Best Practices for Ensuring Success in Social Media Marketing

Assessing opportunities in social media marketing may seem like a daunting task paritcularly for a small business – There are thousands of social media platforms out there and not all of them may be right for your business. Like with any marketing strategy, business owners are often challenged to find and build strategies that provide the best opportunities for establishing a relationship with their customers. However, this process becomes much less daunting when armed with key insights and clear objectives to use as a prism for assessing which platforms have the necessary scale and engagement opportunities for your brand.

Below we present a 3 step process which will act as a guide before you jump into social media marketing:

STEP 1 – Define Marketing Objectives

Strategic development starts with setting clear objectives. Goal setting for your social media marketing program should be no different than with any other marketing plan. The goals that work best are traditional marketing objectives such as to increase overall business/brand awareness, higher sales converssions, list building, driving website traffic and building loyal customer base.

STEP 2 – Evaluate Opportunities

Innovation in technology has lead to advent of endless social media platforms. Innovation, creativity and outof- the-box thinking often lend themselves to successful interactions in social marketing but often at the expense of acheiving marketing objectives. Remember businesses benefit more from the direct response element rather than awards. Awards don’t pay the bills; results do. Also remember that just because a social platform grows rapidly and/or gains a lot of media attention, this does not mean that you should jumo on the bandwagon as well.

Use the following simple checklist to evaluate opportunities for your business:

1. Objectives: Does the opportunity meet your business objectives? Does this opportunity provide value that will help me achieve my stated goals? How will I measure the opportunity’s contribution to achieving these goals?

2. Assests: Does the opportunity leverage your business’ existing tangible assets? Can it showcase the strengths of your business – online content, endorsements, customer testimonials, partnerships, sponsorships etc?

3 Rules: Does the opportunity abide by the social media rules of the road? Does this opportunity allows you to strike a balance between your brand’s own style and the specific rules of the social space you wish to occupy – without sacrificing creativity and innovation ?

4. Value: Does it provide significant value to your customers ? Is this value perceived by customers to be more than that of your competitiors ?

STEP 3 – Selecting Appropriate Social Media Platforms

Once you have defined marketing objectives and evaluated opportunities, selection of appropriate social media platforms should take place. Just becasue your competitor is using Twitter doesn’t mean you have to be on it as well. For instance, Flickr (photo sharing site) would be ideal for wedding photograhpy business but perhaps not for an Accountant. Do you get the idea ?

This 3 step process should be an essential element of any effective Social Media Marketing Strategy. Please also remember that this has to work in conjunction with any other offline or online marketing efforts and not in isolation.