8 Important Factors That Make a Successful Strategy for Social Media Marketing

8 Important Factors That Make a Successful Strategy for Social Media Marketing

Conducting a business has been relatively made easier with the advent of the social media. Bygone are the stiff option of spending a lot of money in order to advertise via traditional methods.

But while you can still opt to spend on social media to market your business with startling results, blindly tapping on this platform will not guarantee you better results unless you know what social media marketing was about.

Believe it or not, your effort of trying to reach a wider audience via social media will go long ways by knowing the underlying mechanics about it than merely dumping wads of cash in the hopes of growing your business as a result.

Let us help you get your social media marketing strategy work at your first attempt at it by knowing these 8 critical elements that make it a success:

1.Know your business goals

The social media offers enough flexibility that could enable any user to do many things at it, particularly for business. But without specific goals, the social media makes for a very vast terrain which forks at every direction and not reach a specific destination.

One very efficient early steps you could take therefore about your social media marketing strategy is to identify the needs of your company and how your chosen platform—social media—can aid with those. Generally-speaking, however, most businesses use the social media for the following purposes:

To increase exposure to a wider audience (branding)
Keep in touch with the existing customer base and retain them
Reduce the bottom line of the overall marketing costs

While you could come up with a myriad of goals in line with the purposes listed above, it is suggested that you focus only on two primary and two secondary goals. Again, trying to do everything at once is like heading at every direction which the platform gives you, only to end up lost and not reaching your goal. You do not want that.

2.Be clear when setting your marketing objectives

You may already have your goals to go for, but if you do not have an end-point for each, you will never know if you are achieving your goals. If you want to make your goals to be as attainable as possible—and thus, more realistic—you have to set some parameters that make them so.

For instance, if one of your main goal is to generate enough sales to keep your business afloat and growing, set a specific amount of revenue to target, whether the numbers are high or low. That way you would have a way of knowing that you are meeting your target goal or not.

Ideally, you would know if your objective is proper when it meets the standards of the so-called SMART approach which is an acronym for specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound.

3. Target your target clients

If your business is struggling in making engagements, the chance is good that you do not have a specific type of consumers in mind as the ideal consumers. Even when your line of business is aimed at the general public, you should still be finding a commonality among your buyers based on certain demographic data.

This method may require a bit of statistical data gathering, but this is the most efficient way of knowing who your real consumers are among the larger population. Knowing so, you could easily adapt by pivoting your business strategy towards your target consumers.

4.Identify your competitors

Unless the products or services you are selling is one-of-a-kind, which no other knows of, expect to have some competition in the line of business you are trying to profit from. Knowing this, research a handful of companies that are offering the same products or services as your business do.

Call it business spying, but one effective way of standing out from the rivalry is to offer an overall better quality of products or services that your competitors cannot. Primarily, you would only this by knowing how the competition fares against your business.

Essentially, what this move calls is for you to keep up-to-date with the competition and try as you might to do better at what your rival companies are doing.

5.Find proper channels

There are literally tens or hundreds of social media platforms out there, each of which catering to overlapping or unique demographics and purposes. While you can put the effort and have your business exposure in all of them, not all of these platforms may offer the same quality of results as another.

For instance, you may get better engagement when you are marketing using Facebook but may not be the same case with Twitter given the demographics of your target clients. While you may try to even things out and push more marketing with Twitter to the level that of Facebook, sometimes the effort may not be worth it in the end.

Instead of trying to get more well-rounded with your approach, just focus on those channels which provide your favorable results and ditch those which are only wasting your precious time.

6. Plan and develop a content strategy

The social media may be a place of trivial things such as a repository of a person’s random rants and useless pictures. But the good aspect of the social media is also a thriving source of good contents, too.

If you want your business to be taken seriously, you would need to attract your target clients’ attention by providing them quality contents. In conjunction, do not neglect of other factors that will make your posts effective in its intended purposes such as time of its posting and the frequency by which they were rolled out.

Remember, much like everything that is profitable on the internet, quality content is king!

7.Set aside resources and budget

The use of the social media may be free for the most part but, if you are using it as a marketing platform, you would need to spend a little bit to make your approach go a long way. Apart from the platform itself, you would also need other tools or manpower that themselves might require some costs to acquire or use.

8.Assign a dedicated personnel to do the job

While you may be capable enough on your own to handle the marketing of your business using the social media, but there are evidently more benefits in having more manpower with this goal. Whether it is about having someone dedicate his time in providing quality contents for your social media page or one to handle customer inquiries via the platform, there are plenty of roles which other people could fill to make your business boom.