Top 3 tips to achieve the best social media marketing strategy for your company
Looking for the best social media marketing strategy for your business? Social media continues to top the charts as one of the top lead generation strategies for finance and professional services alike.
Also, it can help boost your SEO strategy (more front page rankings in Google) and drive more leads as well.
Today I am going to outline my top 3 tips to ensure your social media marketing strategy is generating results for your business. Feel free to click on the video below to watch a short 2 min overview of our top 3 tips.
If you happen to be the CFO of a financial services firm, then this figure may help paint a powerful picture as to why social media is here to stay and why your CMO and marketing team need to get on top if it.
According to LinkHumans, Social media advertising revenue will reach $9.8 billion in 2016. Clearly, this isn’t a fly-by-night marketing avenue, but one that has real strength, engagement and can help your company lead the way to dominate your niche, drive more leads and convert more sales.
So let’s dive in and have a look at the top 3 tips to help boost your social media marketing strategy.
Best social media marketing tip number 1
The first tip is to ensure you and your team are creating content worth sharing.
The whole idea of social media is to engage, share and open the discussion. If all your content is about you, your products and services, then you are not going to get much engagement.
Your content is the cornerstone of your social media marketing. Your goal is to create content that sparks the interest of your target market, educates and informs and positions you as the expert.
How can you and your team develop content that is worth sharing?
The first thing you want to do is run some research. Your goal is to uncover the wants and needs of your target market so you can ‘heal their pain’ so to speak.
The best way to do research to generate content worth sharing is by:
- Creating a survey and asking your audience directly what they’d like to know. Tools like SurveyMonkey are quite helpful in allowing you to efficiently create a new looking survey with no coding experience.
- Running some relevant keyword research to find out what your audience is currently searching for online. You can run keyword research using LongTailPro, Moz Keyword research, keywordtool, Google trends or just go to the Google Keyword Planner in your AdWords account.
- Running a seminar or webinar. By running a seminar or webinar, you get first-hand knowledge of what your audience is looking for. They will tell you with the questions they ask.
- Using BuzzSumo. BuzzSumo helps you identify which content is currently ranking the best across social media and other online areas.
- Running a quick search across Amazon.com. Often some real gems get found when searching across the top selling books in your niche.
- Keeping a notepad handy. I like to use the notepad app on my smartphone and jot down ideas that come to mind.
- Using the online version of Notepad can be useful as well. Tools like Evernote can help organise your thoughts and give you a place to put your best ideas.
- Grabbing a list of your customers most frequently asked questions. Most sites have an FAQ section, and often your support team are fielding the same questions over and over again. This is an excellent indication of the types of content your audience is reaching out for.
Inspire them with your content
So there you have eight ideas to get the ball rolling to focus on winning content your audience loves. Your goal is to inspire them to share your content via their preferred social media channels.
Once your meet this criterion, you are well on the way to a winning social media strategy.
Best social media marketing tip number 2
Tip number 2 is to identify a strategy for each channel.
LinkedIn is very different from Facebook, which is very different to Twitter. Take the time to understand the message you need to create for each channel and commit to that strategy.
Every company needs to commit to building a strategy for the key channels your primary competitors are using. Take some time to research what is resonating with the audience on each channel and start to formulate your strategy.
The best way to boost your social media results is to get your hands dirty. Nothing will replace the actual execution of a well thought out plan. But don’t overthink the process and spend all your time doing research.
Finding the nuggets of gold
There are so many nuggets of gold you will find along the way. The longer you leave it to test new ideas, the longer it will take to truly find your groove.
Your company may have both B2B (Business to Business) and B2C (Business to Consumer) channels. Therefore, it is important to create an independent strategy for both areas that resonates with your audiences.
If you do run both B2B and B2C, then you will have independent teams focused on each one. Talk to them about how they can drive more leads through a dedicated social media marketing strategy.
Best social media marketing tip number 3
Tip number 3 is to strengthen each of your social media assets.
Too often we step into a company and notice one or two of the channels entirely neglected. Or the guy who WAS looking after it has now left the company.
This is not sufficient. People are creatures of habit. If you have a daily stock market update and the person creating it leaves, then you need to jump on it and update it daily.
Your people are expecting it. If you leave it for a week, then your tribe has left and found someone else who can supply their information.
Build the systems to generate more leads
Build the systems within your organisation, so your social media channels continue to generate leads. This is the only way to win the online social media battle.
When it comes to creating the best social media marketing strategy, consistency will trump the most well-intentioned plans. Get in there, test, implement, analyse the results and refine, refine and refine.
Only testing and time will help you identify what the best social media marketing strategy that resonates with your audience is.
Are you testing other social media channels
Another point to note is to have a plan in place to test other up and coming channels. Your goal here is to see what engagement you can achieve.
Often the lowest hanging fruit is sitting idle on the channels your competitors haven’t taken the time to look into.
The goals of your social media marketing team are to allocate sufficient time to test other platforms. You must get involved and open the conversation with the people across these channels.
Some other less obvious channels that are overlooked by some large corporations are:
- YouTube
- Tumblr
- Vine
- Meetup
- Snapchat
- Vimeo
- Flickr
- Slideshare
So what are you waiting for? There is no time like the present to get in and build your audience and drive more leads to your lead generation assets via social media.
Feel free to connect with us via our social media channels and let us know what has been working well for your company.
