How to create a social media marketing strategy for a mobile world

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Heres a little-known fact.   Social marketing
was "born" as a discipline in the 1970s when
Philip Kotler and Gerald Zaltman realized that
the same marketing principles that marketers were
using to sell products could be used to "sell"
ideas, attitudes, and behaviors.   Note that
social marketing has the same underlying
principles as social media marketing, but the two
aren't exactly the same.   Social media
marketing is when an individual, business or
brand uses social media platforms and websites to
promote their idea or product. In the social
media explosion of the past decade, the influence
of any given business has grown to reflect
unprecedented reach, often crossing geographical
boundaries.   As more and more people and
businesses start using social platforms to
promote themselves, a successful social media
marketing strategy will require precise planning,
unique storytelling, and effective execution.
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Set Clear Goals
Any marketing effort, online or offline, needs a
purpose in order to be fruitful. Setting clear,
achievable, measurable goals is instrumental to
your social media marketing strategy.   Rather
than setting vague goals such as increase
engagement or get more followers, put more
specific thought into what you want to achieve,
why this is important to your brand and most
importantly - how will you know you have
succeeded.
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• Here is an example of how you can approach
  goal-setting for social media
• Vague Goal
• Get more followers
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• Specific, Realistic goal
• Get 200 more followers by the end of the month
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• Why is this important
• More eyeballs for my upcoming product promotion
• How will you measure success
• The social profile will reflect the addition of
  200 new followers in the past month.

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• Heres a second example
• Vague Goal
•  Increase Engagement
• Specific, Realistic goal
• Engage with at least 5 people on a daily basis
  for the next three months.

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Why is this important
This will help me build organic relationships for
my brand and create an attentive community
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How will you measure success
Since engagement is an elusive concept, the only
real way you will measure engagement is through
your effort liking, commenting, sharing,
following and interacting with 5 people a day. If
you do this consistently, it makes logical sense
that increased engagement would follow!   If you
are able to define a clear purpose for your
social media activities, set realistic goals and
outline a system for executing and measuring
them, you are off to a good start. Consistent
implementation of your social media strategy can
help you achieve specific parameters. This is
especially true with mobile platforms because the
users attention is fleeting. So, if you want
your message to make an impact, you have to be
very clear about the message that you want to
convey.
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Identify Your Target Audience
Experimenting with the social media marketing
campaigns is great! However, experimentation
doesn't have to mean you stick to generic content
until something clicks - which is what most
people do!   Creating content for a generic
audience will not display the depth of your
knowledge. Nor will it enable a deeper connection
with a specific target demographic. If you are
looking for brand loyalty and engagement, try
starting out in a small niche with a strong brand
message. Something that your small niche audience
feels passionately about. It might help if you
incorporate buyer personas into your social media
marketing strategy. Buyer personas help you to
define a subset of people who will be more
receptive to your message. That way, you can
target the right people, in the right location,
at the right time - and most importantly with the
right message. In order to come up with a
realistic buyer persona, you may want to look at
factors such as
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• Age
• Job Title
• Income
• Location
• Preferred Social Platforms
• Pain Points
• Purchasing Behaviour
• These are just a few of the facets of your buyer
  persona you may want to research, explore and
  define. A thorough buyer analysis is necessary if
  you want to succeed on social media.

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Create a Content Marketing Plan
Creating good content is an art - but
distributing it right is marketing! Lets talk
about content creation first. Sitting down to
chart out a content strategy that covers a
variety of topics will help you create a rounded
out content strategy. Once you have a list of
potential topics, you may want to organize your
content topics into an editorial calendar. This
simple exercise will help you create a logical
progression of engaging content for your
audience. Following this process will also help
avoid any duplication of content and allow for
better-researched articles because you have the
entire list of content topics at your disposal.
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Now, comes the marketing part.
  Depending on the time and resources available
to you, creating an account on every platform may
not be feasible. If you did your research earlier
to define your buyer personas, you will have a
general idea of which platform would yield you
the most interested audience. In addition to
knowing about your audience, you may also need
knowledge of specific platforms and how they
work.   For example, if your content is highly
visual, you may choose to go with visual
platforms like Pinterest and Instagram to create
visual impact. If you offer B2B services and your
content is long-form, you may want to use
LinkedIn blogs to spread your brand message. If
you have video content, you will need to be
active on youtube, Facebook or IGTV.
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Engage Your Users
  Say you completed all of the above steps. By
now, you should have some rudimentary content
crafted and ready to publish according to your
preordained social strategy.   Now, it is time
to add in some bells and whistles to facilitate
engagement. Remember to go beyond pictures and
blog posts to take full advantage of social media
functionality. For example, on Instagram, you
might want to take advantage of their stories or
the new Ask Me Anything feature. On LinkedIn,
you might post short blogs that leads back to a
longer blog on your website.
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Another great way to increase content is to
organize a low barrier-to-entry contest for the
users. Users love taking part in interesting
conversations and participating in contests,
especially if the effort required to participate
is not extraordinary. Make sure your
conversations and contests encourage sharing so
people other than your followers can enjoy the
interaction as well. Also, keep in mind that
posting at different times of the day will yield
different results. In the radio advertising
world, broadcast stations allot slots for every
advertising spot. Primetime advertisements that
reach maximum listeners are sold at a more
premium rate. The time slots with a lower reach
are more affordable. Even if you are only
promoting your content organically, posting at a
time when most of your niche audience is active
will drive up engagement as well as the
visibility of your content.
Another great way to increase content is to
organize a low barrier-to-entry contest for the
users. Users love taking part in interesting
conversations and participating in contests,
especially if the effort required to participate
is not extraordinary. Make sure your
conversations and contests encourage sharing so
people other than your followers can enjoy the
interaction as well.   Also, keep in mind that
posting at different times of the day will yield
different results. In the radio advertising
world, broadcast stations allot slots for every
advertising spot. Primetime advertisements that
reach maximum listeners are sold at a more
premium rate. The time slots with a lower reach
are more affordable. Even if you are only
promoting your content organically, posting at a
time when most of your niche audience is active
will drive up engagement as well as the
visibility of your content.
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Use The Right Social Media Management Tools
So, you have mastered the art of creating and
distributing great content. You create a weeks
worth of postings. Now comes a big logistical
challenge. Posting on multiple platforms every
single day can quickly become cumbersome and
time-consuming.  
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The anual posting was a huge issue, say, a decade
ago. Today, there are great tools like Buffer,
Hootsuite, Sprout Social, CoSchedule and Feedly
to help you escape from the burnout that will
inevitably come from manually posting each and
every post on each and every platform for months
on end. Do yourself a favor and sign up for one
of these scheduling tools which will help you
scale your efforts with ease. Hey, some of them,
have free versions as well that you can try
before you go for the paid ones! In addition to
scheduling posts ahead of time, some of these
scheduling tools will also allow you to keep a
track of your results, analyze data and make
tweaks to optimize your posts.
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