Top 5 Important Elements of a Successful Social Media Marketing

You already know by now that it’s a dumb idea to build your house on rented land (like Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, or any other third party network you have no control of).

This is because the owner of the land might wake up someday and decide to evict you from his property, and that’s how you’ll lose your business overnight.

What am I trying to say here? Building your business on social media without having your own platform can be disastrous. I’ve heard of how many people lost their business that is worth thousands of dollars this way after Facebook disabled or unpublished their pages for no good reason.

This is something you’ll never wish for.

But you may be wondering, “What type of social media marketing should I focus on?”

How are all these popular business owners using social media efficiently to find more leads, boost their reputations, and generate more sales?

Now, if my guess is right, then you don’t have to wonder anymore. This is because, in this guide, I’ll share with you the five critical factors that will transform your social media marketing campaign from a mischievous time-killer to an effective bottom-line booster.

If you’re ready, let’s get to it.

1# Get Your Home Fixed First

Before doing anything, you have to put your home together. That is the first step towards launching a badass social media marketing campaign.

Now, if you don’t know, your home base is your blog which is a domain you own. You have total control of your website’s user experience — from the site design to the user interface to the content.

This is the place you show people that you know what you’re doing. That means building a solid foundation of high-quality, in-depth content that showcases your expertise in a pleasant, straightforward way.

First impressions matter a lot, so you want to ensure that your design is super clean, professional, and smart. It can still be funky or stylish if that’s what you like, but it shouldn’t look confusing or amateurish.

Again, your home base is a place you publish content to provide answers to your reader’s questions, share with them exciting tips and strategies towards solving their annoying problems.

Most importantly, when someone wishes to find out more about you, your home base is where you send them.

It’s your content marketing tool, which means you need to be communicating mainly with your customers, not with other gurus in your niche.

It is, therefore, worth cleaning up and putting together before starting any social media marketing campaign.

2# Figure out Your Business Goals

Each of your social media marketing strategies should move you closer to your goals. You can’t possibly progress without knowing what you’re pursuing.

Look closely at your business’ overall needs and determine how social media can help you in reaching them.

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You’ll certainly have many personalized goals, but there are a few goals that every serious business should add to their overall strategy. For example, things like increasing traffic, boosting brand awareness, reducing marketing costs, and retaining customers are relevant to every company.

You, therefore, have to decide on your goals and objectives before creating an effective social media marketing strategy.

Finally, I’ll advise you to focus on two primary goals and two secondary goals. This is because having lots of goals at the same time leads to distractions, and you’ll end up achieving none.

3# Who is The Face of Your Brand?

If you want to promote your business on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc., you need a human face to make it work for you.

Just like people usually do in public settings, you’ll need to adopt a persona (a selected range of your emotions, thoughts, and observations) and integrate it into your social media strategy.

You absolutely don’t want to share everything about yourself with your social media connections. You’re, however, going to be informal and social, but in a way that’s interesting, appropriate, and relevant to whomever you’re communicating with.

Now, I’m not saying you should be a fake. But I want you to be genuine and friendly. Sound like a human, and not a corporate robot (even though AI is gradually becoming the talk of town) 😀

Similarly, you shouldn’t stick to business every time. It’s always proper to at some point in time; demonstrate that you have a life. It’s not so good to give the world the ugly impression that you’re boring, careless, or rude.

Finally, I want you to understand that being authentic in business doesn’t come from over-sharing or boring your audience to stupor – it lies in standing by your word, and doing what you say you’ll do.

4# Clearly Define Your Marketing Objectives

Goals are utterly useless if you don’t have specific factors that define when they’re achieved.

For instance, if one of your core goals is generating leads, how many leads will you generate before tagging that goal a success? 10? 100? 1000? This is what you must decide on before starting your social media campaign.

The role of marketing objectives is to clearly explain how you get from Point A (an unachieved goal) to Point B (a successfully achieved goal). One of the easiest ways to determine your objectives is to employ the S-M-A-R-T approach, and that means making your aims to be:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Achievable
• Relevant
• Time-bound

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Going back to our previous example, if your primary goal is to generate leads, a clearly defined marketing objective could be to boost leads by 60%. And for you to accurately measure your progress, you have to choose which tracking tools and analytics you need to have in place.

Preparing yourself for failure is never an option. If you set an objective of boosting your leads by 500 or 1000%, it’s unlikely that you’ll achieve it. Therefore, it’s crucial that you choose achievable marketing objectives, given the resources you have.

Since you’ve taken the time to define your marketing goals, so they’re relevant to your brand, it’s good you extend that same consideration to your objectives.

Furthermore, attaching a timeframe to your efforts is essential. You want to decide when you intend to achieve your goal(s).

Your objective of boosting leads by 60% may be super specific, measurable, achievable and relevant, but if you don’t have a deadline for accomplishing that goal, your time, resources, efforts and attention may be diverted to other directions.

5# Research the Competition

In every marketing campaign, researching your competition is critical to your overall success. It not only keeps you informed of their activity but also gives you an idea of what’s working so you can integrate those successful strategies into your own efforts.

Here, the first thing to do is to make a list of a few of your major competitors, then figure out which social media networks they’re active on, and carefully analyze their content strategy. After all these, check the number of their followers or fans, their posting frequency and what time of day they usually post.

Apart from that, you equally want to pay attention to the type of content they’re posting on their social media channels, and its context (promotional, humorous, informative, etc.) and how they’re interacting with their fans.

The most vital activity to check here is engagement. Even though engagement rate on a particular update can only be calculated by page admins, you can also get a good idea of what they’re seeing.

For instance, let’s assume you’re looking at a competitor’s last 10-20 Facebook updates. Divide the total number of engagement activities for those posts by the page’s total number of followers. (Engagement activity includes comments, likes, shares, and so on.)

Interestingly, that same formula can also be used on all of your competitors’ social media channels (e.g., on Twitter you can calculate favorites and retweets).

Keep in mind, however, that the calculation is meant to provide you a general overview of the competition’s performance so you can compare how you measure up against each other.

Conclusion

Social media marketing doesn’t have to be a tedious activity. With the right tools and information, you can use it to skyrocket your business growth by generating an overflowing of leads.

Pay attention to all the tactics shared here, and you’ll never have to worry about creating effective social media campaigns again.

However, whatever you’re doing, don’t forget that it’s not wise to build your house on a rented land. It is, therefore, vital that you put your home in order first before spending your time on social media.