Leveraging the power of social media marketing can help elevate your audience and customer base in a dramatic way. But getting started without any previous experience or insight could be challenging.  It is important that businesses who implement a social media marketing plan know two things:

  1. Social Media Marketing helps you to get your content seen, which can substantially increase your number of “brand mentions” (mentions of your business) on the web. The better you promote your content across marketing channels, the more referring domains you will receive.
  2. Businesses should share their content on the platforms where their target audience spends the most time. In order to do your social media marketing effectively, you need to (a) do some research into the demographics of different platforms to make sure your audience is there and (b) post CONSISTENTLY and mindfully – if you neglect your accounts, you will lose your audience.  If you can’t do it consistently, don’t do it at all.

Keys To Successful Social Media Marketing

Listening
Success with social media and content marketing requires more listening and less talking. Read your target audience’s online content and join discussions to learn what’s important to them. Only then can you create content and spark conversations that add value rather than clutter to their lives.

Focus
It’s better to specialize than to be a jack-of-all-trades. A highly-focused social media and content marketing strategy intended to build a strong brand has a better chance for success than a broad strategy that attempts to be all things to all people.

Quality
Quality trumps quantity. It’s better to have 1,000 online connections who read, share and talk about your content with their own audiences than 10,000 connections who disappear after connecting with you the first time.  In other words, you need followers who have potential to be customers or bring you customers.

Patience
Social media and content marketing success doesn’t happen overnight. While it’s possible to catch lightning in a bottle, it’s far more likely that you’ll need to commit to the long haul to achieve results.

Influence
Spend time finding the online influencers in your market who have quality audiences and are likely to be interested in your products, services and business. Connect with those people and work to build relationships with them.  If you get on their radar as an authoritative, interesting source of useful information, they might share your content with their own followers, which could put you and your business in front of a huge new audience.

Value
If you spend all your time on the social media directly promoting your products and services, people will stop listening. You must add value to the conversation. Focus less on conversions and more on creating amazing content and developing relationships with online influencers. In time, those people will become a powerful catalyst for word-of-mouth marketing for your business.

Acknowledgment
You wouldn’t ignore someone who reaches out to you in person so don’t ignore them online. Building relationships is one of the most important parts of social media marketing success, so always acknowledge every person who reaches out to you.

Accessibility
Don’t publish your content and then disappear. Be available to your audience. That means you need to consistently publish content and participate in conversations. Followers online can be fickle and they won’t hesitate to replace you if you disappear for weeks or months.

Reciprocity
You can’t expect others to share your content and talk about you if you don’t do the same for them. So, a portion of the time you spend on social media should be focused on sharing and talking about content published by others.

For small business clients who want to increase their online visibility, optimize their search engine rankings and increase website traffic, we at Creative Juices highly recommend social media marketing. It is a proven effective and inexpensive way to promote your services and business and make it easier for you to be found online. Carefully researched, planned, and scheduled information posted to all of the best social media avenues on a consistent basis at the right times can make a big impact on your Search Engine Rankings, your website traffic, your incoming leads, and ultimately, your businesses’ revenue.

Creative Juices Marketing is highly informed of the most effective and efficient ways to make Social Media Marketing work for businesses. We’ll show you how the power of social media can effect your business!  Contact Creative Juices Marketing to talk to us about how we can help you with social media marketing.