Any business worth its 21st century salt is using the Internet, our generation’s greatest technological achievement, to advance their own professional ends. For better or worse, conducting forward-thinking business in the past five years has meant maintaining a presence on social media, and some companies succeed at that better than others. When those campaigns are good, they’re great. But when they’re bad, they’re awful. In order to prevent your business from falling into the latter category, you can seize on the following three fundamental methods of improving your social strategy and better position yourself for success.
Define Your Brand
Our postmodern world is filled with logos and slogans being displayed on every surface, popping up on every smartphone and blaring from your Spotify playlist. Defining your brand is essentially staking your claim in the world. It says, “Here is what we do and here is why you should care!” The idea of your brand should be the capital letter that starts the sentence of your pitch to consumers. Take a stand with regard to who you are, what services you offer and sell it to consumers quickly and effectively. If they don’t know who you are, they are not going to be interested in what you’re doing.
Blogging
It should be clear to most business owners at this point that a (well-done) blog is often an invaluable resource for gauging interest in your brand and keeping customers engaged. A blog essentially operates as a hub through which you can update your fans/followers/readers/customers on information that is relevant to their continued relationship with your brand. Some blogs exist only because the owner was told they should have a blog. You can usually tell those ones apart from the ones that actually have value because no one is engaging with them, except for perhaps a few interns or new employees. A successful blog is one that gives readers content that is valuable while keeping them up-to-date and in accordance with your brand.
Marketing
Online marketing by itself can be pretty nebulous; there are manifold ways to promote your brand and message, but very few ways to know which ones are working more than others. In these cases customer resource management can both give your campaigns a boost and offer information that you can use to understand your social audience better in order to generate more conversions, clicks, sales or whatever metric of success you have. Microsoft Dynamics CRM is a marquee service that gives you control over marketing campaigns and customer service, and there are a number of other products and services that will help you understand and capitalize on multiple, ongoing campaigns. If you’re serious about CRM, you can check with a consulting firm to learn more about them and develop a strategy.
Any one of these three tactics will help broaden your social media marketing campaign and for anyone who is serious about social marketing, these are foundational elements to creating a well-rounded, comprehensive strategy. The goal of each tactic presented here – and all social media strategy, really – is to keep your clients engaged and coming back to your brand for more. If you can manage that much, the battle is half-won.
Twitter: writerelated
says:
Hello holly727,
Good work on this article. You are definitely right about companies that maintain blogs just because somebody told them to. Those blogs look fake. In this day and age choosing not to create a real blog shows a disrespect to your customers. It shows that all you care about is their money. It shows that you have no interest in engaging with them. I will definitely keep what you said in mind as I try to build readership to my blogs.
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Twitter: 3MwindowfilmTO
says:
Having a strong brand image can be just as valuable online as it is offline if not more. The best way to go about it is to to have your internet and social media marketing efforts merged with you efforts offline and to have them all linked to each other in a way that generates engagement and eventually conversions. Social media is a great way to do that. You can use contests, post quizzes, and share valuable content with a call to action that will take your prospective clients from the internet into you brick and mortar store where your sales staff can start earning their money by continuing to provide great value and exceptional customer service. Great article and thanks for sharing.
I have always from the start of any site been open and honest and put relevant content on my sites, I keep up to date with the social media and am currently looking into google+ as I never really got the hang of facebook for my industry. To date I have seen steady interest in my sites and think that even though people think they can hide on the internet you need to treat anything you put online as if you were posting it in your shopt window, and anything that is spammy or offensive can harm your business. Interact and build your brand with real people.
Roger
Cisco CCIE Consultant
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Twitter: WebDesignRoma1
says:
Creating and maintaining a positive branding image could be a really tough job, especially for small and medium-sized enterprises.
However a good marketing strategy is becoming very important even for those not called Apple or Nike.
Those three steps of the article are fundamental, but it is also important not to forget social networking, there is an increasingly large share of users that never goes out of their comfort zone.
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Twitter: SamuraiFXTrader
says:
Good article which is very relevant to current things I’ve been thinking about. I have been developing niche sites for a while but only recently have I been interested in getting into the more time-intensive blogging work.
I’m having to re-learn a lot of things about how to market, the social elements, and loads of other things that just weren’t important in my niche sites. I now have a few sites I am building that all have a “brand” and articles like this are making me think I am at least on the right track.
I’ve been doing well with them financially so far but it’s really all about taking that jump to the next level at this point. Thanks for writing this!
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I’m a big believer in defining brand. We have been spending a lot of time on Facebook letting everyone know that we are not just another logo on a product. People are looking for brands they can believe in. They want to support companies that have values like their’s, that are interested in more than just making money. Of course, they also want the best product for the best price.
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I think a lot of people fail to account for the fact that genuinely helping your competitors can actually help you. Working online relationships with people in your industry is a good thing – there’s no reason not to link to a competitor’s site just because it’s a competitor.
I find the most important thing to do when creating social media, or online marketing, content is to be authentic. If the content has real value and is written/produced by someone with true passion for the topic then it generally will do well. If the content is being churned out by people who do not care about the content itself but the marketing results than it generally can be spotted as low quality and wont get any social traction.
Twitter: web_retina
says:
I am a regular reader of this blog and the way the posts are presented in this blog is awesome the writer comes out clearly about each and every topic that I likes the most
Twitter: freshtight
says:
I feel branding is the most significant aspect of marketing online. If you’ve properly defined your business’s main goals and objectives, what makes you different, and how you affect the greater good of the world, then your customers and potential customers will be able to seek you out easier from the crowd (and also remember you amongst your many competitors).
It’s those companies that don’t take the time to define where they stand, their company culture, etc. that end up selling out too quickly or changing something that irks their customers.
Be true to yourself; be true to your brand and you will become successful in due time.
-Tarun
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Twitter: stadriemblems
says:
The first two tips were helpful; I’m not entirely sure how the last one ties in. It seems kind of broad. Unless you’re talking about using a CRM to automate marketing, thus opening up more time for social?
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I think having a certain niche to control the things we post on Social networks is also important. For example, I post about latest movies and things related to technology. And I’ve happened to get a lot of followers with the exact same interests.
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Twitter: m_ali_hafiz
says:
Social media and social media traffic are now very important because no one can really depend on the search engines these days.
Great tips, i have learned from your post. thanks.
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