9 Steps to Social Media Campaigns to Make You More Effective

9 Steps To Social Campaigns That Make You More Effective

As an entrepreneur, there are about 1,000,001 things that need to be done on a given day. It is arguably said that you can work 24 hours, and still have 1 million things to do.  Is the entrepreneurs cannot afford to dilly dally on non-essential task. Time is a huge resource and so streamlining what we need to do is have of most importance.

With so much vying for our attention, how do we as infopreneurs, entrepreneurs and solopreneurs, mompreneur, deal with the overwhelm and the sheer volume of MUST DOs in our business? 

How do we go about without King ourselves into the ground, driving ourselves and our friends and families crazy?

With the abundance of it all, how do we as entrepreneurs get organized, and streamline what we need to do to market our business? With social media, there are nine steps to making your marketing campaigns effectively.

The following nine steps are efficiency reminders for busy entrepreneurs.  These nine simple steps give order and strategy to the monster we call social media. It helps us to hone in our campaigns and provides a process so that we can see the trees from the forest.  Here are the nine steps to social campaigns that will make you more effective.

(1) Know Your Audience

(2) Know Where They Hang Out

(3) Know What Appeals to Them

(4) Have a Social Media Strategy 

(5) An Action Plan Calendar

(6) Content Production

(7) Execute the Content 

(8) Review Your Statistics

(9) Adjust Your Sails and Do It Again

(1) Know Your Audience

Know Your Peeps!  Choosing your ideal client and selecting a specific, targeted audience will serve you well when it comes to marketing.

Unless you are making over $150,000 on one service, program or product, or unless you have deep pockets for marketing, more than one specific ideal customer type will dilute your focus and campaign, especially if you are a soloprenuer. 

"Niching down" and identifying l one specific target audience, in terms of an ideal customer may seem counterintuitive to most entrepreneurs.  

You may feel that your product service or program serves a variety of audiences.  While this may be true, if you are not focused on one ideal customer when you write your marketing copy, your marketing message itself will lose substantial impact.

You must learn to speak to one specific audience at a time. Create your campaign or marketing message and tailor it to one specific ideal customer.  Keep your message focused and directed to that specific person.  What is important to one ideal customer may not be important to another. Therefore when you talk specifically to your ideal client, it makes your offer, product, program, or service irresistible.

Focusing on one niche market does not mean that you will not attract others. However, the focus of your campaign should be targeted and specific so that it is outstanding to those it is intended.  Expanding your reach after you’ve succeeded in penetrating your initial target niche can further eliminate distractions of be too many things for too many people.  

When you create your marketing campaign with a specific person in mind, you are writing with specific details to solve specific problems for that one particular, ideal customer.  Doing so will provide a message with a specific solution, tailor made to solve the problems of your ideal customer. 

If your message is not tailor-made, it becomes a generic solution that speaks to no one. 

RELATED POST:  Niching Down Your Target Audience:  Defining Your Avatar

(2) Know Where They Hang Out

Location, Location, Location!  After having an idea of exactly who you are talking to, you need to know where this person would most likely see your content and be receptive to your marketing campaign.  You need to show up and meet your customers where they are.

It is said that with business and real estate, location is everything. This seems directly applicable to marketing as well.  Going where your customers hang out is key to a successful marketing campaign.

You want to place your, or program at a location where your client's frequent. As a point of example, you would not sell women's lingerie at a shoe store. Nor would you sell makeup at an auto body part store.  It would also not make sense to sell pharmaceuticals at the local farmers market. 

Knowing where your customers hang out and being visible when they are ready to shop is logical common sense.

In life, showing up is half the battle.  Showing up at the right place, at the right time, gives you a competitive edge.   Marketing you want to gain every competitive edge. Being visible is a huge competitive edge over invisibility.  Especially with social media, out of sight and out of mind totally applies!

For instance, if your ideal client is a stay-at-home mom, it would serve you well to know that Google is not the social media platform for you.  You may want to do some market research to identify the most popular network where your ideal client might hang out. (link to the previous article) Depending on the habits and age group of your ideal stay at home mom, Pinterest or Instagram might be more suitable as a platform to attract your ideal client.

Another easy group to draw as an example would be teenagers. Teenagers, for example, will most likely not be on LinkedIn as statistics have shown that LinkedIn is comprised mostly of professionals who are the most advanced in age, 35 years and older.  Knowing where to find your people is really important and marketing.

RELATED POST: 6 Social Media Platforms: How to Decide Where You Need to Be

(3) Know What Appeals to Them

What Do They Want

Insight about what appeals to your specific ideal client makes a significant impact on the responsiveness to your campaign. If you do not know what appeals to your ideal client, either in terms of visuals or content, you will not be successful in reaching them.

Your connection will be lacking because regardless of what you say it will feel to them as though you are speaking at them rather than to them.

Knowing what resonates with your ideal customer will provide a baseline to establish a relationship. When two people see life from a similar perspective, there is a camaraderie understanding. The message that you are saying will be better received it because you are using the right words, triggers, visuals, to appeal to your ideal client.

