Getting your Social Media Marketing right
Social media marketing is a powerful marketing tool that must be taken advantage of in a business
marketing campaign. It is not enough marketing effort to drive traffic to a website or run Google
search engine campaigns for business.
However, online Marketing for businesses should also extend to social media as it is a platform to
build brands reputation, create awareness and massive leads. This is the reason why businesses
should get on social media, see it has a platform to socialize, as well as a community to network and
meet potential buyers.
To take advantage of the several opportunities social media marketing presents, it is advised that businesses
make effective use of the social media marketing tool and map out a social media strategy that takes
into account the business goal and objectives.
Here are few tips to creating good social media strategies for businesses.
Understand your Goals
The first step to consider in creating a social media strategy is to understand the purpose of your
marketing effort. If it is to drive traffic to your website, enhance awareness for the brand, protect
brands reputation, customers service or drive more lead and sales. As this will give your business
strategy a direction towards what it aims at achieving; although, it is advised to focus on one or two
in other to get great result.
Reasonable Objectives
Set clear objectives that are directly tied to your business goals and focus on the S.M.A.R.T strategy
for goal setting to ensure the business objectives are Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Relevant and
Time bound.
Target Audience
Getting the right audience for a business social media marketing campaign is important. A marketer
needs to understand the common traits of people that buy specific products and services. This is to
give an idea on the type of content to push out during campaigns and help minimize wasteful
spending while maximizing conversions.
Competition
When it comes to social media campaign, never ignore your competition as you can learn from their
mistakes and successes. Carrying out research about your competition will give an idea on the
strategy that suits your business plan as this will give informed ideas on which social media platform
works best for your products and services as well as the right content to engage customers.
Develop Content
After researching on competition and the target audience, the next step is to develop unique
content. Be innovative, think outside the box, use images to support your text, make use of hash
tags and get ideas from your competitors’ content as your social media marketing presence needs to be very engaging
Choose your Channels
It is good to choose specific social media sites that suit your products and service. Make sure your
target audience are on that chosen platform, push out content relevant to your service and the
potential target audience at the right time so that the can engage with it
Create a Conversational Calendar
When developing content for social media marketing platforms it is best to create a conversational calendar
first as it helps to plan all content marketing activities, making it structured and organized. This is a
very important tool that most people ignore but utilizing it will help you develop content for a
particular period of time, keep your audience always expecting and it will also help to measure and
analyse how your audience engage with the content.
Allocate Budget
If asked ‘is there need to allocate budget for your social media campaign?’ The answer will be “Yes”,
as social media is not totally free. The marketing process cost your time, thoughts and money.
Putting some money in your marketing effort will give your campaign better reach, massive return
on investment and increased level of engagement.
Measure Analyse and Optimize
You can’t use social media and not apply the marketing analytics to your campaign as this is what
puts a meaning to your entire strategy effort. The marketing analytics gives a solid insight into
money spent, your customer’s preference and measures successes as well as improve on what is not
working well.
The best way to improve your strategy and come up with better ways to interact with potential
buyers is to implement marketing analytics into your strategy and report results on a daily or weekly
basis to avoid wasteful spending.
Nigeria
