Steps to Improve Social Media Marketing

The steps below could be used by any company that uses or would like to use social media as a tool for Marketing. With as many people who are on social media accounts today, social media marketing is just as important as or more important than other marketing techniques used today.

Perks of using social media accounts to market your company, products, or brand is that it is Free, extensive reach to customers, and that there are many different forms of social media.

Follow these six steps below to enhance your use of social media as a marketing tool.

1) Evaluate the Social media that you are already involved in:

• How many social media types are you apart of?

• Do you have updated information throughout your profiles?

• Does your content relate to your marketing ideas?

• Do you post regularly on all social media applications?

• Is your audience seeing your content?

• Is one of your profiles more valuable than others?

• Do you match up with your competitors social media efforts?

2) Set Goals in areas where you may be lacking information or content.

• This is where you can look at the first step and decide where you may have some issues managing your social media sites. Set reasonable goals that you want to change to improve your social media presence.

• Examples of reachable goals:

- Update all profile with current pictures, backgrounds, information, biography, contact information, etc. - Create a LinkedIn account to attract more social media viewers

- Update status once a day with relevant information to the marketing main ideas.

3) Figure out who your target market is and how to reach them through Social media.

• This step would include you finding who exactly you will be aiming your marketing towards. To do this you need to have a profile of the projected buyer in the situation.

• Things that you may include in profiling your projected buyers are and not limited to:

- Age

- Location

- Social Media usage

- Salary

- Sex

- Job/Position/Career

- Lifestyle

- Values

- Education

• By creating this profile of your buyer, you now know who you want to target on social media. This will give you a structure to base your content off. By knowing who you are targeting you can round your content to fit the profiles of your target market.

4) Create engaging content for your viewer and followers to see.

• Creating content that is interesting and related to your target market is important. You also want your content to be particularly engaging as well. Some things that may help you reach more viewers would include the following:

- Images related to the content you post. This could be a meme or an image that directly relates to one of your products

- Videos that give the viewer a new image of your company, products, or employees.

- Links to Blogs, newspaper articles, press releases etc. Other information that can be linked to your brand or product will always give you more viewers.

- Company news, this could be something as simple as a link to the company monthly newsletter.

- A link to your app for users.

5) Measure how successful your Media Changes are.

• This is where you decide if your efforts to reach your social media goals and creating a target market and targeting that specific audience are successful.

• To find out if your successful in this area you really are finding out if you are:

- Reaching enough projected buyers in your market

- How often your brand or products are being talked about

- Shares, views, likes, retweets, etc. of your content

- Followers throughout all sites

- Sales through social media efforts

• By measuring your success, you now can get a better understanding of some of the goals you may have strived towards and others which need more work as your move forward to create a better social media marketing plan.

6) Track your progress, interpret the results, restart the process

• The final step is to track your progress, understand what the results are telling you and redo the entire list over again. By doing this you are able to see the progress that you made over the course of a period of time. Creating graphs may help you better interpret the results. The biggest benefit being able to make changes and restarting the process will give you more growth.

• After following the check list several times, you are able to change your social media presence as your company, brand, and products change.

• Also by implementing this strategy more than once it will give you momentum towards implementing new ideas, strategies, and success into your ongoing social media marketing plan efforts.