Energize Your Marketing
Through Social Media
Part 1 of 3
Social media marketing has recently grabbed the attention of both B2B and B2C businesses. We have all noted companies rising from obscurity to stardom using social media networks. Most businesses today recognize that they need to add social media tactics to their marketing strategies. Perhaps you’ve already added a Facebook or Twitter link to your Web site, or started a blog. At this point, you’re realizing that these tactics have relatively little impact unless they’re integrated into a broader social media marketing strategy. Twitter, Facebook, blogging and SEO campaigns are basically tactics and nothing more. This article will help you adopt a big picture perspective on social media. I’ve included proven guidelines for developing your integrated social media strategy. Once you put your strategy in place, the strategy itself will help you isolate which social media tactics to use, how to launch effective campaigns and how to measure the results of those campaigns.
5 keys to strategy development
When developing your social media strategy, make sure it answers the following questions:
ATTRACT: How can I attract my target market to my marketing channels?
CONVERT: How can I increase conversion rates, turning potential customers into actual ones?
INTEGRATE: How can I integrate the messaging and impact of all my social media channels?
BUILD: How can I strengthen brand loyalty, keeping my customers once I get their attention?
MEASURE: How can I test a campaign and measure my success?
Attract
Attracting consumers with social media requires rich content, appropriate placement, frequent communication, viral marketing and built-in interaction.
Content
Content is king in social media. Engaging, compelling and interactive content will do more than anything else to attract visitors. To develop brand-friendly content: Brainstorm key phrases, metadata and search terms using the four brainstorming channels:
- Your products and services
- Your customers’ problems or needs
- Actual or perceived benefits
- Your competition
Test your terms. Once you feel your marketing team has identified the key words that will help your customers find you, test those terms. Excellent test aids that will cost you less than $100 include:
- KeywordDiscovery.com
- Wordtracker.com
Align your copy. Once you know what search terms your customers are using, your Web site, your blog, your online articles, your Facebook posts and your Twitter Tweets will all benefit from a rewrite that aligns your content with your key words.
Placement
To attract members of your target market, you need to find where they “hang out” on the web. What Twitter accounts or lists do they follow? What Facebook groups are they part of? What LinkedIn groups do they belong to? For example, a search on LinkedIn for groups associated with the keyword “healthcare practitioner” results in 11 different healthcare-related groups. If this feels overwhelming, the following applications can make tracking your target market on the Web much easier:
- Tweetdeck.com (allows you to separate tweets into columns and organize columns by interest)
- Digg.com (sorts and displays articles and online content that have achieved major search engine attention)
- Technorati.com (correlates blog research needs, includes top tags, top 100 blogs, topics searched, etc.)
Frequency
Social media is current, and social media campaigns require frequent updating in order to be effective:
- Twitter accounts should be updated 5-15 times per week
- Facebook profiles should be updated at least once a week (preferably once a day)
- Email blasts should be sent out prior to events and press releases
- LinkedIn group interactions should occur at least twice a month
- An active blog posts at least twice a month
Viral marketing
Social media is incredibly effective because of its viral ability to tap into pre-existing social networks. To make your campaign more “viral,” make sure all your webpages (not just the homepage) have links to Facebook, Twitter, RSS feeds and other social media sites. Also, link social media pages to each other so that viewers can pass the page along (tweet, post, etc.) to their entire social networks with a single click.
Interaction
Social media is interactive. Allowing customers to comment on blog and Facebook posts, or retweet Twitter tweets to their friends, or engage in games, contests and surveys on your Web site all increase the interactive nature of their experience. Research has shown that there is a strong correlation between how interactive social media is and how effective it is.
Continue to part 2: Energize Your Marketing Through Social Media.
