5 Steps to a successful social media marketing campaign

Step 1 – Complete Brand Audit – Onsite and Offsite

On-site

How does your site compare to your competitors’ sites? How well does your site rank in search engines like Google? Does your online presence create a lasting, positive brand impression on visitors? Is your organization’s mission stated in a confident, memorable way that resonates with your audience?

Website credibility is paramount to retaining visitors and to converting those visitors into customers. Today, a site’s presence, design, and content are three factors essential to the site’s success. If you are not doing an outstanding job in fulfilling these three factors, your visitors are not likely to become your sales leads—and will turn to your competition.

Web presence audit consists of several components:

Site Content and Design

This component comprehensively reviews all issues that can negatively affect your site, and recommends ways to improve targeting, user experience, content, and site design. We will compare your site to your competitors’ and industry leaders’. The final report suggests how to improve the quality and quantity of your content, and proposes specific recommendations on content that would likely benefit your site’s ability to draw traffic and build links.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

This component thoroughly reviews all the factors that contribute to long-term improvements in SEO. We inspect the major issues that may impact how search engines are able to crawl, index, and rank your website for the terms you target. We employ a multitude of scans and tools to identify what can be improved and how. To determine if your site is optimized, we examine search-friendliness, page content, keywords used, site Metadata, as well as list of all spider-able pages on your site and their corresponding title tags. Our technical team helps you configure and analyze Google Webmaster Tools, as well as identify and optimize your home page for 3 -5 target keywords.

Off-site

Social Presence

You site is not the only place where people can find information about you. This fact can work to your advantage, but it can also hurt your reputation if you are not able to monitor the spread of information about you. We will look at all of your profiles on social networks and determine whether or not they serve your brand image. In the report, we present you with a list of other sites, blogs, discussion forums, and boards that mention your company; a list of sites and portals that benefit you to join; and a list of online discussions to participate in. The report will also include tools to help you monitor your overall online presence.

We recommend a complete Brand Analysis Package for every new customer. Using automated tools, social networks, online research, and our knowledge of blogs and the online community, we assemble a comprehensive document detailing how your product or brand is viewed and discussed online.

The Brand Analysis package is a 6-8 week program that provides:

• Weekly summaries of online conversations
• Lists of online communities serving as focus groups
• Industry trends (memetracking or coolfinding)
• Descriptions of product reviews and those of your competitors
• Suggested methods to interact with online “influentials”
• “Bottom line” summaries for quick reading and reference
• List creation for email addresses, websites, and blogs to involve in product launches
• High-level strategic analysis of your online reputation
• Brand Analysis can serve as a stand-alone document for internal decision- making or as a roadmap for promotional campaigns and product launches.

Step 2 – Design Social Media Campaign

OVER 1000 CASE STUDIES, AND GROWING DAILY! Our extensive internal library of case studies reveals what your competition is doing, how well it is working for them, and what we can do to top them for you. We are not in the business of reinventing the wheel, but we believe in knowing what works so we can take it to the next level.

Our work revolves around your brand. We can take your brand online, or establish something new, fresh, and distinctive. Web design and online presence has to be integrated with your brand’s message. Otherwise, your message lacks consistency and loses its power to impress, attract, and retain consumers. We accomplish this through a three-stage process: listening to the community, implementing and communicating what you have accomplished, and measuring the results. Once we measure the results, we continue to communicate with your community, monitor progress, and adjust accordingly.

In our strategy, we use various social media components such as social networks, blogs and twits, podcasts and webinars, intelligent press releases, wikis, online broadcasting, and user-generated content.

Social Media Strategy Development

The effectiveness of social media lies in its power to build relationships. It empowers you to engage and connect with visitors on a level deeper than paid advertising affords. The goal of your social media campaign should be to invite site visitors to join you and contribute to the conversation about what matters to them—and this has everything to do with your services, products, and brands.

We do the following to develop a social media strategy:?

• Online Brand Reputation Audit – Let us review your current online presence and find out exactly where your site appears, who uses your content, and what people are saying about your company. Negative information can rank high on search engines, and has a strong potential to hurt your company. We help you address these issues with resources that find and track negative comments and the behavior that leads people to search for them. We monitor search engines, blogs, forums, social networks, and a whole range of other websites to ensure a strong reputation for you.
• Market research – How much do you know about the online presence of your competition? Learn who the online leaders in your industry are, monitor their activity, track new developments, and build on the success of your competition.
• Consumer analysis – In order to build relationships with your consumers, it is imperative to know what sites they visit, what blogs they read, and how they act. We use social media to learn the behaviors of your potential customers  in order to help you select the proper marketing tactics to reach them.?
• Audience Development – Once you learn the market and the behaviors of your consumers, it is time to turn your research into development. We select a proper mix of social media tools such as Twitter, Digg, and Facebook to reach your community demographic to start turning it into an audience that advocates for you. Community outreach services are intended to help you identify content, activities, messages, communities, and influencers that will most effectively help you share your opinions, experiences, and perspectives with the right audience. We teach you how to create genuine personal relationships with the influencers and evangelists that have the loudest voices within their online social networks.

