How to Leverage Social Media into Your Business's Marketing Plan

As a business manager, it's important to bring in steady revenue to support your operations and provide you and your employees with a steady paycheck. However, to bring in revenue many businesses must lean on marketing strategies to spread the word about their organization and its offering so customers are aware of what's available when making purchasing decisions. If you're just getting started with your business and are considering implementing a marketing plan to help drive sales revenue, you should also plan to include social media strategies as well. Here are some helpful tips you can use when creating a marketing strategy for your startup.

Research

When you're determining your business start up costs, marketing is a vital portion to be considered. However, marketing doesn't have to be expensive if you do your research in advance so you understand your target audience. This involves diving into who your customers are and what drives them to make purchasing decisions. Their interests, education level, age range, gender, and income all play a vital part in determining your market so you can target the appropriate audience when advertising. While you're spending time researching your customers and their needs, it's also a good idea to research your competition and what key strategies they use to reach their audience. Having thorough research can help you create a quality campaign that's sure to offer insights into key tactics you should use and may provide a better return on your investment.

Define Goals

After conducting your research, you should set campaign goals. Think of what you're looking to accomplish through social media. Perhaps you want to increase your brand's online presence or offer customers an additional channel to interact with your business, or you wish to use it to spread the word about new products or services once they're available. Whatever your goals are, you should be sure they're specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and timely. Following these guidelines can help you create deeper, more clearly-defined goals that you can use to measure the success of your campaign.

Identify Strategies

Once your goals are set, your next step is to identify key strategies for carrying out your social media campaign. One mistake new business owners often make is attempting to do too much at once, which can weaken your overall campaign strategy. Based on your market research, you should be able to determine which social media channels make the most sense for your business. Certain platforms tend to attract very defined audiences, making it easier for businesses to determine the best one for their campaign needs.

Create Landing Pages

Your social media campaign should have an end goal, which for most businesses is converting to sales. If your business is interested in creating a campaign designed to boost sales, then you will want to create calls to action as part of your campaign. If you're like most business owners, your call to action will likely end on your website with a purchase or putting your customer in contact with someone at your company for more information. Creating landing pages for specific calls to action can make your customer's overall interaction with your campaign easier while also providing you with detailed analytics you can use to tweak your campaign as needed to continue to boost sales.

Build a Content Strategy

To keep customers engaged with your brand, it's important to have engaging content as part of your social media campaign. Quality content is what catches a customer's eye when they're browsing online and entices them to click those calls to action that can boost revenue. When creating a content strategy, consider your brand and what type of message you want to convey to your customers. Often, customers are looking to companies to be industry experts that are able to provide them with education or information they'll find useful. A quality content strategy is vital to a successful social media campaign and should be kept fresh and engaging to offer your campaign long-term success.

These tips can help your new business create a successful social media campaign that will engage and educate customers about your brand while providing you consistent revenue.