Any business must start with a plan, and the audience must also be defined elaborately if it is to succeed. Social media marketing is certainly a new form of advertising, yet it is now becoming an integral channel of marketing and advertising of business brands. Once you know your business objects and the audience, you can use the social media feedback cycle to identify demands, and offer solutions.
If you are to succeed in this, you must bear in mind the fact that all your efforts and expenses must have a good Return on investment. In order for that to be achievable, you must bear in mind the following secrets.
Choose Your Path
Just imagine that the world we live in is already so full of information that any information you need about anything is already readily available; it is a world in which there is information overload. However, being readily available is not the same as easily accessible.
The whole idea about advertising has always been to avail information to those who need it at the right time. Therefore, any successful social media marketing campaign starts with the end in mind, and this entails choosing the path you must trudge on. That is to say: what information do you want to give? What line of business are you doing? Once this is defined, you should decide how you want to deliver your message to the audience.
At the end of the day, he who delivers the most simple message, useful, timely, and short message carries the day in the marketing world. This is where you should let your creative juices to guide you. However, stay focused on the goals and never be carried away.
Define the Opportunity and the Audience
A message should have an audience, but if you don’t know what exactly your audience is, then you are in for a big trouble. A social media marketing campaign is not effective if it is not targeted. It is pointless trying to sell a Christian prayer book while most of your Facebook fan page/twitter followers are non-Christians. It doesn’t matter how interesting, timely or useful your campaign message is-if it is not targeted to the right people, you are chasing after the wind.
Defining the audience also means that you have identified their concerns, worries, and what they love. You’ve got to reach them and let them understand that you are there for them. As you do that, it would be more prudent to under promise and over deliver. In most cases, it is very tempting to over promise and end up under delivering. Remember, the customers will judge your performance based on your promises.
Select Your Channels
Not all social media companion messages can fit any business brand awareness campaign. A lot of care should be taken to determine the best channel to use for your social media marketing plan depending on your brand or the type of products you are selling. The type of channel you chose will also determine the tools and apps you’ll use.
Feedback
Don’t forget to measure your results once you have gone through all these steps. You’ll want to select the metrics of measuring the results so that you can respond to the feedback accordingly. For instance, you can use polls, forums, surveys, or comments to get feedback.
Respond
Sometimes how you respond to market feedback can make or break your business. Customers should be made to feel that their comments/views/suggestions/complaints are being treated seriously. Your response can involve replying to comments, solving a certain complain, explain stuff, listening to them, or engaging them in a discussion.
Photo Credit: Flickr/Rosaura Ochoa
