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A Social Strategy is the First Step to Achieving Social Marketing ROI
Posted on August 16th, 2012 by The PointBurst Team
Social media marketing is like anything else; success is best achieved when your actions are guided by thought. Traditional marketing methods and strategies just don’t work today as digital technologies and social media have changed the way we live, work, communicate, and even make purchases. But in their rush to get into social media for fear of being left behind and losing ground to competitors, many companies create a social media presence without first determining the goals they want to achieve by being there leading to frustration, missed opportunities, lost time, and the inability to determine that all important ROI. The solution is to determine your end goals so that you can create a strategy to meet them.
The answer to these three essential questions will help you start to form your social media marketing strategy:
1. What do you want to achieve? What is the business need or goal you are trying to address?
- Do you want to address a dwindling sales pipeline and get more leads into your funnel? Do you want to create more brand awareness? Bolster your brand’s reputation? Create a customer service channel?…
- There are many different reasons to use social media, see our earlier post to learn more.
2. Which social media networks should you use?
- Not every social network is appropriate for every business or for every goal. Each social network has different target audiences, and characteristics and should be used to achieve different goals. Identifying the appropriate network for you and focusing your efforts there will deliver better results.
- Some of the most important social networks include: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Google+, and Blogs. Click here to learn more about the features of these social networks.
3. How will you measure your results? What constitutes a successful ROI?
- Is a successful ROI expanding your fan base by X number of followers/fans/likes? Getting X number of leads from each social channel used? Is gaining actionable market intelligence and insight what will gauge your ROI?…
- Determining what you consider to be a successful outcome of your marketing strategy, a successful ROI, will help direct your social media efforts and allow you to gauge progress along the way.
By taking the time to answer these three questions, you and your team are able to create a social media marketing strategy that is targeted, actionable and aligned with your business goals. This strategy will allow you and your team to leverage the power and wonderful unique features of social media and put them to work for your brand!
This infographic from business consulting company Zintro created from research from more than a dozen sources including Mashable, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google profiles the top social networks for business.
