The Ramp to Social Media Marketing

Let’s talk about the process of building up to a successful campaign.

First of all: don’t start running ads until you have fully built up the parts that support a successful marketing campaign.Brand awareness

Start by building trust through quality content. Work on consistently creating content on a regular cycle and with a consistent style. I can’t overstate how important this whole consistency thing really is. It has to be constant in quantity and quality.

It can be really hard to get your mojo going at first, but think of this; isn’t it easier to come up with something to talk about when you talk to someone every day than it is when you talk to someone only occasionally? The more you produce, the easier it becomes. You will even be able to come up with content ideas more easily.

This is the stage that you should be focusing on building a website and establishing social media channels. Not only do you want to be putting out that great content all the time, but now is also when you build your analytics, data capture, and sales methods (aka funnels) into your system.

Putting these things in order now will reap the greatest rewards once you have campaigns under your belt and all that data will allow you to tune your system effectively over time.

Social media marketing audit

Now that you have your brand defined and you are producing relevant content on a regular basis, it is time to do a social media marketing audit.

There are a hand full of tools we use to do this, but in essence, we simply want to look at all of your intended social media platforms and see where there are actionable things that you are missing.

Example: Is your profile picture relevant? Is your page completely filled out with information about who you are and how to contact you? How often are you posting on each? Are you posting platform optimized content that people are engaging you with?

It’s all fairly simple stuff, but this is where we look for holes to fill and develop a strategy to increase the performance of all of your channels and platforms.

Research

While continuing to focus on your content game and tuning your backend systems, it is time to add focus to researching your clients or audience.

This is probably my favorite part of the process. It is an opportunity to really learn about your client or audience. We are going to find out who they are, what they are interested in and where they hang out.

If this is something you haven’t done before, it is likely that you will be surprised at your misconceptions about your target clientele or audience.

Researching your audience for ads is all about accuracy and specificity. The success of a marketing campaign largely comes down to how detailed your understanding of who you are trying to market to is. Being too general is a common and big mistake that will cost you a lot in missing the actual target. We have tools and templates that help us perfect this process.

We often call these client or audience profiles “avatars”. Many businesses have more than one avatar. It is important to realize this and break each audience down to its most specific target avatar. We then use those specific avatars to design ads and ad copy that resonates with them.

Time to make some ads

You finally have the data and processes in place to begin creating targeted ads. This is still only the beginning. Once you start running ads, you will likely find holes in your sales and service processes that need fixing. That’s great. Get on that and to the next phase.

Testing and optimizing

If you have made it this far – Congratulations, you are about to start seeing returns on your efforts. If you are committed to winning the long game, then this is when you will get to work on closing deals.

Listen carefully to your clients and relentlessly search out any pain points they experience in your process and smooth them out.

Make sure you are always A/B testing your ads against their avatars and optimize both the ads and your avatars continually.

The catch

Here is the bad news and the good news all at once – this is an extremely fast moving world, this media marketing thing. Your business may be also, but everything about the platforms we use and the way we use them changes rapidly. We must embrace this fact.

The leaders are the ones that realize change is constant and we need to ride the wave – everyday. There is no sitting still.