Five Steps That Can Facilitate Effective Social Media Marketing

There are many ways in which you can fashion an effective social media marketing strategy but the question is always about how much needs to be done and where or at what point do you need to draw a line. With the rising popularity and use of social media it now becomes important to outline a proper plan for an effective social media strategy. There are same basic steps which are extremely important and often form the backbone of an effective social media marketing strategy. Here is a detailed look on these crucial steps:social-media-marketing

  1. Identify Your Objectives

First and foremost it is extremely important to identify the objectives that you plan to achieve through your social media marketing strategy. Whether you want to increase traffic to your site or you plan to expand your user base or even spread awareness about a new campaign that you might have undertaken, it becomes extremely imperative to clearly state the objectives to everyone who is part of the planning procedure.

It is also important to quantify your objectives as in you want a 5% increase in web traffic in say 5 months or you aim to expand your subscriber base by 10% in six months and the like. The way it helps is it enables everyone around to measure the overall success of the strategy on a relative scale of performance and also opt for course correction in case the need arises.

  1. A Policy Document Is A Must

The next critical factor that comes into play is need for a Policy Document that outlines the whole gamut of Dos and Don’ts as well as the tone that you want to establish through your social network marketing strategies. This is extremely important because just like the objectives, these clearly identify the SOPs that should guide the eventual strategy and the way this will go on to impact the overall tone or message that the Policy Document seeks to convey.

Another importance of a policy document is the potential of a brand getting diluted with an inappropriate campaign in minimised. When the policy document is out there for everyone to follow, it becomes quite clear and fairly easy to incorporate the these elements in the final strategy in a way that a robust brand is always successful in fashioning a campaign that does not fall out of place.

  1. Undertaking A Plan

With the objectives and policies in place, the next course of action is of course the need for a detailed plan. Your plan is the ultimate objective that you envisage for the brand and the way you want the overall execution in a way that all the various elements of your objectives and policy are securely in place. Additionally a plan defines the exact execution strategy for any social media initiative. This is particularly handy because what it ensures in the process is that there is no scope for any obvious miss in the ultimate execution. This involves the smallest details like the images you used to convey your message or perhaps the tone that is conveyed through the initiatives.

For example, if you see the kind of leads that coupon machine got through social media marketing, the benefits of planning is clearly borne out. The effective plan ensured that everyone on board was clear about the overall strategy and worked in tandem to execute the eventual plan in a synchronised fashion. They simply gave out Rs 50 free mobile recharge for every coupon used from their amazon store.Therefore the risk of a potential misunderstanding or a divergent message also gets reduced to a significant extent.

  1. Creating A Training Programme

Once the plan is in place, the next obvious course of action is getting it executed. Many a times it might so happen that many of the staff might not be very well versed with the overall social media marketing procedures given the relative novelty factor. In that case offering some basic training on social media and ways to handle it might come in good stead and help your staff excel in the required field. It will provide them with the key understanding of who’s on what platform, how to reach the target audiences and the various nitty-gritty of the best practices in the world of social media network.

Why this kind of training programme yields superlative results is because it provides the required domain knowledge to the staff and they are not left fending for themselves in the dark. They are confident and develop a deep understanding of what they strive to achieve. In that way whatever the plan might be, you could rest assured for a faultless execution and a pointed targeting. Therefore this kind of training programme enables an individual and the team with greater sense of competence and inspires them to excel in the said area.

  1. Measure Your Efforts

Last but not the least, it is extremely important to assess all your initiatives. Therefore if you plan to drive 10% additional traffic in 6 months, it is important to measure how much additional traffic you are able to generate every month. So overall though you might have a six months target, this kind of assessment opens up the prospect of potential mid-point course correction and initiating a different strategy if required.

Incidentally the social media network also has a plethora of advanced tools. You could use tools like Google Analytics or individual analytics incorporated by the various social media sites to assess the progress of your strategy at regular intervals. These crucial statistics will facilitate a sustained understanding on how your plans are performing and identify potential loopholes that you might have to look to plug.

Conclusion

These five critical steps will not just sharpen the social media network strategy that you might look to incorporate but these often form the backbone for a sustained and long-term initiative in social media platform. It comes especially handy for a startup as they are often struggling with limited resources and the need to address multiples issues at the same time.