The Key to Reaching Your Social Media Marketing Goals
Using social media marketing successfully for your business requires some forethought and planning. You don’t need to make a playbook per se, but having a solid idea of why you want to use social media can help keep you on track. Without setting your marketing goals, it can be very easy to waste time on social media and not see any real results for your efforts.
The key to reaching your social media marketing goals is actually having them.
Let’s think about some social media marketing goals.
Maybe you want to:
- Increase brand awareness
- Build your email subscriber list
- Sell more of your products or services
Once you’ve identified your reasons for wanting to be social, think about which social media outlets are a good match for your goals. If you’re looking to network with industry professionals, or hire employees, LinkedIn is a good choice. If you’re looking to build subscribers to a list or an advertising platform, a blog and Twitter may work better so you can share your information and engage with potential new readers. Is your business product, design or image-based? Pinterest offers a great platform for visual businesses.
Steal A Page from Our Book
For The Mogul Mom, making personal connections is an imperative part of our marketing plan. And really, generating valuable, organic connections with others is important to any business – after all, it’s what turns “window-shoppers” into customers. Since The Mogul Mom offers valuable advice and resources to mom entrepreneurs, we tap into social media that allows us to interact with potential readers by engaging in conversation and encouraging a community-like atmosphere. The three social media platforms that help us reach our marketing goals and keep us growing are:
Blogging
Blogging is a great way to share content, generate new readers, and stay connected with current clients and customers. In fact, most people expect a business to have a blog because it’s an easy way to learn more about your business. The Mogul Mom uses WordPress, a blogging platform that allows us to post new content, add photos and video, and engage with our readers by encouraging them to leave comments and ask questions. Blogging is also a great way to improve your business’s search engine optimization (SEO). You want people to be able to find you online. When they go to Google to conduct a search for a product or service like yours, you want your name to pop up in search results. All search engines have their own way of generating results, but the basics are:
- Keywords
- Key phrases
- Relevancy of your website to the search
For instance, The Mogul Mom focuses on moms who are starting, and running businesses. Our content is relevant to the overall theme of our business, and includes keywords and search terms people would type into a search engine if trying to find information that a business like ours provides. Think about your business from a potential customer’s standpoint. What words or descriptions would they use to find you online? Make a list, or use Google’s Keyword Tool to help you. Then, be sure to keep your keywords in mind when writing content for your blog. And blogging also offers another big benefit – you can cross promote your blog posts across other social media platforms to reach a wider audience.
Facebook is a social networking heavy-hitter that connects you with people where they hang out frequently. Just about everyone is on Facebook! A Facebook business page is a lot like a personal page - you can add pictures and video, share updates, and interact with people via comments and ‘likes.’ The Mogul Mom has over 5,000 “fans” on our Facebook page, and we interact with them by having conversations, linking to our blog content and talking about new products that may be available. Our Facebook fans refer our page, share our content, and repost to their own social networks, which helps us spread the word about The Mogul Mom.
Twitter is a handy platform that brings everything together. It’s like a blog, but mini-sized in that you only get 140 characters to get your message across. Because one of our goals is to start conversations, Twitter is a great place for us to ask questions, offer quick solutions or showcase recent blog posts. You can easily link Twitter to your blog, so when you post new content, a link is generated on Twitter and shares it to your followers. We post often on our Twitter page, sharing both our new and archived content. We also tweet about our products and services, but are careful not to flood our followers with sales pitches. That’s a sure way to lose followers and turn off potential customers. Using strategic social media marketing has helped us build and grow The Mogul Mom community over the past five years. Social media can do the same for you if you take the time to determine your marketing goals and use the right social media platforms to help you reach them. If you need help choosing which social media venues will be the most effective for you, and how to use them to market your business, check out Get Social.
What are your social media marketing goals and how do you achieve them?
I am blogging on behalf of Visa Business and received compensation for my time from Visa for sharing my views in this post, but the views expressed here are solely mine, not Visa’s. Visit Visa’s reinvented Facebook Page: Well Sourced by Visa Business. The page offers small business owners a place where they can find educational resources, read success stories from other business owners, engage with peers, and find tips to help businesses run more efficiently. Every month, the page introduces a new theme that focuses on a topic important to a small business owner’s success. For additional tips and advice, and information about Visa’s small business solutions, follow @VisaSmallBiz and visit http://visa.com/business