Social Media Marketing
The power of social media is immense and can be a great tool to grow your business. However, there is not a “one size fits all” strategy. Each business will have a slightly different strategy with varying content, followings and “listening” techniques.
Strategic Implementation
Social media marketing involves leveraging various channels to achieve your marketing communications and branding goals. This could include any combination of using Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Pinterest, Youtube, and LinkedIn. It involves growing a social media following, listening to conversations, sharing knowledge and getting involved in discussions.
The key to success is tapping into existing groups of users—listening and responding to those groups. Creativity, humor, helpfulness, and valuable insights can all be essential ingredients for an effective social media campaign.
Benefits of a Good Strategic Plan
- Build links and inbound traffic to improve search results
- Grow a following of potential customers
- Drive traffic to new content
- Establish your business as a thought leader and expert in your industry
- Build trust and loyalty
- Validate your services and products through social media “likes”
The Bigger Picture
Social media works hand in glove with search marketing. SEM (search engine marketing) focuses primarily on building awareness of your business via search strategies like SEO (search engine optimization) and PPC (pay per click advertising) — driving traffic to targeted landing pages on your site. An ongoing social media strategy will reinforce those efforts by adding traffic and triggers that match the topics, products and service offerings that are being targeted.
Online marketing is a comprehensive marketing approach that includes social media, search (SEO and SEM), paid advertising, email, content strategy and analytics. Social media is one of the core components of online marketing and is increasing in importance each year. It cannot be overlooked by any business trying to market their products or services online.
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