It’s not just an online presence that’s now vital in the business world – having a regularly updated, attractive range of social media channels is just as important to avoid being eclipsed by the competition. Whether you’ve just got your pages up and running, or have established pages and are thinking about ways to make your online marketing more effective, then this article is for you.
From setting online marketing goals to assessing how successful your efforts have been in meeting them, we’ll cover everything you need to know below.
Define Your Goals
Before taking any other action, it’s crucial to define your goals. This will ensure that you design a campaign that will hit the mark and do exactly what you want it to – it’ll also negate the risk of wasting time and expense going down a wrong turn and needing to backtrack in your marketing.
So, start by getting really clear on what your online campaign is designed to achieve. Are you looking to boost your business’s visibility, improve conversion rates, showcase a new range of products or services, increase the value of a customer’s average order, announce a relaunch – or something else?
Once you know exactly what you want your campaign to achieve, you can move on to getting the show on the road and taking steps to achieve this.
Figure Out the Target Audience
This will be much easier once you’ve carried out the above step. Knowing who you’re talking to is key in working out how to introduce your business on social media and get the attention of those who you want to sit up and take notice.
Start by considering what drives your target audience, their pain points, daily lived experience, and the way in which they interact with social media, to come up with the best means of reaching them.
A really helpful way to go about doing this is to devise a comprehensive target audience profile and keep this in the front of your mind at every step of creating your online marketing campaign. Social media analytic tools, as well as those available on your website, can be a fundamental part of developing an in-depth picture of your target audience.
Create Great Content
One of the keys to a great social media campaign that’ll effectively drive online business is to post frequently and consistently – without sacrificing the content quality. All content you post should add value to the viewer, whether that’s through being informative, entertaining, or solving a particular problem they’re experiencing – possibly a problem they didn’t even know they had!
It’s also a great idea to mix up the type of content you’re posting on your social media to keep things even more interesting. To this end, try posting videos, how-to guides, image galleries, and newsletters, as well as plain text – and don’t forget to include those all-important links to your homepage or specific product or service page.
Make a Posting Calendar
To keep up your marketing campaign’s momentum, create a schedule of when you’re going to post, the content to be posted, and, if you have more than one social channel, where it’s going. This is an important way of staying on top of things and making sure you successfully walk the line between over and under-posting.
To help you figure out what and when to post, you could deploy one of several strategies used by top businesses. So, you could try the Thirds strategy: in this scenario, one-third of the content you post should directly promote your business, another third should cover the ideas of leaders in your industry, and a final third should be made up of direct interactions with your audience.
Alternatively, you could go with the 80/20 strategy, in which 80% of the content you post is created to add value to your visitors, and 20% is all about promoting your product or services.
Whichever strategy you opt to use, being consistent in terms of post-scheduling and content quality is crucial.
Assess the Results
When creating your posting schedule, it’s a great idea to also add points at which you’ll assess the efficacy of your marketing campaign, using analytic tools to determine just how far your social media efforts are moving you towards the goal you set at the start of the process.
Looking at how well the campaign is doing on a regular basis will allow you to make small (or large!) tweaks during its lifecycle to either adjust things that aren’t going as well as you’d hoped or amp up any elements that are performing spectacularly!
The Takeaway
Planning an online campaign focused on driving visitors to your business via your social media platforms can be a powerful way to increase visibility, boost your brand image, and hit the targets you have in terms of conversions, sales, lead generation, and more.
Use the easy-to-follow steps above to help you navigate the process of devising a campaign that will help to put your business on the digital map for all the right reasons!