Don't Start With Social Media

Social media marketing is a component of an overall marketing plan and an effort that can positively impact your revenue. At the very least, it delivers brand awareness and grows your audience. Social media marketing has become a gold rush for businesses, but it is a mistake to think that this is where you start and that business will then flow like the mighty Niagara Falls.

Social media marketing and networking is the hottest topic in the “how to grow your business” discussion, so it goes without saying that everyone knows they have to be involved. However, there is one caveat: if you aren’t ready to launch a social media campaign, don’t start there. Have you thought about how best to introduce guests to one another? You get the general idea. You must be ready with a strategic plan that is interwoven with the rest of your marketing efforts and your overall business operation. There are several steps to take before launching a social media campaign to ensure your efforts receive the most return on investment. The following three steps can help you develop a comprehensive social media marketing plan:

1. Your website:

The latest search modules are changing. For example, the search engine Bing factors geographic location into its search results. Over the next few months, Google will roll out Caffeine, a new search infrastructure that will consider page quality, broken links, and site speed when assessing ranking. If you have a new website that is optimized, then you can move on to the next steps. However, if your website is not new, or it hasn’t been revamped within the last year or two, then you need to start with your website. Regardless of the road you take—email campaigns, print ads, or social media—all will point to one place first: your website. This is your home base and the central piece of equity that establishes your brand and your identity. It is the doorway to your company, services, products, staff, and how you operate. (For more information on updating your website, visit nyreport.com Report Link number 72813.)

2. SEO (Search Engine Optimization):

If your web designer is not up to snuff on the latest—and I mean the absolute latest—changes that are happening everyday in search technology, then hire a vendor or a combination of vendors who are. Your marketing budget should cover on-going updates and maintenance of your website and go toward building fresh content, links, and adding to resources available on your site. There are code modifications, such as the proper use of keywords within the meta tags, page naming, internal linking, and other more-complex site programming code issues, that should be brought into the make-up of your website and marketing efforts, as well. There are several aspects to optimizing your website for improved search engine rankings, and these change all of the time. You should not think about your website like print collateral, i.e., it was designed and went to print and therefore is complete. Your website should be an ever-evolving lead resource; constantly being tended.

3. Research:

Another critical place to focus your marketing dollars is on research. This doesn’t have to be an extreme investment, but will require some time, effort, and money. This exercise will help you understand how your market is behaving today. Get to know who is out there and where they are engaging on the internet. Figure out what your competitors are doing; identify where your prospects are; and when they search for solutions. Find out what issues they are congregating around, what networks they are participating in, and what exactly they are searching for. And let us not forget, why do they buy? What are their triggers? A sales trainer may learn that a prospect is attending sales- and marketing-related seminars based on updates to their LinkedIn and Facebook profiles. Or, a recruiter following a Twitter discussion can reveal that a particular client may be trying to beef up his accounting department. Much of this research can be done on your own using the search tools that Google has to offer free of charge, and other sites such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Socialmention.com, and many others. Once you determine who, what, when, where, and why, you should be able to determine the most effective networks to engage.

A critical part of preparing a social media marketing strategy is learning to listen, setting up systems to gather the flow of information, and then responding, participating and “feeding the beast” with new and interesting content. The budget dollars and resources that will tend these ripe fields is another area where you need to balance internal and external resources. You can set up “listening stations” by creating certain searches, such as a customer by name and by company, and saving that search in Google Reader—this will bring a feed right into your mailbox whenever something is found. Adding feeds about relevant subjects and people from aggregate sites such as socialmention.com, whostalkin.com, and howsocialble.com can help you sort through the overwhelming amount of information. Google Alerts is another handy tool to get a search result daily right in your mailbox. You might want to consider hiring a social media expert or team to monitor conversations in Twitter, Ning, blogs, and other places where there maybe opportunities. These can be sales leads or they can be opportunities to address what other people are saying online about your service or product.