Displaying your product’s or service’s value: Create online press releases and email newsletters. Share testimonials and reviews with your users and offer affiliate or loyalty programs, online events, or promotions.
Advertising: Take advantage of pay-per-click ads, banners, and sponsorships.
Use social media strategically to
Meet an otherwise unmet marketing need.
Increase access to your target market.
Open the door to a new niche market.
Move prospects through the conversion funnel.
Improve the experience for existing customers.
For example, the website for Fluid IT Services (www.fluiditservices.com) links to its Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn sites, as well as its blog (www.fluiditservices.com/blog), to attract its audience. For more information on overall online marketing, see Stephanie Diamond’s book, Digital Marketing All-In-One For Dummies (John Wiley & Sons, Inc.).
To get the maximum benefit from social media, you must have a hub site, the site to which web traffic will be directed, as shown in Figure 1-9. With more than 2 billion websites online, you need social media as a source of traffic. Your hub site can be a full website or a blog, as long as the site has its own domain name. It doesn’t matter where the site is hosted — only that you own its name, which appears as www.yourcompany.com or http://blog.yourcompany.com. Though you can link to http://yourcompany.wordpress.com, you can’t effectively optimize or advertise a WordPress address like this. Besides, it doesn’t look professional to use a domain name from a third party.
Consider doing some sketching for your own campaign: Create a block diagram that shows the relationship between components, the flow of content between outlets, and perhaps even the criteria for success and how you’ll measure those criteria.
Courtesy of Watermelon Mountain Web Marketing: www.watermelonweb.com
FIGURE 1-9: All social media channels and other forms of online marketing interconnect with your hub website.
Developing a Strategic Social Media Marketing Plan
Surely you wrote an overall marketing plan when you last updated your business plan and an online-marketing plan when you first created your website. If not, it’s never too late! For business planning resources, see the Starting a Business page at www.sba.gov/category/navigation-structure/starting-managing-business/starting-business.
You can further refine a marketing plan for social media marketing. As with any other marketing plan, you start with strategy. A Social Media Marketing Goals statement (Figure 1-10 shows an example) would incorporate sections on strategic goals, objectives, target markets, methods, costs, and return on investment (ROI).
You can download the form on this book’s website (www.dummies.com/go/socialmediamarketingaio5e) and read more about ROI in Book 1, Chapter 2.
Here are some points to keep in mind when putting together your strategic marketing overview:
The most important function of the form isn’t for you to follow it slavishly, but rather to force you to consider the various facets of social media marketing before you invest too much effort or money. Courtesy of Watermelon Mountain Web Marketing: www.watermelonweb.comFIGURE 1-10: Establish your social-marketing goals, objectives, and target market definition on this form.
The form also helps you communicate decisions to your board of advisors or your boss, in case you need to make the business case for getting involved in social media.
The form provides a coherent framework for explaining to everyone involved in your social media effort — employees, volunteers, or contractors — the task you’re trying to accomplish and why.
Book 1, Chapter 3 includes a Social Media Marketing Plan, which helps you develop a detailed tactical approach — including timelines — for specific social media services, sites, and tools.
In the following sections, we talk about the information you should include on this form.
Establishing goals
The Goals section prioritizes the overall reasons you’re implementing a social media campaign. You can prioritize your goals from the seven benefits of social media, described in the earlier section “Understanding the Benefits of Social Media,” or you can add your own goals. Most businesses have multiple goals, which you can specify on the form.
Consult Table 1-1 to see how companies are using social media to reach their goals.
TABLE 1-1 Matching Social Media Services to Goals
| Goal | Customer Communication | Brand Awareness | Traffic Generation | SEO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Good | Good | Good | Good | |
| Good | Good | Good | Good | |
| Good | Good | Good | Good | |
| Periscope | Okay | Okay | Okay | Okay |
|
|