Gigi Catalin Neculai - Strategy Must Drive Your Social Media Marketing

 When it comes to your business, you must have a strategy for your social media marketing efforts. If you don't have a strategy in place, you will not to really make good progress. At least not the progress that you will make if you do have the strategy working for you.

 

The purpose of your social media marketing strategy

 

Your social media strategy serves as a guide that you can follow in order to get from Point A to Point B. It allows you to stay on the correct path for your business and it helps you to increase your traffic with top-quality target audience members. If your business does not have a social media marketing strategy means that you will not be in control of the direction that you follow and exactly where you are going to end up. It may mean that you will be all over the place and you will have the possibility of never reaching your goals (at least, not all of them). As daunting as social media may be to you, it is definitely important enough to leverage because it will make your business become more successful.

 

Does social media contribute to your strategy the way that you expect?

 

As you are creating and working your social media marketing strategy, it is important that you feel confident about the idea that it is really making a positive change to your business. Your strategy is very important in such a situation and it is essential that you know exactly what you are doing and how you are going to go about accomplishing what you set out to do. If you choose to delegate your business's social media activities to someone else, if is very important that you choose that person very carefully and very wisely.

 

Actually creating the social media marketing strategy

 

Your business's social media marketing strategy is very important and not only do you need one in place but you also have to make sure that your strategy is well thought out and effective. Part of what you must include in your social media marketing strategy is a specific approach.

 

First of all, it is critical that you establish your objective(s) before you do anything else. Without objectives, you will have a very difficult time of getting where you need to be. If you try to think of developing your strategy as something fun and interesting, it will not become a "task" but, rather, will become a pleasurable activity. You will see that it will go smoothly and easily if you use that approach.

 

Aligning your social media marketing strategy with our objectives is an extremely important second step. You must make sure that you have an established connection between the two. This all ties into getting from Point A to Point B. Without the alignment, you will not make progress. There are many different social media marketing objectives that you can focus your business on. Some of the more productive ones are:

 

Generating new leads.

Dramatically increasing the number of people who opt in to your newsletter or other offerings.

Promoting a particular event.

Attracting more traffic to your landing page.

Promoting your new offerings.

Paying close attention to analytics so that you can understand clearly how your business is progressing.

Giving credit where credit is due. It is very important to acknowledge your fans and followers who have been nice enough to support your efforts and to pass on the word to other people they know and trust. Express in some way how much you appreciate what they are doing for you and your business. Some of the analytics that you should pay attention to are the number of conversions you have made, how much revenue you have generated through those conversions, and the total amount of money that you have earned through your social media marketing efforts.

 

Figuring out how to define success. Being able to define and measure success is extremely important when it comes to your social media marketing strategy. There are several ways that you can measure that, including:

 

Stepping up the number of conversions that you have been able to make.

Multiplying the number of retweets on Twitter that have occurred.

Increasing the number of new visitors, time spent on your business's website, and the number of times that visitors viewed your page.

The victories that your business experiences should be closely linked to your social media marketing activities and tracked through the analytics tools. It is critical that you understand that your social media efforts are tied closely to your business's success. If you wish to succeed professionally, you have no choice but to be as active on social media as you can. Remember to be consistent, persistent, and discrete in your social media marketing efforts. It will be worth the effort in the long run. Whatever you do in business, make sure that your efforts bring forth results that work for you.