“Social media can be a huge driver of website traffic, awareness of your brand and, of course, new business leads, and online and offline sales.
Social media can also be a time suck that eats resources but doesn’t yield results.
How do you prevent that from happening? Simple: treat social media marketing with the same discipline and level of planning as any other marketing. Don’t just engage in random sharing and chatting. Instead, plan and execute real campaigns.
Here are 6 tips for a great social media marketing campaign:
1. Define your goal – in detail
What’s the one goal you want out of your campaign? Is it to drive people to fill out a lead form on your website? Are you trying to increase e-commerce sales? Do you want to drive in store traffic?
Define it as an action you want people to take. Be specific. “I want people to [insert verb].”
If you aren’t clear about your goal, the rest of your campaign is likely to be vague and may disappoint you. Get this step right and the rest falls into place easier.
2. Specify a measurement
The next step is to define a number that you would consider a successful result. This could be a flat number such as adding 500 email subscribers. Or it could be a dollar number, such as driving $20,000 in online sales. Your number could be a percentage growth as well, such as driving 15% growth in new leads.
Assigning a numerical goal gives you something to drive toward and later measure your success against. Just as important, it serves as a gut check to assess whether the resources you are about to devote will be worth the desired outcome, and whether the goal is a stretch yet attainable. If not, it’s better to set a different goal for your campaign.
3. Focus on one platform
Unless you’re an accomplished marketer, you’re going to want to focus on a single social media platform. By focusing on a single platform you can devote more effort to understanding the platform features and implementing the techniques to leverage them well.
More campaigns fail through poor execution than any other reason, in my experience. Often that stems from not understanding the right steps to take or not knowing the social platform well enough to use advanced features that really can move the needle.”
View the rest of the tips by clicking here.
