Social media success is a sometimes-tenuous marketing tool to measure. In order to achieve social media success, a marketer has to implement a series of strategies that are synergistic and are part of a complete marketing and promotion plan. The results ultimately achieved through the targeted use of social media can be incredibly effective in converting followers and likes into revenue-generating clients.Here are the five steps that I feel are necessary to achieve a level of social media success:
Know where you are. Before you can effectively implement a social media strategy, you need to know what you’re doing now and how effective, or ineffective it is. List all of the steps you are taking to market your business: email campaigns, print media, social media, brochures, etc. Next you need to determine the expenses associated with each, compare that to the number of new clients the strategy brings in, then divide those to determine your “cost of customer acquisition.” If you discover that you’re spending money in a particular marketing area that isn’t bringing any benefits, it may be time to jettison that tool and implement a new one.
Embrace the “Social Media Trinity.” In this exercise, you need to close out the hype surrounding social media and target your energies on what I believe are the three most important social media tools: microblogging, blogging and social networking.
Fuse your strategies into a coherent marketing plan. To do this you need to look at your current marketing plan and find ways to integrate the Social Media Trinity into what you’re doing in new and unique ways.
What resources do you have available and where can you find what you don’t already have? Knowing where to find the resources you need to implement a new social media strategy is key. Resources could be in-house staff that could implement and carry out social media strategies or you may decide that outsourcing the content is in your best interests in terms of time and money management.
How do you measure success? Once you’ve implemented your social media strategy you need to have metrics in place to determine whether your efforts are reaping rewards. As the saying goes, “You can’t manage what you don’t measure.”
In many businesses, ROI (return on investment) is king. You will need to justify your CCA (cost of customer acquisition) to either your company CEO or to your own bank account and see if your social media strategy is paying off or whether you need to step back and rethink the strategy.
Lon Safko – Author of The Social Media Bible & The Fusion Marketing Bible
lon safko, author, speaker, keynote, training, social media bible, fusion marketing bible
