Its marketing but not as we know it! It isn't just the latest, greatest fad, it's a powerful mechanism to cultivate customer relationships and outclass big businesses without having to spend a fortune on infrastructure.


Measuring the success of your campaign is key to understanding what kind of an impact you are having in the market place. This is a golden rule in a successful social media marketing campaign. More on this later in the article.


Your Website


This is the face of your organisation and therefore is an important factor for your online marketing campaign. People will be directed to your site which will need to project the correct message about your business, brand, products and services. It will be one of the main points of contact between you and your customers, and the site that they will find through a web search for your business.



Make the website easy to navigate, attractive and clear to read, and make sure that it communicates the culture of your business. It's important to get your branding right, so that you can replicate it across different social media platforms, and be instantly recognisable for customers.


Facebook / LinkedIn / Twitter


Facebook social media platform is free and gives you the ability to engage with customers. here are many other social networks apart from Facebook, however, and some of these might suit your target audience better, being aimed at business professionals (LinkedIn), teenagers, females, or particular market sectors (MySpace).


Creating special pages on Facebook will help you portrait your brand image. You will be able to interact directly with customers, understanding their likes and dislikes, market products and services and let them know about new and interesting things about your business. The great thing about social marketing is the viral aspect; this is where your customer tell other people about your marketing through their own social media (Facebook) pages.


Twitter is slightly different to the other social networking engines. It is a good idea to keep posts short, some say 80 characters or less. When it comes to Twitter, the length of Twitter feeds is limited to 140 characters, but studies have shown that posts with 80 characters or fewer received significantly higher engagement rates.


Consistency in posting is also important, because marketing is often an activity that spans the months, and even years before getting results. Don't over-post, in other words, little and often is better than posting ten times a day. Posts should be thoughtful, engaging, and encourage conversation, feedback or sharing, and if it contains some form of media, such as a photo or video, it will most likely garner further attention.


To make a promotion become viral you need brand gravitas. For someone like Nike that’s easy, however, for smaller businesses it becomes much harder. Brand gravitas comes with combining the right amount of brand awareness, correct brand image and style of marketing promotion.


YouTube


The thought of having an account at YouTube (and a channel) is scary for many, even intimidating.  Good news, you don’t have to produce your own videos to have an active social experience on YouTube.  Indeed you should eventually overcome your fears and publish videos so you can connect with your market, but you don’t have to start there.


A few things that you can do without producing video content of your own:



  • Commenting (on others videos, or channels)

  • Sharing On other social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter

  • Creating playlists of your favourite YouTube videos

  • Rate videos (1-5 stars)


Tracking / Analysing / Reporting


Google offer some fantastic tracking tools. Make sure your website is linked up so that you understand where all your traffic is coming from. Facebook also offer some tracking tools, although there may be some costs involved the results can be very good. Insight: YouTube’s reporting function helps you understand views, viewer demographics, popularity, and community.


You can share good reports and blog posts about your business with your own audience, and bad feedback can also be useful, as it can enable you to engage with individuals who may have an insight into your business or products and services that can help you to improve.


The great thing about social media marketing platforms is that they are free, and their usage in on the up. If you want to take it to the next level, you can choose to spend money on hiring a consultant or social media manager, and invest in ads and partnership deals. Saying that, it's well worth trying the free options first. If you would like to discuss your brand and social media marketing please call us on 0845 3885863