Just a few years ago, you could get away with building a social media marketing strategy on the fly. As long as you were present, you were doing more than your competitors–right?

Well it’s now 2018 and not much of the same logic applies today! With 30% of millennials saying they engage with a brand on social at least once a month, your strategy can’t be only about existence.

We want to provide you and your marketing team with the right steps to take toward a successful social strategy so your brand isn’t left in the dust.

7 Steps in Creating a Winning Social Media Marketing Strategy

1. Create Social Media Marketing Goals That Solve Your Biggest Challenges

The first step to any strategy is to understand what you want out of your efforts. Social media marketing isn’t about flipping a switch and calling it a day. Instead, social media planning should be looked at like cooking.

cooking by the recipe - Social Media Marketing Plan

Once you have your ingredients, you follow a recipe and presto! But that’s not always the case.

That’s why creating goals is so critical to the first part of your social media strategy. At the same time, it’s best to set goals that you know are attainable. Asking for 1 million new Instagram followers in 2018 is unrealistic. With achievable goals, you’re more likely to stick to the original plan and continue to take on new hurdles as you complete old ones.

Social Media Goals to Consider…

Goal setting is a staple of all marketing and business strategies. Social media is no exception.

Of course, with a range of social capabilities, it can be difficult to determine exactly what your objectives should be. For guidance, here are some common social media goals to consider:

  • Increase brand awareness: To create authentic and lasting brand awareness, avoid a slew of promotional messages. Instead, focus on meaningful content and a strong brand personality through your social channels.
  • Higher quality of sales: Digging through your social channels is nearly impossible without monitoring or listening to specific keywords, phrases or hashtags. Through more efficient social media targeting, you reach your core audience much faster.
  • Drive in-person sales: Some retailers rely on social media marketing efforts to drive in-store sales. Is your brand promoting enough on social to reward those who come to you? What about alerting customers to what’s going on in your stores?
  • Improve ROI: There’s not a brand on social media that doesn’t want to increase its return on investment.
  • Create a loyal fanbase: Does your brand promote user-generated content? Do your followers react positively without any initiation? Getting to this point takes time and effort with creating a positive brand persona on social.
  • Better pulse on the industry: What are your competitors doing that seems to be working? What strategies are they using to drive engagement or sales? Having a pulse on the industry could simply help you improve your efforts and take some tips from those doing well.

Don’t forget to document your social media goals. Not only is it important to help you benchmark where you are, but it also improves your chances of achieving them. According to some statistics, people who write their goals down are 30 times more successful.

success-when-goals-are-written-out

2. Research Your Social Media Audience

Approximately 79% of adults use Facebook–but are your customers actively engaging with your brand there? Understanding your audience is necessary to learn things like who buys your products, what age group is the toughest to sell and what income level makes up the most of your returning customers? As for social media, it’s just as critical to know your audience.

First, your brand should look into the demographics of your most valuable social channels. Like we mentioned before, you should have a goal in mind for your social media marketing strategy. This is why you need to research the channels that correlate the most with your goals.

To help you find the Social Media Channels to focus on: take a quick look at the essential demographics data for each major network – check out this guide!

Identifying Customer Demographics

While the demographics data above gives you insight into each channel, what about your own customers? Further analysis has to be completed before you can truly know your customer demographics on social media.

That’s why many brands use a social media dashboard that can provide an overview of who’s following you and how they interact with you on each channel. Most brands today are using at least some sort of dashboard. However, does your dashboard address your specific goals?

Whether you’re an agency providing insights for your clients or an company discovering your own demographics, an all-in-one dashboard solution is critical.

Sprout Social Dashboard analytics-report-twitter-listeningSSprout Social Logoprout Social prides itself on the in-depth and essential demographics data for your social networks to help you identify your customers.

Learn more with a free 30-day trial to uncover crucial data with Sprout!

3. Establish Your Most Important Metrics

While your targeted social media metrics might be the most important step of a strategy, it’s often the spot most veer off the path. Vanity metrics like follower count and likes are always good to measure, but does it tell you the whole story of your brand on social media?

We often get wrapped up in viewing followers and likes as the truth to a campaign, but it’s smart to take a step back and evaluate the social metrics associated with your overall goals.

Engagement metrics sometimes paint a better picture, because as we’ve mentioned many times here, building lasting relationships works on social.

