Before you jump in and add your business to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and all those other cool social media tools for marketing, four important things should be considered so you don’t end up like a dork….
- What’s your pitch?
Instead of using the old elevator pitch – one minute or less, consider your social media pitch: What is your company about in 120 characters or less? Figuring your pitch out beforehand will help you be consistent in your social media message and you’ll know exactly what to say when it’s time to introduce your business. - What are your goals?
Instead of implementing an overall social media marketing strategy first and then adding your goals, it is much more effective to develop your goals first. Then your goals and ideal outcomes can inform your strategy, not the other way around. - How are you going to be measuring social media marketing?
Many people say marketing on social media is a more effective way of marketing and advertising. Well, you’re never going to know unless you measure your results. You can follow as many case studies and experienced social media advisers as you like – in social media marketing every case is different and you’re insane if you’re not measuring your social media marketing results.I recommend clients follow a set structure to measure their social media marketing results effectively: Goal-Structure-Measurement (more about that in a future post).
- How are you going to engage others?
The reason that many businesses jump on to the social media marketing bandwagon is because “that’s where all the people are”. It’s true, a lot of people participate in social media, but that doesn’t mean they’re going to be interested in your business or brand.If you’re going to be effective at marketing on social media, you need to work out how to engage customers before hand. Whether you incentives by giving away discounts or freebies, whether you create a loyalty program or rewards for friend-to-friend referrals. Whatever you think will engage customers, I recommend developing a plan beforehand. The last thing you want to happen is for your social media marketing to flop because no one wants to talk to you.
Is there anything you wish you had considered before you jumped into marketing on social media? Leave your comments below.
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
Great post Janna! Thanks for sharing your valuable insight.
Just want to add something to complement point no.4: social media makes engaging with others very easy… so if you don’t do it you’re missing the point
. The way I see it, by engaging your customers / potential customers, you can utilize social media:
- to tune in to your marketplace
- to interact and truly understand what problem your company or organization or you as an individual can solve
- to design everything you offer to help these people, based on what they tell you instead of guessing what they want!
Andre
Thanks for your comment Andre! I totally agree, using social media to research your market and survey your customers is very powerful. In my opinion most people are not using it enough – hopefully these posts will help others figure out how social media can help their business.
Hi Jana great post I find it ever more frustating with the ammount of crap I see on Twitter all it seems be to this last couple of months is crap marketing so how do you get around this?
Hi Rob, I agree that Twitter is becoming more and more spammy! In fact I have heard that some of the big internet marketers (like Frank Kern) are deleting their accounts because of this.
Twitter has introduced a new ‘report as spam’ function which I use sometimes (but to be honest, I have better things to do with my time!). I also stopped following everyone who follows me. You can also use the list building function to just follow the people who have something interesting to say… As for the spammy DMs: Delete! Deltete! Delete!
i have tried social media marketing for getting our new products to be known on the market. it seems to work well specially if the audience is targeted **
{ 4 trackbacks }