Social Media Training

Find out how to use such popular tools as Twitter, Ning, Wiki, and YouTube effectively. You will learn how to integrate these tools into your strategy and to connect with your demographic. You will learn how to identify the right online resources and to monitor what thought-leaders predict the next big thing is. We give you the tools to monitor and evaluate emerging technology so you can decide which will bring you the best ROI.? Our social media training includes:

• Use of webcasts and podcasts
• Setting up and managing blogs and multi-user blogs
• Viral marketing and how to set up campaigns
• Building social networks from scratch

Social Media Methodology

Social media has changed the way we do marketing. Below are some of the principles that define social media and its business applications. Today’s web solutions have to take advantage of Web 2.0, where content, interaction, collaboration, and functionality are the keys to success. We ground our coaching in these principles:

Sharing is everything. Today, companies that are transparent in the eyes of their consumers gain their trust. It is essential for the company to share what it does, and to talk to consumers instead of selling to them.

Your brand is what people think about you. Just because you intend to be the most prominent brand online, that doesn’t mean your consumers see you that way. Quite often, there is a gap between what you intend to look like and how your audience sees you. The key to social media is the ability to monitor EVERYTHING around you. It is your responsibility to know what people say about you, how your clients treat your services, and how clients use your products. Unless you closely monitor and act on your findings, you are irresponsible in the eyes of social consumer.

1. Be aware – consumers have changed. The abundance of choices has made consumers a lot more selective. They have too many options to pay attention to anybody who does not meet their demands. Social consumers are in control, and if they are not satisfied, they will tear your brand apart. Social consumers create content and compete with you for the attention of the wider audience.
2. Competition is easier to monitor. In only a few hours, you can find every trace that a company has ever left online. The challenge rests not in the amount of content available, but in your ability to digest it and use it to your advantage.
3. Be organic. Paying for attention might work in traditional marketing, but in social media, where interaction is everything, you have build trust and relationships.
4. Commitment and persistence brings results. Social media is not a quarter- based endeavor. It takes time and requires a long-lasting commitment to change. Your return on investment depends on the time you invest and the actions you take.
5. Positioning – be careful of where you are. Social media makes it easy to appear before a wider audience. Most of the time, there is no cost to appear on various networks, industry -related sites, and even news portals. However, a company has to be selective and realize that appearing online is a commitment. Once you make your appearance, you have to reinforce it continuously or people will forget you.
6. You have to matter. Every business has to answer the question, “Why do I matter?” Your audience needs to know why you stand out, why your services are what they need, and why your products have a positive impact on their lives. They have to become emotionally invested in your success.
7. Tools come and go; your brand has to stay. If you have 300 followers on Twitter or 100 blog readers, do you think they will look for you if those tools become obsolete? Nine out of ten companies will say no. The reason is simple: people are addicted to new tools and applications. But you need to make them addicted to your message—to your brand. This way, your audience will follow you no matter what is trendy.

Step 3 – Listen

It is impossible to market your site without knowing what your customers and users want. Our first priority is to equip your site with “ears,” making it easy for users to share their feedback and suggest improvements to your presence. Members of the community can contribute in various ways: blogs, adding business listings, writing articles and reviews, sharing ideas, communicating through web chats, and more. Listening doesn’t just mean surveying your users: it means listening to where the market is going and what your competition is doing. This is where our unique library of resources comes into play. We monitor the trends in your business, engage in conversations with market experts, assess where the market stands, and identify the right niche for you.

Step 4 – Communicate

After you have examined the market, talked to your users, and surveyed your community, it is time to implement and communicate what you have accomplished back to the consumers. We use permission marketing to create relationships with partner sites, engage in email marketing to convey your message, and use newsletters to retain your current customer base at a very low cost.

Additionally, we actively engage in social media marketing and help companies design a comprehensive communication strategy that capitalizes on various social media venues. It is imperative to select channels used by the people you want to reach. Social networks and active engagement in social media are vital because they get out your message and give you access to a much larger user group to expose your brand. If you get your customers or peers actively involved with your products or services, you can instill brand loyalty in your customers. As part of our communication strategy, we use the following techniques:

• Viral marketing – using existing social networks
• Video marketing – using video and online video channels to engage consumers in interactive conversations
• Pull interactions –pulling users into conversations instead of pushing them with products and services
• Creating and using virtual communities – over 90% of small companies who participated in a marketing study expressed interest in using private and public online communities to promote a conversation with site users
• Online PR – Have a two-way conversation with your community. Traditional PR strategies do not promote interaction, but focus on product/service sales. Our PR strategies focus on building a community vital to spreading your message.

Step 5 – Measure

One of the most prominent advantages of Web 2.0 technology is the ability to measure results easily. Using conversation tracking services, web traffic can be analyzed to determine how site visitors behave and if they do what you hope– read product descriptions, look at services offered, subscribe to newsletters, comment on blog postings, etc. For companies that post blogs, firms such as BlogPulse and Technorati can track who is linking to a blog site and what’s being said about it. Google analytics and other site tracking devices can be used for free to see how user dynamics change. With the right approach, a company can take advantage of Web 2.0’s incredible reach and the opportunity to connect with customers in an entirely new way.

Are you ready to launch your social media marketing campaign? Call us at (513) 373-4216 or complete this form.