Strenuous yet beneficial. Profitably new. Meticulous…
Social Media Marketing is here to stay. And if you want your brand too, to persist in the long run, make sure you read this blog till the end!
Social Media Marketing has taken the definition of marketing a step ahead. And this one step is certainly the use of metrics to measure the outcome of the marketing strategies that we imply.
The way digital marketing can map down every ounce of the reach, impression, likes, and dislikes that your marketing strategy receives is certainly a blessing that the brightest offline marketing strategies were not able to bless you with.
To know more about why your brand needs digital marketing to grow to its fullest potential, click here.
Now that we are on the same cards as we are aware that our brands need Social Media Marketing and that too at the earliest, it is essential that we move to the next step: How to start social media marketing for your business!
In this blog, we have tried to respond to all the digital marketing enthusiasts, who are ready to begin with Digital Marketing, and fishing the internet for an appropriate Digital Marketing Strategy… Take a break, you have landed on the right blog-station!
Before we begin, let us share a brief moral with you…
While relating SMM strategies with a good consistent ROI, know that it needs YOU too to build your brand. Irrespective of whichever digital marketing agency you have invested in, if you are reluctant to assist your own brand is growing by understanding and providing what your social media presence needs from you… daydreaming about great ROIs shall stay distant dreams for once and for all.
So, with a practical approach, let’s begin to move through a seven-stage digital marketing plan curated to bring better tomorrows for your brand.
All the metrics won’t dig you gold.
Social media engages in vanity. True.
And thus, your social media strategy, that makes sure you are keeping money on the table while talking should be free of this baseless vanity.
We are not saying likes and retweets are meaningless, but these easily-measurable metrics do not truly add any real-value to your business in the long run. These are certainly integral in the honeymoon period of your brand, as in when it is just wed with the market and requires brand awareness. But once the relationship enhances, your brand certainly needs some better metrics to focus on.
Rather stress on Lead Generations, Website traffic and Shares. These metrics are real indicators that what you are putting up for your brand in the SMM pages: are not just being appreciated: but understood and found useful enough to be taken a step ahead.
Because that’s when it leaves an impact strong enough to convert an engagement into conversion in near time.
Thus, before you begin with the first step of your social media marketing plan, work on this small task given below.
You shall find a column of agendas (that your brand needs to fulfill) and a set of relevant metrics. Try to match the correct pairs.
Can you guess these right?
(Once done you shall find the correct answers below…)
| 1. Raising Brand Awareness | a. Website traffic, subscriptions to channels |
| 2. Ensuring Conversions | b. Social Media review Screenshots |
| 3. Lead Generations through filled forms | c. Comments, likes, tags |
| 4. Preserving Created Customers | d. Follow, Share |
Answers: 1(d),2 (c), 3(a), 4(b)
Now, that you know which engagement tactics is for which agenda, choose your agenda based on where your brand is standing in its career arc, and there you have your first step!
Eat your target market demographics and interests for breakfast.
An ideal digital marketeer is aware of the purchasing psyche of his ideal customer better than the back of his hand. Yes, we understand it’s difficult and you are no shrink.
But do you realize that maybe this might have been exactly what the business tycoons who have been developing legendary solutions as products and services, the goodwill of whose is still doing their rounds in the market after so many years, might have done!
A famous shoe brand that caters to the developing needs of athletes all across the globe today, was begun by a track and field coach, Bill Bowerman, who felt the pain caused by a bad shoe for an athlete by staying in the field throughout his career!
When an innovative pair of young men could not get a taxi in a late wintery evening, they realized the problem of those who miss opportunities in lack pf proper conveyances, and there came up the idea of a brand that would assist you in renting cabs!
So, it’s all about understanding the target market’s needs before building both your brand or, your brand page on Social Media.
So, stage 2, part 1, would be to draw a human figure, consider it your target market, and fill it in with all the criterions of interests and demographics that your experience says they can belong from.
Stage 2, part 2 would profess on gathering real-world data. The criteria that you assumed to be a part of your buyer’s personality traits until now have been your experience-based assumptions. Assumptions, as we all know, are often not in alignment with reality. And thus, in the next step you have to research through surveys or statistics available over Google, that what fraction of your assumptions were true, and draft a final list of research-backed buyer persona criterion list.
Once on Social Media, design posts and promote them, keeping in mind whatever you jotted down and the real stats that validated a few of those to be included in your buyer’s persona.
Learn while you run.
Running parallelly with competitors is a mandate for any business to survive. But what we often fail to do while running in this race, in learning from the ones we are competing with.
Go to the social media pages, and without even knowing which industry you belong to we can vouch on this, that the names in prominence from your industry are already there on Social Media giving a shout out about their presence to their target market on social media, every now and then…
While you sit quietly expecting someone to walk into your store!
The way of doing business has changed. And to take your profit curve towards that change, a social media presence is not enough. A competitive analysis is always required to understand your stance in the rat-race. Especially if you don’t plan to win it and yet come out as a rat.
Once you visit the social media pages of your competitors, at times you might as well be able to identify who are your exact competitors. Competition is not necessarily based on the profit scale. For some brands it’s as well about manufacturing processes, innovation investments, worker strength, customer loyalty…there can be various criteria towards evaluating the performance of a brand.
Understand your USP and follow the brands that compete based on those USPs. Social Media makes even competing so transparent. Understand and conduct a competitive analysis, practice social media listening, to get a better idea of what your target market expects out of your brand.
Talking about competitive strategies used by some grand brands in the world: do check out the Facebook account of GoPro, the Instagram account of Lego, the Twitter account of Disney & YouTube account of Google over a cup of coffee today evening!
Create a KRA sheet for each social media platform presence you have created.
Every social media platform has its own pros and cons. While planning your social media strategy ensure that you have planned in a way that it can utilize the pros of every Social Media Pedestal in favor of your brand.
For instance, if you are using Twitter for tutorials, and Snapchat for customer service you certainly are wasting money, effort, and time.
Before investing in any social media presence create an excel sheet where for any post in relevance to your brand you have an adjacently placed list of social media platforms and their specific KRAs so that the post agendas are always in alignment with the social media platform’s USPs.
In order to understand the social media platforms better the first step that you need to take is to open an account on every social media channel.
And to assist you in the process here are a few video tutorials from the makers of Get You At,