Social Media Marketing Consultants & Experts for Hire

Part of being successful in social media is using a strategy to get the results you have in mind.

Whether you are active on Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Pinterest or others it’s best to have some steps to follow that logically lead you to your goals.

You wouldn’t drive across country without having some kind of map to go with, right? The same should apply for your business ventures.

How to Develop a Social Media Marketing Strategies for your Small Business

The strategy you use to reach your goals is going to depend largely on the goals you have.I recently re-read an article on Social Media Examiner by Amy Porterfield about how to put together your own strategy, in the article she describes 3 steps to follow to come up with your own strategy. Take a look at the article, it goes well with the sample strategies below and will only help you get more specific and focused with your goals.

Commonly businesses want to achieve one or more of the following goals:

• Increased website sales
• More awareness of brand and product line
• Lowered overall marketing costs
• Search optimization benefits
• Leads for business services

It is possible to get more than one result from your efforts, but for anyone starting to focus on goals with social media, please choose one of the above results. Based on the result you have chosen, let’s discuss potential social media marketing strategies your business can use:

**As a forewarning there are several strategies to get the results from above, the following are just suggestions for each one.**

Increased Website Sales Social Media Strategy:

• More posting links to your website, these must be links and updates that provide value to your followers.
• Post links to your website across more social media platforms, each individually and according to their best practices.
• Optimize your social media platforms for getting links, ie: add your website link to Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest.
• Spend time being active and building relationships on each of the platforms you participate on.
• Leverage relationships to get more reach for your social media posts and links.

Plan of Action for this:

• Make a blog or content schedule, and write the content.
• When each piece is finished, personalize it for your followers on Facebook, Twitter and Pinterst if you are consumer business, or Facebook, Twitter and
• Linkedin for a business service/commodity.
• Submit the link to your new post to Stumbleupon, Digg and Delicious

Social Media Participation, Mon-Fri:

• Login everyday to the 3 platforms you are using, here is a Social Media Template I previously wrote to help with daily activities
• Take care of all notifications
• Connect with another user, fanpage, profile by leaving comments, retweeting, thanking, etc
• Retweet, Share and Repin at least 3 times a day for each platform
• Follow new followers
• Post an original tip, helpful, short piece of information for followers

Brand Awareness Social Media Marketing Strategy

For this you want to reach as many new people as possible and get them to like, remember, and share you.

• Join as many conversations as possible
• Make sure your username consists of your brand and industry (ie: Mari Smith Social Media)
• Give away something of value that will stick out to your market
• Be where your market is
• Be very active by logging in several times per day
• Reach out to new people constantly
• Invite feedback
• Add to conversation- Do not self promote and be annoying

Plan of Action:

• You must have a worthy product and or service for this to work.
• Use your brand logo in everything, on your profile image, etc.
• Be active on at least 3 platforms

Facebook For Brand Awareness

• Find several fanpages where your market is active, and add them to a list under your personal profile.
• Visit this list often, click to visit the pages that you want to comment on, open them in new tabs.
• Login as your fanpage.
• Refresh each of their pages that you opened.
• Comment as your fanpage, adding to the conversation.

Twitter for Brand Awareness

• Set up your profile to include information about your brand and how it relates to your industry. Make is attractive.
• Find profiles where people of your market are followers, ex: people who like board games follow Monopoly, and you sell a board game.
• Go through their followers and start following them, many will reciprocate with a follow.
• Follow several other fanpages related to yours, retweet for them, share for them, etc
• Monitor hashtags on TweetWally and respond often to people using those tags
• Be on the lookout for chats in your industry, for instance chats about toys to buy for Christmas if you are a board game, and participate in them.

Slowly build up your other social media followings as you can handle more of them, following each platform’s best practices.

Accumulating More Business Leads Social Media Strategy

If you provide a service or a high priced product, you probably do a lot of selling with leads. Social media is a great way to get leads if you know how.

Here are some ways you can increase leads:

• Have a valuable download to give away
• Build relationships with people in your target market
• Be a trusted authority
• Be active, consistent, and patient

Plan of Action in Accordance with Social Media:

• Put together a giveaway, discount or download that everyone in your market would want, you know your market best, think from their point of view, what do they want or need?
• Structure the download to be accessible once you are liked, followed or connected with.
• Advertise the benefits of your download
• Send out a press release, an email to past clients, promote your download on all platforms to all current followers.
• Provide regular interaction, content, and presence in your industry on all platforms, focusing on building relationships with users who are obviously interested in your industry (ie: they follow industry brands, they post on industry fanpage, they repin industry products and posts)
• Weekly post about your download
• Build relationships with non-competitors that can also share your download with their followers

You should also have a very intricate email marketing campaign set up to nurture leads. While this can be time consuming, your efforts will be lost if leads are not properly handled once they provide you with information.

Construct Your Own Social Media Marketing Strategies

The strategies I have written here are those I would use as a basis for my own business based on the results I want. These are strategies I use with current clients to give them the best results. I tried to include the specifics of what you would need to get started on the path to results. As always if you have any questions, I would love to help, post below, in Facebook, on Twitter, or send me an email.

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We will be adding our cheatsheets for Social Media Platforms Best Practices later this week!