Social media platforms are the billboards to drive traffic to your website and to your brand. Like all advertising and promotion, you simply cannot rely on the same info that you’ve posted last year, last month, and last week to continue to attract customers to your brand. Your competitors are on to you, and they’ll respond in kind with their newest campaigns to promote their products and services. They’ll blow you out of the water if you sit back on your laurels.
Social media is not static. It’s dynamic. Examine the timeline on any social platform—your post will stay there for a short time and then eventually fall off the page. Sure, it will remain on your business profile page, but customers wont see that post unless they are visiting your business profile. What can you do to keep your brand alive on social media feeds?
Which brings us to the subject of your website. Have nothing new to add? Think it’s good as-is? Think again—Your competition has visited your website and is on to you, working behind the scenes to make their website stand above yours in the Google rankings. All it takes is adding fresh content—blog articles, new product descriptions, white papers, how-to videos, and press releases.
So with the New Year, it’s time to spruce up your online image. We aren’t necessarily advocating a complete overhaul, just some tweaks to keep you competitive in the digital marketplace.
Refresh your brand message. Create a digital marketing goal plan that contains these elements:
1. Start with Your Website. With a well organized website, you help search engines drive your target audience to your content. Potential customers are seeking your products and services—You just need to make your information easily visible to search engines so that you can close the sale. Update content on your web pages using the most current relevant SEO (optimizing each page with new META information, keywords, and relevant content). Add and check internal links to where other relevant content can be found within your website. Add external links to social media business profiles, reviews, and business partners. All of these actions combine to up your website’s domain authority (the likelihood of your website to rank in the search engines).
2. Be a Goal-Setter. According to Hubspot’s State of Inbound Report, businesses that calculate their return on investment (ROI) for their marketing strategies are 72% more likely to believe that their company’s marketing strategy is effective. Set marketing goals that are measurable. For instance, to increase your social media followers and page likes by X percent, to increase your blog click-through rate to other content, and to increase email open rate by X percent. Are these goals to be attained weekly, monthly, or yearly? Determine how success in each KPI (key performance indicator) contributes to improving your bottom line to set ROI benchmarks.
3. Create a Budget and Stick to It. Hubspot’s State of Inbound Report also confirms a strong correlation between digital marketing effectiveness and budget. We’re talking about the time devoted to creating, posting, and analyzing your digital marketing plan. How much time will you devote to managing social network profiles? How much content do you want to create for your blog? Do you need to invest in graphics and stock images? How much CPM (cost per thousand) or CPC (cost per click) impressions do you need to create an ROI on your advertising? Regardless of your business sector, WordStream Blog suggests that as much as 20% of the gross revenue for new companies should be allocated to marketing, which established companies could get away with spending some 12% of their gross revenue (of course, a new company needs to build an audience from scratch). The good news is that a healthy return on your investment can be yours with a minimum investment, because social media management costs far less than other traditional forms of marketing.
4. Cement Your Online Reputation by Deploying Stealth Social Media Profiles. Zero in on the best social media platforms for your business success, concentrating on where your target audience is most likely to hang out:
• Facebook is the most popular social media network, which makes it invaluable for most businesses. Besides posting photos and company updates, a business profile puts powerful tools for advertising and analysis at your fingertips. Your business profile functions as your Facebook storefront, because you can customize it to go far and beyond a simple bio and contact information. Promote your business using Google maps, hours of operation, products, shopping carts, videos, and much more. Apps from other websites seamlessly integrate with Facebook, allowing you to post discounts, coupons, and business events on other sites for them to instantly appear on Facebook.
• Twitter is perfect for spreading the word in quick, brief statements (using 240 characters or less) containing relevant content. Use these short blurbs to create a meaningful dialogue with customers and potential customers—Answer questions, share praise, retweet reviews, share videos, images, and links. Build your brand with the savvy placement of hashtags (#). Include hashtags in your business profile, and change them up from time to time to keep your brand in the forefront of your customer’s minds to readily fulfill their needs.