Large audiences and likable content is absolutely great, but here are some other metrics you might want to pursue:
  • Reach: Post reach is the number of unique users who saw your post. How far is your content spreading across social? Is it actually reaching user’s feeds?
  • Clicks: This is the amount of clicks on your content, company name or logo. Link clicks are critical toward understanding how users move through your marketing funnel. Tracking clicks per campaign is essential to understand what drives curiosity or encourages people to buy.
  • Engagement: The total number of social interactions divided by number of impressions. For engagement, it’s about seeing who interacted and if it was a good ratio out of your total reach. This sheds light on how well your audience perceives you and their willingness to interact.
  • Hashtag performance: What were your most used hashtags on your own side? Which hashtags were most associated with your brand? Or what hashtags created the most engagement?
  • Sentiment: This is the measurement of how users reacted to your content, brand or hashtag. Did customers find your recent campaign offensive? What type of sentiment are people associating with your campaign hashtag? It’s always better to dig deeper and find what people are saying.
  • Organic and paid likes: More than just standard Likes, these likes are defined from paid or organic content. For channels like Facebook, organic engagement is much harder to gain traction, which is why many brands turn to Facebook Ads. However, earning organic likes on Instagram isn’t quite as difficult.

4. Research Your Social Competitive Landscape

Before you start creating content, it’s really smart to investigate your competitors.

We’ll always believe you shouldn’t steal your competitors ideas, but instead learn and grow from their success and failures. So how do you find that information?

The first step is to find out who’s your competition in the first place. The simplest way to find competitors is through a simple Google search.

You can exclude the major retailer, Amazon. Search for those who show up who are in your specific industry. Next you want to see who is active on social.

After gathering a handful of industry competitors, it’s smart to use a social media competitive analysis tool like Sprout Social to track Facebook and Instagram content.

Then you will see post break downs of text, images and video to see what your competitors are doing to drive the most engagement. Once you dig through the competitive analysis, you’ll have a better idea of what your potential customers want.

5. Build & Curate Engaging Social Media Content

Did someone say content?
It’s no lie–social media content is extremely important to your marketing strategy.

Related Articles:
The Five Major Psychological Reasons Why People Share Content
Writing Web Content That Makes People Read, Not Skim It

However, it’s best to follow the previous steps before planning out content.

Facebook LIVE EngagementWe recommend creating content that fits to your brand’s identity. It’s necessary to find the perfect balance between target content and being overly promotional as well.

Remember that video is vital to your social media marketing strategy. As approximately 90% of online shoppers believe product videos help them make a purchasing decision.

Ensure you have a consistent schedule of excellent content to publish that doesn’t get stale.

6. Engage With Your Audience & Don’t Ignore

Social media channels are built as networks. This means their main purpose is to be a space to converse, discuss topics and share content. Your brand can’t forget these core elements of “networking” and it takes effort to ensure conversations or engagement opportunities aren’t left unattended.

Through social media, you gain respect as a brand by just being present and talking to your audience. That’s why social customer care is so important to brands wanting to increase audience awareness. It’s all about engagement.

people-connectedWith all the updated algorithms, organic content has a tough time reaching the majority of your audience. The last thing you want to do is ignore those who engage and lose out on sending more down your marketing funnel.

7. Track Your Efforts & Always Improve

So, how well did you do on your social media marketing strategy? Without continuously analyzing your efforts, you’ll never know how one campaign did over another. Having a bird’s-eye-view of your social media activity helps put things into perspective.

If you work at building lasting relationships, there’s a lot less room for failure with your social media marketing strategy.

Sprout Social LogoUse a Tool to Track Success

Sprout Social prides itself on the in-depth and essential demographics data for your social networks to help you track your success. Learn more with a free 30-day trial to uncover crucial data with Sprout!

Looking for more Easy Online Social Media Marketing Training for Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube and with coaching?

These G500 online training courses are for people that are beginners or intermediate Social Media Marketers. These courses could also be a great offer for your customers if it suits your businesses adjectives.
Become an Affiliate Today!
FUse Your Smartphone to Make Money Onlineor a LIMITED Time…. We are offering FREE one on one coaching with your choice of Social Media training module from G500 Training…
You can get 100% of your outlay for ALL the training courses
back with ONE referral….

Plus see how to make $1,000 within hours with a simple Get the Paid First Affiliate Program Here!

If you want or need any help connect with us on one of our social media platforms or on our contact us form!

Talk Soon,

Nicky and Dave

 

Deciding where to invest your marketing dollars isn’t a decision you take lightly.

You know you need to attract new customers and keep your existing clients coming back, but you can’t afford to invest time or resources into something that isn’t going to deliver the results you expect.

