Social media marketing is an excellent way to stay in touch with your current clients and reach potential clients. Often small business owners will use social media marketing without a plan. I call this throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what will stick. It can be frustrating, time-consuming, and defeating. I get it. If you’re feeling this way, keep reading.
Don’t give up. Start by asking yourself these five questions.
- Why are your goals and objectives for using social media marketing? Why do you want to use social media marketing?
- Who do you want to reach on social media, and where are they? Do they use Facebook, Instagram, or another platform?
- What type of content can you share on social media? Will you share photos, products, videos, podcasts, etc.?
- Who will create this content to share, and how much time will you delegate for this activity? Suppose your marketing intern is assigned this task, is she skilled to handle content creation, social media management, and can you afford to pay her for a set number of hours each week for these tasks?
- How will you measure your social media activity for success? For example, suppose your goal is to increase your website traffic. In that case, you can evaluate your Google Analytics to determine if you have an increase in website traffic from Facebook, for example.
Answering these questions will help you in creating a plan. A plan is like a roadmap; it can guide you. If you have no plan, it is easy to get lost and frustrated.
What you do not want to do is add to the noise online. Creating a Facebook business page just because every other business has one isn’t a good reason. An example of a good reason would be a new bakery in town, creating a Facebook business page to build local brand awareness, sharing their good baked photos, and weekly cupcake flavor to increase cupcake sales. The bakery can determine if their awareness has increased by seeing Fan page numbers grow. If the weekly cupcake flavor sales increase after posting to Facebook, the correlation can be made that posting to Facebook is a worthwhile marketing effort. There is a return on investment.
If you’re frustrated and ready to give up, let’s connect. We’re pros at helping small businesses craft social media marketing plans that deliver results, not frustration. Keep it Real Social is a boutique social media marketing agency serving clients in Petoskey, Traverse City, Harbor Springs, Charlevoix, Gaylord, Boyne City, Ann Arbor, and Grand Rapids, Michigan, as well as Gainsville, Flordia.
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