Targeting Social Media Marketing Strategies

With the increased number and variety of social media outlets that businesses and other organizations have at their disposal these days, it can be a bit challenging to narrow the field and focus in very tightly on the best social media marketing strategies for achieving specific goals. The most successful marketing plans though are those with clearly defined and achievable goals, so targeting your strategies is critical to success.

 Define Your Social Media Goals

 The first step in successfully targeting a social media marketing strategy is to define the goals you wish to achieve. Your goals may be to increase your business presence and brand recognition in your niche industry, or to get more traffic to your business website. Whatever your goals, you must be able to clearly define them and ensure that they are truly achievable. If you set an unrealistic and unachievable goal, no amount of social media marketing activities, no matter how well they are completed, will help you attain that goal.

 Examine Your Focus and Target Demographic

 You must look at both your own business focus and the consumer demographic you wish to target through social media promotional and advertising activities. If, for example, you’re a consultancy operations that primarily focuses on data collection and analysis, then content-based social media promotions, like blog posts and articles on subjects related to your business focus may be most useful. If, on the other hand, you’re a company which provides job search and interview coaching to high profile candidates, then social media video promotions, like clips of mock interview sessions, may be the right outlet for your marketing efforts.

 Survey Your Social Media Options

 After looking at what kind of promotional activities may be the most useful for you and for your target audience, you’ll need to look at the social media options available for sharing the type of content or materials you plan to utilize in promoting your business. Most social media utilities allow users to share a range of media types, including text documents, video links, blog feeds and other content. Choose utilities that will serve you best, even if you must limit the number of social media platforms through which you promote your business.

 Focus on Quality Rather than Quantity

 It is better to provide quality content on a single social media utility than to have subpar content in several locations. In other words, you’ll want to focus your efforts on giving your customers, clients, followers and fans truly useful and relevant information and other content. The more professional your presentation and more relevant your content is to your target demographic, the stronger the return on your investment you’ll see through your social media marketing efforts.

 Consistently Engage Your Social Media Network

 Remember that whatever social media outlets you choose, you’ll need to consistently engage your followers or fans in order to maintain their interest and get the most out of your promotional activities. Set and keep a consistent schedule for sharing new information, videos or other content. Sharing something new and relevant once a week is sufficient in many marketing campaigns, though businesses with very lofty goals may need to consider social media network updates several times per week or even on a daily basis.

4 Jan 2012