In the fast emerging world of digital, mobile and social media marketing, experimentation is always an ongoing task in order to optimize results as there is no “one size fits all” approach. There is a tendency to think that social media is a simple and easy to comprehend marketing tool, and one that provides businesses with the ability to interact in real time with a vast target market.
So what practical measures can you take to ensure that your social media strategy fulfills its potential?
1. Evaluate your Brand and Market
While creating a Facebook page would theoretically give you access to a billion potential customers, it means little unless you are have identified a target market and the way in which your brand can be of benefit to it. Service orientated businesses may prefer to use the written word to promote themselves through resources such as Twitter whilst product driven firms are likely to benefit from audio visual tools that can showcase their goods via Pinterest and Facebook.
2. Create an Integrated Strategy
Developing an integrated social media strategy, and one that takes in a number of different sites as part of a fully targeted campaign. This obviously should take into account insights from your landing pages using web analytics such as Google Analytics to determine source of traffic, demography, location, conversion of user base etc.
It could be said that Facebook is most likely to form the focal point of activities, other platforms such as Google +, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and Pinterest should not be neglected, in order to understand which of these offers the best advantage to your business.
Your “strategy” must be based on a clear vision of your brand, product or service. It should not always be about “likes” or “Follows”.
3. Be Flexible When Creating your Strategy
The nature of social media is evolutionary, as established resources diversify their service and new websites emerge regularly. It is crucial that you keep in touch with market trends as they develop, as be prepared to adapt your strategy to incorporate new resources that can boost your campaign.
These steps will not only help you to develop a purposeful social media strategy from the outset, but also ensure that you are able to sustain its performance over a prolonged period of time. Remember that the key lies in the word ‘strategy’, which means that you must invest time, thought and research into understanding each social media resource and the whether or not they are compatible with your brand.
Without this targeted approach, you run the genuine risk of missing out on genuine interaction and future sales conversions.