10 Components of a Highly Successful Social Marketing Campaign
1. Determine Numbers vs Quality
The first thing you have to do in a social marketing campaign is to get attention. Let’s take Twitter as an example. You can’t just show up on twitter and expect a host of followers after a couple of tweets. So you need to know where your potential customers are and communicate with them.
It’s imperative that you determine: is it more valuable to get an extremely large number of twitter followers, or is it advisable to acquire followers which are explicitly enthusiastic about the subjects that you’re focused on.
2. Divide Your Time Wisely
When a person is utilizing Tweets to get clients it’s essential to find followers who are connected to your own area of interest, which means you must split your actions to obtain numbers compared to tasks geared towards getting particular followers within your marketplace. Several actions to obtain a great deal of followers risk turning off the highly targeted followers. For that reason take into consideration precisely why and exactly how you’re making use of Twitter whenever determining what strategies are ideal for you. For example, we promote our WordPress SEO course on our Twitter account using Twitter Cards. This strategy has been ideal for our model.
3. Follow and be followed
Having decided on numbers vs quality, or a mixture of both, the tried and tested way of getting followers is to follow other people. A good percentage of them will follow you back, and if you are offering valuable content, they will keep following you. Twitter search and Facebook groups are two good places to find people to target.
Look at what individuals Twitter recommends that you follow and in addition search for yourself. Follow the ones that you would like to follow you: prospective customers, buyers, key players within your marketplace, etc.
4. Be Bold But Cautious
For those who find themselves keen on volume in a social marketing campaign, follow the greatest number of people as you can, irrespective of who they may be or what their particular likes and dislikes happen to be. Quite a few will immediately follow you and then your numbers will increase. You could then unfollow a majority of these. A number of them will probably unfollow you too, however, many are not going to. Twitter has turned off some accounts doing this, therefore keep an eye on the number of people you follow and unfollow immediately if a problem arises.
5. Take your followers somewhere with you
This is probably the most crucial element in a social marketing campaign, but is often overlooked. To explain it, take the analogy of internet dating. People search for compatible people for a while. Then they communicate online a little. Eventually, once they find somebody they are interested in, they go offline and meet up somewhere, like a bar. If all goes well, they exchange numbers, meet again, and strike up a relationship.
With social media platforms such as Facebook, Youtube and especially Twitter, it is essential to move off to somewhere more engaging and specific to your business. This could be your site, which is a start. But eventually you need to make that move and get their contact details, such as name and email, so that you can go to them in the form of newsletters and offers. So how do you motivate people to take that step, go to an opt in form and commit to you more?
6. Give more than you get and give good stuff
People are not interested in you. They are interested in what you can do for them. Sad, selfish, but true. So why not pander to human nature and give them something (or better still, lots of things) that could be of great benefit to them (but at not such a great cost to you)? The old faithful “free report” has been working well before the advent of the internet, and still works a treat today.
People are very interested in getting instant, brief solutions to current problems in their niche. If you can provide something simple but effective, like an informative e-book, people will take you up on the offer. In terms of a social marketing campaign, you can send people directly to an opt in page which briefly explains some of the benefits of the free offer, and asks for their name and email. In reality, those that subscribe are giving you something very valuable too, which is their contact details.
7. Maximize your Return on Investment (ROI)
So now, alongside Twitter, Facebook etc., you can then engage the oldest social media marketing platform of all – email marketing. Email has the highest ROI of any social media marketing. The Direct Marketing Association reports that for every dollar spent on email marketing $40.56 is earned, compared to internet advertising – $19.72. The math is a no brainer. That is not to say that everybody who starts an email marketing campaign is going to get that type of return, it is an average. But a very encouraging average at that.
8. Maximize your Content Reach
This is how you can drastically broaden your outreach. For example, if you make a video, don’t just upload it to one video site. You can use free services such as Tubemogul to distribute a single video to many large video sharing sites such as Youtube, Veoh, Daily motion, Vimeo etc. This not only saves you time, but spreads your content out without any extra work on your part. Make sure you give your videos compelling titles, keyword rich tags, and a link to your offer or opt in page in the description.
9. Repurpose Your Content
If your video has a constant voice over throughout, you can now also covert the audio into a podcast or audio files to distribute to the many free audio sharing sites.
The next step could be to transcribe your video to text. You can actually do this while you make your video using voice recognition software like Dragon Naturally Speaking, or pay a transcription company a small fee to do it for you. Either way, you will have more unique content to use on your blog, for tweets, a Facebook page, Web 2.0 sites like Squidoo, Hubpages, WordPress.com and article sites. Depending on how long your video was, you may have material for several 400-500 word articles.
So you have now gone from having a video in just one place (e.g. Youtube) to potentially:
- More video sites
- Dozens of podcast and audio sharing sites
- Blog posts
- Tweets
- Article sites
- Web 2.0 Sites
That could easily add up to over a hundred sites just from one video!
10. Delegate as much as possible
Big companies have the luxury of employing an army of people to work on any given social marketing campaign. If you are a smaller business then the workload can be overwhelming at times. However, for surprisingly small fees, you can accomplish a great deal of outreach that would personally take you weeks. If you like to write, and want to concentrate on that, but need your articles distributed across the web, then it is often easier to get somebody else to create accounts and submit them for you. Fiverr.com is a good place to outsource many social marketing campaign tasks (for $5).
Some times you will want to have tools like our WordPress SEO Plugin that will help you take care of your content SEO and give you more time to focus on other areas of marketing. Go give it a try, I’d be happy to serve you.