• LinkedIn is known as the social networking hub for professional networking. For B2B companies that are particularly centered around tech and manufacturing, take advantage of LinkedIn’s offerings. Make connections with colleagues at companies that utilize your products and services to build lasting impressions, create customer loyalty, and increase your bottom line over the long term. LinkedIn profiles are akin to business resumes, and by joining specific LinkedIn Groups relevant to your industry, you’ll paint yourself as a business authority and industry expert in your field of concentration. Post information about your latest awards, white papers, product innovations, and blog articles to drive your industry’s movers and shakers to your website.
• YouTube is the standard for video sharing, where a business profile becomes a virtual TV channel that can house your business “commercials”. Capture fascinating stories about your company on a video cam is fair game: product demos, exclusive interviews with the CEO, behind-the-scenes tours of your warehouse, conference and expo action, panel discussions, and off-the-wall entertainment (for instance, trivia and polls about your products) are all fair game. Cross-promote with easy-to-post URLs and html codes to deliver on-demand video content on your web pages. Plus, the videos are all searchable through Google, as YouTube offers the ability to tag videos with META descriptions and keywords.
• Instagram is the visual platform based entirely on video and photo posts. But what makes it unique from other platforms that encourage the sharing of visual content is that Instagram is mobile—You cannot post directly to Instagram from a desktop computer. When your target audience performs most of their shopping and communicating on-the-go, Instagram can be a boon. Your Instagram Stories are designed for immediate content dissemination, since the photos and videos disappear 24 hours after posting. Create a direct dialogue using polls, questions, and sliding bars. To allow connections to continue to see your posts, use Instagram Highlights, the story reels that remain on your profile until you decide to delete them. Upload content live, as it happens, and remember to use hashtags (Instagram allows as many as 30 hashtags per post).
• Pinterest allows users to save visual content and display it by “pinning” it to their own categorized, digital bulletin boards, which they share with many connections. Pinterest is not just for fashion, food, and home decorating. Companies that sell products and parts for construction and DIY projects excel on Pinterest by posting how-to-build, step-by-step images that attract interest in their products. Get creative with a Pinterest profile, which gives you the power to align all your posts with your brand using clever descriptions of your boards. Use your keywords!
These are, by no means, all of the social media platforms to consider for your business. Depending upon your industry and where your customers roam, you may choose to consider others. Check out the current social media demographics to determine where to concentrate. Focusing on just a handful of platforms is most productive, because you’ll be able to devote time to building a consistent voice.
5. Choose Your Plan of Attack. Map out your strategy for how frequently to post on each social channel. Determine the focus of your posts and create a schedule. Examples of posts contain info about your latest blog articles, new product releases, educational content for your customers, industry reports, appearances at expos, and more, but they must all link back to the specific info on your website.
Utilize direct messaging to establish a direct rapport with customers. Facebook and Yelp even give you the option of placing a call-to-action button on your business profile. Besides posting the best content for each social media platform on a consistent basis, respond to direct messages to drive customers through your sales funnel.
6. Employ The Secret to Successful, Moneymaking Digital Marketing. Customization is the secret sauce that brings customers to you instead of your competitors. Digital marketing is not a one-size-fits-all. Many factors come into play to make an unmistakable, winning impression on your target audience. Start with content development for your website, social media profiles, blog articles, and social media posts. Add graphic design to make your company’s story, products, and services sizzle. Strategize for the ultimate search engine optimization (SEO) for content creation that gets you ranked in Google and beyond. With Google Analytics in place, you’ll be able to adjust your social reach campaigns to increase your ROI.
But don’t rely on accomplishing all of these tasks all in-house. Call on seasoned experts at 559-978-4096 to see your digital marketing goal planning come to full fruition this year and beyond. Get started with a free website assessment and a thorough analysis of your online competition.
