Steps to Create a Winning Social Network Marketing Strategy
Social Network Marketing is the Gateway to Your Target Audience
Today, there are a plethora of online digital platforms where you can market your business—Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest to name just a few. By engaging with your target audience over the internet using these platforms, you’re doing social network marketing (SNM). SNM is a form of online marketing that utilizes social networking sites as a marketing tool.
Naturally, the goal of network marketing on these online platforms is producing content that users will share with their social network, which will ultimately help a company to increase its brand exposure and widen its reach. At least this is what the theory says but how much truth is there in the above statement?
For example, according to Statista, approximately 70% of the people in the U.S has at least one social profile. Next, there are about 2.5 billion active worldwide social media users. Moreover, with so many people using online products every day, social networking presents businesses, especially small businesses, with real opportunities to reach their target audience and expand.
However, ensuring a presence on social media isn’t enough to achieve the above objective. You also need to have a winning social network marketing strategy in place as well. Additionally, you need to be active on the platform(s) that your target audience often uses. The good news is that we are going to reveal that the steps that businesses in Austin, Texas can use to create a winning social strategy.
5 Steps to Create a Winning Social Network Marketing Strategy
What would you give for a marketing channel that required you to spend only a few hours each week to increase your business’ recognition, traffic, and sales with little to no cost? Perhaps the world! But no need for that because digital marketing does not work that way. Instead, it gives you the above benefits without requiring you to sacrifice much. No wonder about 90% of marketers today use social media to increase exposure for their company, among other uses.
Whether you agree or not, social networks are a crucial part of every marketing strategy today. Why is that? the benefits of using social media are so great that anyone not using this cost-effective marketing channel will miss out on a phenomenal opportunity to market their business. However, don’t use digital marketing blindly. Instead, craft a marketing strategy to engage with your target audience on the social platforms that help you to increase brand exposure and win new customers. Following are 5 steps to create such as strategy.
1. Audit Your Social Presence
First, before creating a digital online strategy for the future, determine where you currently stand. Next, Follow the below areas to consider when auditing the social media presence of your business:
- Which social networks are you currently on?
- Are those networks optimized?
- Which networks are currently bringing you the most value?
- How do your social profiles compare to those of your competitors’?
Once you’ve answered the above questions, you will be in a better position to craft a winning marketing strategy.
2. Set Goals that Align to Business Objectives
Secondly, to create a winning social media strategy, you must start by establishing your objectives and goals for it. If you don’t do that, you will have no way to measure the success of your investment(s) in social network marketing. Make sure that each goal you set for your social media platforms fulfills the criteria of S.M.A.R.T goals which is an acronym for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-Bound goals. The SMART framework is the best way to ensure your goals lead to real business results and not just lofty ideals.
3. Identify Your Ideal Customers
Thirdly, be specific. No matter how qualified you are as a marketer, your social marketing campaign will fail if you market the wrong audience. Not having an accurate ideal customer profile or buyer persona is the number one reason businesses suffer from low engagement on their social networks.
With the right buyer persona, you will be able to target the right people, in the right places, at the right times and with the right messages. The more specific your buyer persona is, the more conversions you will get out of every social network you use to promote your business. You can come up with a highly focused buyer persona by finding out the following about your target audience in Austin, Texas:
- Age
- Location
- Job title
- Income
- Pain points
- Most used social network
4. Choose Channels and Tactics
Fourthly, a mistake that many businesses make is creating a page on every popular social network. You should not do this without researching which network brings in the most return on your investment. Avoid wasting your time in the ‘wrong’ social network. Instead, use the information from your buyer personas to determine which social media platform is best for your business.
Once you’ve picked the social platforms you want to market on, choose the tactics to use on them. Your tactics for each social network should be based on your social network marketing goals and objectives, as well as the best practices of each platform. Some examples of these tactics are driving traffic to a landing page, increasing likes on Facebook, and promoting content on your website on Facebook or Twitter.
5. Carefully Allocate Your Budget
Based on priorities, determine where you want to spend your money and what SMM tactics you want to actually implement. So, prioritize tactics for your online marketing strategy, and then implement the tactics in order of priority.
A2ZVA provides digital media management services in Austin, Texas that can bring years of social media marketing experience to your project. With our social networking marketing, you have a great chance of increasing your business’ exposure and widening its reach.
