One crucial aspect to keep in mind is that each social network will need its own campaign, its own calendar, and its own strategy and tactics. This may seem like a lot of information to remember. Still, it will not be confusing when you break it down into individual calendars, campaigns, and days to do the work. Create a content repository. Read below, and we will show you what to do.
Every social media has its own personality, plus you don't want every single social media experience to be a cookie cutter of the other for your audience. This is the danger of too much integration between each social media account. If everything you say is the same across all accounts, why should someone follow you, friend you, or connect with you on more than one? You will take the same information and organize it, cut it down, or repurpose it for each social media based on that social media alone and the message you're trying to impart.
Live streaming and ephemeral content (such as Instagram Stories and Snapchat) have become essential in building a social media presence. Incorporate these formats into your social media strategy to engage your audience in real-time and create a sense of urgency around your content.
The growing significance of influencer marketing and collaboration with content creators should not be overlooked. Partnering with influencers and creators can help you reach new audiences and add credibility to your brand.
Using social media analytics tools to track and measure the success of your campaigns is crucial. Tools like Sprout Social, Hootsuite, and Google Analytics can provide valuable insights into your campaign performance and help you optimize your strategy.
With more users accessing social media platforms through their smartphones and tablets, optimizing your content for mobile consumption is essential. Ensure your content is easily readable and accessible on mobile devices to reach a broader audience.
You've likely gathered from the fact that you will create a social media calendar that the main thing you'll be creating is content. You'll need a place for all that content to live, and it should be your website or blog. Blogs and websites are interchangeable today, but blogs or websites should be self-hosted with their unique domain name.
In addition to your original, unique, and informative content, your website will also house links to resources, websites, books, authorities, information, and influencers your audience would enjoy knowing about. By being a repository for information related to your niche, your website will become the go-to place for trusted information vetted by you.
Outside of your blog, you can have other areas on your website with a readable copy for your visitors.
This is an excellent place to put all your press releases and information that you want the media to have about you and your business. You may also include event information, a list of products and web real estate, awards, images, and more.
As mentioned above, having an area of your website devoted to resources your ideal clients might enjoy is a great way to establish yourself as an expert in your niche. You might include whitepapers, eBooks, eReports, guides, links to other people's information, and essential research on the resource page. You might also include links to the tools you like to use in your business.
This is a great place to put questions and answers and any technical documentation that might need to be given to your customers and clients or potential customers and clients about your services and products. This type of content can not only help buyers who are on the fence make a purchase, but it will also help make current clients and customers happy to be able to find the information they need.
This is a great way to demonstrate how others have used your products, services, or concepts to solve problems or become successful. You can include videos, PDF files, screenshots, and any information you think will show how other people use your information to be successful, solve a problem, or otherwise. Perhaps this might become a portfolio page for some businesses.
This is a significant page to include on your website. There are even plugins for WordPress that can help make this process automatic. You send your customers a link to the questionnaire, and their review or testimonial is automatically added to your website—a great way to have user-generated content.
If you're getting a nice library of content in different forms, PDFs, Podcasts, videos, and so forth, why not create a separate page for each type of content? This will enable those who prefer a specific type of content to view it how they want and give you a new way to display it.
This is another type of content that should reside either on your website or on a special domain name for each product. Again, it's up to you how you do that, and both ways are successful. Having as much content evolve from one domain name as possible will make your page rank higher in the search engines.
Some online gurus have referred to your website or blog as your hub or home base. This is precisely what it is. You want all content to originate somewhere; make it your website or blog. All other marketing channels, be they social, paid advertisements, offline ads, article marketing, and more, should all link back to your main website. It shouldn't matter what type of content you're distributing; the link back is your website. Remember that the end goal of all marketing is to convert leads into customers.
Your website must provide information to potential clients and clients alike throughout the entire customer cycle. There are many tools to help make everything easier to work together. We've talked about some already, but let's get more in-depth about them here.
Tracking, measuring, and analyzing the numbers before, during, and after any new social media marketing or SEO effort is essential. If you don't know what numbers you started with, you'll have difficulty knowing whether your hard work paid off. However, even if the numbers show a complete failure in reaching your goals, you can see where things went wrong and will be able to decide what to do the next time differently.
Remember the SMART acronym to ensure that your goals are clear. Once established, you want to look at where you are compared to where you want to be. That's how you'll know whether or not you succeeded in reaching those goals.
What you measure will depend on what type of things you're measuring. For example, is it social media, a landing page, SEO tactics, or something else entirely that you're measuring?
Some things you should be tracking include the following:
Essentially, you want to track and measure anything that can be tracked and measured. You want to see where the numbers were before, during, and after you do any new things you add or make changes. Whether SEO-based, social media-based, content-based, paid-to-advertise-based or something else entirely, if you look at the numbers, you can only know if your social media marketing and SEO plans are working.
By studying all the appropriate numbers for any action and reaction, you can determine what works and what doesn't. Then, you can quickly modify your tactics toward better returns on investment, throwing out what isn't working and replacing it with what is working.
Read Part Seven in our series... Tools to Implement, Track and Measure Success.