This is the reason why it is I thought most important to Know who your audience is.  When your audience means that not only do you know what their pain points are, you also have a viable solution to their problem.

Regard to content production, having an idea of what connects and entertains ideal client will help you bridge the gap of communication. If your content is of interest to your ideal client, and it is a topic that speaks to their heart, they will most likely share the information because then it becomes share-worthy.

What you output on social media will be a source of information, and little by little your ideal client will come to look forward to your content each week.

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(4) Have a Social Media Strategy

Strategize!  Rather than throwing Jell-O on to the wall and seeing what sticks, it helps greatly to have a social media strategy.

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Having a social media marketing strategy action plan will allow you to reach your marketing goals with specifics on what to post, went to post, where to post, and how often to post.

A strategic plan will also provide action items to complete every day every week and every month.

More than shooting from the hip, a strategic action plan allows you to be intentional about goals and benchmarks and how you will achieve them, individually and as a team. At any point, you will know what you need to do and the steps that need to be implemented to accomplish a goal.

The strategy you go beyond identifying your niche, pain points or problems to be solved. A content strategy allows you to have a game plan on what kind of content to produce, and what would be attractive to your ideal client.  A good marketing strategy enables you to align goals and results with a plan of action.

(5) An Action Plan Calendar

Creating a calendar is an action plan with deadlines. With a specific calendar, not only will you know what to do, You will know when it is due.

Having a calendar is particularly important in the daily grind. As an entrepreneur, 1 million things come up in the course of the day.  There are days when everything that comes up seems to be on high-priority that must be taken care of. As we are putting out fires we may forget the action steps that need to be done for this certain day. Many entrepreneurs get distracted and lose track of what absolutely needs to get done.

Having a Calendar keeps you on track and provides a level of control and freedom. Regardless of what you accomplished on the calendar to do for that day, you no you would reach your goal at the end of the month.

(6) Content Production

Creating the Content that appeals to your people.  Content creation is really important to any social media campaign. It is also the most time-consuming process of the many tasks that entrepreneurs face.

To be successful on social media, we've got to either roll up our sleeves and get marketing content produced or have a calendar without anything to post.

The problem lies not with a source of creative ideas. It is often times a problem to produce content because of the sheer amount of content that needs to be produced for marketing, communications, content, emails, sales, and more.  Entrepreneurs face the real dilemma of time scarcity. What would it be like if you outsourced and hired someone to take part of that task away?

Having a virtual assistant to reply to your emails, or Doug your books, for instance, may save you hours and hours of energy devoted to that task.  The tradeoff that is the number of dollars that you spend in exchange for completion of that work.  

The key to creating content is to have a strategy so that when you sit down, all content can be streamlined and created at one sitting. Studies have shown that when you start or stop a task it takes about 20% of productivity away from that task by simply needing to switch gears.

(7) Schedule the Content

Execution (Turn It On)

Alas, the execution is just as important as the production of the content. If we were to produce content and we do not schedule it and share with the world, it would do us no good.

Scheduling the content is most streamlined in bulk. Just like production, you would want to sit down and schedule all your content, all at once.

Scheduling Content in this manner will leave no stones unturned and once completed, you are free to do other things important to your business.

Scheduling social media consistently and regularly also helps social campaigns as the consistency will help to cut through the noise of social media.  Consistent posting allows your post to be seen,  and therefore have a higher opportunity for engagement. Engagement and relevance have a direct relationship.  Social media channels recognize high engagement as high relevancy in there for a post that I put on social media will more visible to a greater number of people.

RELATED POST: 5 Powerful Reasons I Switched to CoSchedule for Social Media Postings

(8) Review Stats & Analyze

At least once a month sit down with the statistics from all your sources. Bring out your web analytics, your Google statistics, your bit.ly links, and review the documentation.

Without an objective look an overview of the numbers, you will never know which marketing channels serves you the best. 

Giving time to a marketing campaign, at least 3 to 6 months, will provide a tiny look-see into what is happening with your social media. Providing yourself a window of time for your social media campaigns to work for you will also give you perspective. 

Analyzing data will provide a trend. However, despite the outward appearance of immediate gratification on social media, there is something to be said about long-term data that will give you an idea of trends, engagement, responses, and whether you are on the right track. Rather than looking at something on a micro level, evaluating statistics overtime will give you a better overall handle on what to do and what not to do which brings us to the next point: adjust as needed

(9) Adjust and Do It Again:  Rinse & Repeat

Analyzing where your people come from, you can then adjust your campaign as need be.

Perhaps your data is such because of an inconsistent message, or because of a totally consistent message.  One thing is for certain regarding social media, the more consistent you are in your output of content and postings, the more attention your campaigns will receive.

If you are growing your email list for example and are offering a freebie or lead magnet that is not in demand, the results will speak for itself. Similarly, if you have a totally awesome giveaway that provides true value for your audience, people will look for future items from you because of the immense value of your product.