You’ve gotten your boss to buy into social media marketing but your results are less than stellar. What do you do next?
The answer depends on what you’re currently doing. Have members of your organization set up Facebook and Twitter accounts without considering your business goals or thinking through the marketing implications?
To get your social media marketing to the next level take a step back and assess what’s working and what’s not working with your current social media marketing approach. Here are seven steps to help you take your social media marketing to the next level.
- Do you know what your business objectives are for your social media marketing? If you’re not sure, there’s a good chance that your social media efforts are off course because you don’t have one! You need to be able to answer what are you trying to accomplish and why. This helps you to determine your target market and desired actions. Without this guidance, your may be trying to generate traffic when you should be looking for qualified leads.
- Do you use a targeted call-to-action with a related promotional code? If you’re looking to get prospects to take a specific action, it’s critical to lead them there and have a means to track their activity and results.
- Have you integrated appropriate social media sharing? Regardless of where you’ve placed content, on social media platforms and/or owned media, do you ask visitors to share your information via social bookmarking? Show the most popular options for your offering. At a minimum, consider Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Google+. Remember you can use social sharing on content that’s not social media. Don’t forget to include appropriate reminders to persuade readers to share your information.
- Are you using your other marketing and owned media to cross promote your social media efforts cost-effectively? This means including a blurb, link or sentence in your website, emailings, catalogs and packages. Be creative in how you leverage your existing content and media to get people involved. For example, I was in an ice cream parlor in Cambridge where they used a flatscreen to flash a few of their most interesting tweets and mobile messages.
- Are you incorporating video into your offering? Remember that your users have been trained to watch television since they were small. Besides, YouTube is the number two social media platform and the number two search engine. Also, bear in mind that video content extends beyond YouTube. Think 360 degree, panoramic views of your clothes and other types of video to help your buyers extend product usage. Remember to consider the size and type of the file so that it can play on a variety of devices (iPads & iPhones can not display Flash) as well as social media optimization.
- Have you thought to incorporate photographs into your social media mix? Think broadly when it comes to photographs since they’re truly eye candy that engages readers and draws them into your other social media content. This means that where possible you should integrate photographs to break up your long text content with visuals. Also, get your customers involved by getting them to submit photographs using your product.
- Are you measuring your social media efforts effectively? Like most marketing, it’s critical to track social media over time. Determine how you’re going to assess social media effectiveness before you implement your marketing. Remember, it’s useless to track pageviews if you’re looking to optimize sales.
Regardless of your current social media execution, you should be able to get your presence to the next level by systematically going through this checklist.
What would you add to this list and why?
Happy marketing,
Heidi Cohen
Here are some related articles.
- Do you know your social media marketing ABCs?
- 31 Signs you’re still not serious about social media.
- Share the social media love-21 tips to show you care
- How to guarantee your social media ROI is zero.
Photo credit: Ever Jean via Flickr
