Are you planning Social Media Marketing for your Business? Do you have a plan like where to start and how to start? What are the key points or key areas of marketing or trends you need to keep in mind before starting social media marketing? Here is the complete 10 points checklist every social media marketer needs to follow before starting social media marketing for any business. If you already have your strategy in place, you can use this checklist to ensure that you have not missed any essential key areas.
1. Do you have the Road Map on what to focus on?
2. Do you know your targeting audience?
3. Do you know which the right social media channel for your business promotion?
4. Do your social Presence audited?
5. Do you have an idea of what tools need to use for social media?
6. What is your budget for social media marketing?
7. What hashtags do you need to use for your campaigns?
8. Do you have the right team for social media marketing?
9. Do you have the monthly post calendar?
10. Do you have the list of influencers whom you need to follow?
Do you have the road map on what to focus on?
Before starting social media marketing, a business needs to have a clear road map or a blueprint for a complete year. This roadmap helps you to be clear on what to focus on and what the mission statement is. A mission statement helps to drive future actions and also helps us to build Brand Identity. While preparing this mission statement we need to keep our targeting audience in mind. The roadmap could be a simple word document or an excel file that can access from anywhere/any device throughout the year. You can use the free cloud-based tools also.
Do you know your targeting audience?
In Social Media Marketing, You need to have a clear idea on whom we need to target so that we can create ideal content, campaigns and promotions that will address their needs and add value to them and get to some of the details like what do they do and how do they react and how do they spend, the demographics and some of the psychographic, etc. The best of finding the right audience is using the Buyer Personas. There are many buyer personas research tools like Hubspot Buyer persona tool & Buffer Buyer persona research tool with a step by step instructions on how to do buyer research.
Do you know which the right social media channel for your business promotion?
When starting social media marketing, every business needs to define what social media channel is going to be useful for your business, not all social media channels are useful to your business. I strongly recommend not going with multiple channels in the initial stages. Better try focusing on one or two channels and get some interactions. A channel with a better Interaction rate is good than a channel with a zero interaction rate. Once your brand influence grows, then you can consider creating, expanding, and optimizing your content and efforts for multiple channels. Choose the current trending and top social media channels for better product engagement
Do your social Presence audited?
Conducting a social media audit is very important for every business. It’s very important to understand who you are to the average user before chalking out future business objectives. You need to ask a few questions before building social presence:
1. How strong is our existing online presence like the website and social branding?
2. Is our website optimized for search results, usability & lead generation?
3. What is our main focusing content?
4. Do we have landing pages for all our marketing campaigns?
5. How about our social media presence? Are our brand is visible and present in all the social media channels where our prospects are spending time?
6. Why do we need to have a strong social presence?
Do you have an idea of what tools need to use for social media?
Not everything can be done with free posting. Social Media is not about only posting content. We need to do core research on customer behavior and interest targeting. Using the right tools in social media marketing helps us to save time and maximize our productivity. There are free tools and paid tools for every digital need including software and mobile apps. And also there are eBooks, online courses, and podcasts that we can use to learn and equip ourselves to accomplish our marketing objectives. It takes a bit of a learning curve and time as we select the right ones that suit us, but the time spent on this now is time saved in the future.
What is your budget for social media marketing?
It is necessary to allocate a separate marketing budget for social media campaigns. This gives us the ability to start planning our general posts and ad campaigns with various social media channels. Social Media advertising is evolving and becoming a more important part of the marketing mix producing great results. We need to know how much budget need to allocate for all the activities in each and every stage.
What hashtags do you need to use for your campaigns?
Hashtags are using everywhere these days. We can see them on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and LinkedIn. As social media marketers, we can’t ignore them and we need to have more focus on hashtags that are related to our line of business. We need to know how to strategically implement the hashtag. Hashtags help our content to get better reach and awareness of our brand.
Do you have the right team for social media marketing?
The right social media team always helps to accomplish great things. The social media marketing planning and strategy impact will depend on how strong our team is. In social media, there needs strong coordination between multiple teams with various skills. For example, a social media marketing campaign for a product launch might require the following teams like the Strategy team, the advertising team, the Content creation, and Content editing team, the Media management team, the Design Team, the IT programming, and the SEO team to work together. The best way to get productive results in Social media is to recruit and create their own in-house digital team with expertise in each of the above functions. Hiring a consultant and a digital agency with a proven track record of working on social media marketing campaigns is also one of the best ways. This option will give you access to all the skill sets.
Do you have the monthly post calendar?
Social Media Marketing Calendar is one of the most useful resources that you can create for marketing your business. It helps to keeps you focused, organized, and working towards your marketing goals, and also it can save a lot of time in thinking about what to post every day on social channels. A social media marketing
calendar is the secret weapon you need for creating and launching successful posts and campaigns. It helps to ensure that-
1. We are creating and planning content for specific marketing goals.
2. We don’t forget important dates
3. We have a balanced variety of posts
4. Our posts are consistent and relevant throughout the year
Everyone involved with their social media content knows what they need to do, and when it needs to happen
Do you have the list of influencers whom you need to follow?
An Influencer is a user who has established credibility in a specific industry and has access to a huge audience crowd and can persuade others to act based on their recommendations. Building and maintaining a relevant audience for our brand is one of the hardest things to do on social media. An influencer has the authenticity to attract many viewers consistently and can motivate others to expand their social audience reach. Influencers help us in reaching a good amount of audience. There are many influencers on social media channels, users with large followings and voices, such as Bloggers, celebrities, and business leaders, who can give your profile a significant boost. Connecting with Influencers and making them endorse our product is the best way of social media marketing.
These are the 10 key points every social media marketer needs to follow before optimizing social media for any business. Hope you enjoy reading the content. Thank you for spending your time. Stay Blessed
Nagarjuna Reddy. Sudha is a Digital Marketing Manager at Web I7 Digital Media and Digital Marketing Trainer at Learn Digital Academy, the best digital marketing training institute in Bangalore. Nagarjuna is a well experienced digital marketer, trained more than 250 digital marketers up to date. He is passionate about creating digital strategies that lead to better content engagements and sales driven traffic.
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