The Essential Elements of Effective Social Media Marketing

Are you among those aware of the powerful opportunity that social media presents for brand awareness but don’t know where to start or focus efforts? There are some key factors that can help one to reap the desired rewards from social media marketing.

Below are 7 essential elements that can turn social media marketing from a colossal time-waster to a successful strategy.

1. Identification of Business Goals

It is impossible to move forward if you are not aware of what you are working towards. Each social media strategy serves a certain goal. To identify goals, consider overall business needs and make a decision of how social media can be used in reaching them. While companies can come up with several goals, there are those that are recommended and considered relevant to all and these are brand awareness, customer retention, and a reduction of marketing costs.

1. Identification of potential customers

Prior to hoping on social media platforms, focus on your target audience. This starts with identification on issues such as demographics, age, income, residence, interests, and trends, among others. It is important to understand what they are all about so that you’ll know how you can tailor content to make a connection. The content needs to cater for their specific needs and avoid being everything to everyone else.

1. Select social media platforms

Which is/are the social media platform(s) of choice? The choice of social media platform is heavily dependent on the target audience. After identifying the popular platforms among them, go where they are and seek to create awareness and engagement. It is important to treat all platforms differently by avoiding posting same content in all of them. It is important to maintain consistency while at it since this builds recognition and memorability. To ensure consistency, come up with a routine by including social media activities to the calendar to-do list. This is where time management also comes in as a consistent schedule and content marketing calendar are necessary.

1. Relevant topics

Content posted should be relevant to news topics and events. Post any news or breaking news related to your industry as soon as they come out. While doing this, it is important to share personal opinion and join the conversation. Posting news items that are unrelated to your business diverts the audience’s attention and this may negatively affect your relationship. Share relevant, useful, attention-grabbing, and informative content.

1. SEO

Social media sharing and SEO are more connected than ever. The latter is a perfect complement of the former. The same factors that ensure social media work such as useful content are the same that search engines seeks to serve up. Search engines seek content that can be valued as a resource.

1. Engage

Engaging customers is an important strategy as it gives them a sense of importance and leaves them feeling appreciated. It is important to take time to listen to customers to understand their needs, desires and preferences. The next step should be working to meet the needs through content, time, and genuine feedback.

1. Re-evaluate plan regularly

While there are those who have successfully integrated social media marketing into their business, others are yet to achieve desirable milestones. It is, therefore, important to have tools that can track, measure and show results of the strategy in place. It is impossible to manage the strategy if it is not measurable since progress report will not be available. This helps ensure that necessary changes are made where necessary while useful aspects are maintained.