through content marketing, customer support or product development. Targeting the right social media with the content that your customers need can help build your audience base, leading to more online traffic.

Before starting to work with new customers, we create an onboarding document together. As part of this process, we also develop Buyer-Persona profiles. If you haven’t done so already, I do recommend that you create a profile for all the people who may be involved in potentially purchasing your product or service. This handy questionnaire will get you started in no time:

• What’s their demographic information? (i.e. gender, ethnicity, disposable income, education, hobbies, urbanicity, etc.)
• What is their job title, level of seniority, etc.?
• What are mannerisms and buzzwords that describe them?
• What are their pain points and what does your product or service help them solve?
• What do they value most about your product or service?
• What are their goals in purchasing your products or services?
• Where do they go for information before making a purchase (i.e. social media networks, online forums, etc.)?
• What are common objections to your product or service?

The more you know about your target audience, the better and more efficiently you’ll be able to communicate and engage with them.

#2. Engage with Your Audience

It’s never been so easy to engage with your audience through the use of social media. Interacting with your audience can mean asking people to write a review for your business, reading and responding to comments on your Instagram photos or requesting a picture of your product for a giveaway. You can learn so much information about what your customers are saying and use that in future social media efforts and product development. Also, the more people comment and engage with your business on social media, the greater the chance that your website will rank higher in search engine results.

Positive reviews are not only great for improving the visibility of your website in the search engines, they are also an easy and convenient way for you to engage with the person who left the review. As you can see from the below screenshot, many of our students will leave a review on our Google Business Listing. I’ll always make sure to respond to the person and thank them for taking the time to leave the review:

#3. Consistent Branding

Using social media can help increase brand awareness for your company. As you start to rank higher in search engine results, you can reach people that you hadn’t been able to before. People may be searching for what you’re selling, but they don’t know your brand and products or services until you start ranking higher. If they continue to see your brand on various platforms, and the messages resonate with people, they’ll be more likely to search for your brand directly. Make sure that you use consistent and standardized branding assets so that your target audience can easily identify your social media platforms and posts.

#4. Become a Thought Leader

Positioning yourself as a thought leader in your industry is invaluable. I’m very passionate about LinkedIn and our digital marketing workshops usually include a section on how to take full advantage of this powerful business social media platform. When I had a chance to write for Social Media Examiner, a well known online publication platform, about LinkedIn and how businesses can take advantage of this powerful platform, I jumped on the opportunity. I wrote four in-depth articles for them and still continue to reap the benefits of this effort. The articles have been shared thousands of times on social media and I still get leads from people who are interested in working with me.

Once you start becoming known in your industry by writing for online publications and consistently posting relevant information to your own social media channels, your audience may start turning to you more and more when they have questions or need support. More hits to your website mean a better chance of ranking higher. If you’re seen as a thought leader, people may be more inclined to sign up for your newsletter, watch your webinar or engage with your social media efforts. All of this can improve your search ranking and overall online relevancy.

Key to Success: The 6-Step Social Media Marketing Strategy

We have long been offering search engine optimization and search engine marketing workshops and we’re thrilled to announce that we now also offer a half-day social media marketing course in the Denver area. Attendees learn how to implement a 6-step strategy that can make all the differences. We also discuss why social media and SEO work better together, the importance of content marketing best practices, we explore several of the most common tools and how to get the most of a social media advertising strategy. Ginny Hampton, Social Media Specialist at SocialSEO, recently joined me in hosting an hour-long online session and I hope you’ll find the time to watch this complimentary webinar:

Ultimately, if you have a good social media, content, digital marketing, and SEO strategy in place, you can increase the level of awareness and turn potential customers into buying customers. By generating high-quality content, and using social media to make your audience aware of the content, you’ll also naturally “educate” Google and other search engines about your business. Remember, search engines take a close look at everything that happens online and you’ll soon benefit from increased search rankings and more visits to your website. It’s truly a win-win situation.

Our digital marketing workshops are hands-on and attendees learn real-life examples of things that are working. I hope to see you in one of our upcoming courses; please don’t hesitate to reach out if I can answer any questions!