Social media marketing is a strategy used to build brand awareness, boost sales, and increase website traffic to your website. This includes publishing good content in your social media profiles, engaging and listening to your followers, monitoring your results, and conducting social media promotions. While this seems like a lot to do for a relatively new marketing strategy, it is really not as complex as one might think. In fact, the process can be simplified down to four steps: engaging, communicating, listening, and measuring.
The first step in implementing social media marketing effectively is to engage your audience. Your audience is people who you want to engage with, so you should treat them like you would any other customer. In other words, make sure you respond to questions, encourage interaction, answer their questions, offer incentives for referrals, etc. As you do so, you are building trust with these prospects. They will begin to respond to your brand and to what you have to say, which will increase your online presence and hence, brand awareness.
The second step is communicating. Whether you use Facebook, Twitter, or any of the other social media networks, you need to communicate with your prospects and engage with them in some way. This is usually done through asking questions, answering questions, providing information, etc., but it can also be as simple as commenting on an article, leaving a blog post, joining a group, etc.
The third key takeaway is to measure your results. Many social media marketers fail to measure their results because they don’t track anything, which means that they aren’t able to provide solid proof that their strategies are working. You should measure your results against your goals. If you want to drive traffic to your site, then you should see what kind of audience you’re attracting to your site or blog on Facebook, YouTube, etc.
Finally, you need to execute your strategy. There is no good reason for failing at social media management. It’s all about executing your plan, measuring your strategy, monitoring your results, engaging with your audience, and implementing your strategy. The only way you will fail is if you do not execute your plan and your strategy. Therefore, your responsibility is to ensure you execute your social media management strategy.
All of these points are important to understand if you want to take your marketing online seriously. If you have a marketing goal, you must also have a set of tactics and measures that are required to meet that goal. If you do not have a clear idea of how to reach your target, what metrics to look at to track your progress, or how to measure your results, then you will be floundering in the water like a fish out of water. Therefore, if you want to get serious about your social media advertising strategy, you must understand the importance of engagement, the necessity of measuring your metrics, and the necessity of implementing strategies to engage with your audience. By following these tips, you can create a compelling, analytical social media marketing plan that will provide you with solid engagement results.