An email marketing campaign is a cost-effective solution that gives you the power to reach customers in a place most people visit every day — their inbox.

Want to Try Email Marketing for Your Business?
Sign up for your FREE 30-Day AWeber Trial here.

AWeber Email Marketing logoThere’s plenty of data to back up the benefits of email marketing campaigns.

For Example: Email is almost 40 times more effective than Facebook and Twitter combined in helping your business acquire new customers. (McKinsey)

But if you really want to find out how email can work for your business.

Read 25 benefits of using Email Marketing for any business, but especially relevant for those with small businesses:

1. Build Credibility

People do business with people they know, like, and trust. Email gives you the ability to build credibility with your audience by sharing helpful and informative content.

People will read our newsletters and be able to tell if we’ve the right people for the project or to help before they even call us.

content2. Generate Calls

When done right, email marketing lets businesses reach the right person, with the right offer, at the right time. A well-timed email results in a flood of calls each time they hit send.

3. Strengthen Relationships

If you want to build strong customer relationships, it’s important to have an effective tool to communicate with the people who matter most to your business.

Email gives you the ability to stay top-of-mind and keep people engaged with your business during your busy season and the slower times of the year.

4. Improve Communication

If your business depends on having a reliable way to communicate with your members and clients, you need to have a communication channel you can trust.

For real estate management companies email has provided a reliable solution to keep tenants informed and up-to-date.

Related Article: How To Get Really Good at Influencing Others

5. Build Your Brand

With email marketing, you can strengthen brand recognition with new and potential clients, and extend your reach when people forward or share your message with a friend.

Branding Matters

“The emails are an important reinforcement of brand. I get calls from people I’ve never met all the time. They get the newsletter. Maybe it was forwarded to them by a family member or friend of theirs, and they know I’m the person to call. It really helps establish credibility upfront before saying a word.”
– Dave Cane, Easy Online Biz Solutions

6. Boost Sales

When you have an audience of people who opt in to receiving updates from your business, you’ll be able to think differently about how you boost sales throughout the year.

This has been especially valuable for a business like ours, which communicates with local residents and prople from alround the world.

It has definitely been the easiest way to reach people.

Related Article: Who Else Wants To Be Successful With Tested Headlines That Will Generate Clicks?

7. Learn What Works Effectively

Another benefit of email marketing is that it gives you the metrics you need to see how your campaign emails are performing. These insights help you market smarter, and also give you the advantage of better understanding the needs and interests of your customer base.

We can tell people are interacting with our content and click through to our website.

8. Get Started Quickly

With email marketing software like AWeber (what we us for 98% of our Email Marketing), you’ll have the tools and training you need to get started quickly.

Related Article: How to Build an Email Marketing List Quickly

Regardless of your level of marketing experience or expertise. When you do get stuck, we have a team of people who are dedicated to your success. Just pick up the phone and give them a call.

9. Reach People on ANY Device

With nearly two-thirds of all emails being opened on a mobile device, email marketing is one of the best tools you can use to take advantage of the growing popularity of mobile technology.

Mobile

We are almost positive that all of those people were on their phones, not in a traditional office.

10. Get More from Doing Less

One of the benefits of using an email marketing provider is that you have access to professionally-designed email templates.

These templates are designed to make it quick and easy to get your message out to your audience, and ensure you look professional when it lands in the inbox.

11. Look Professional

Email templates aren’t just easy to use; they’re also designed to make sure you look professional when you reach your audience member’s inbox. You can insert your own content and customize each email template with your logo and colors to make sure it matches your brand.

12. Increase Website Traffic

Whether you’re an e-commerce business that sells products online, or a retail store that wants to increase traffic to your website so that you can bring more people into your store — email marketing campaigns can help.

Email definitely works. We see people clicking through to our website and we have people calling or facebook messaging to telling us that they saw our newsletter.

14. Market with a Personal Touch

Unlike other marketing channels that often limit your ability to customize your message for the different audiences you communicate with, email marketing gives you the ability to organize your audience into lists and communicate with people based on interest, purchase behavior, location, and more.

15. Generate Leads

Not everyone who joins your email list will be ready to make a purchase or sign up for a service. Email gives you the opportunity to capture new visitor’s attention and nurture the relationship with helpful and informative content.

Related Article: Should You Pay for Leads to Expand Your Customer List?

16. Start a Conversation

Email marketing lets you start a two-way conversation that will benefit you and your readers. Don’t just push your message out to them; encourage them to share their feedback and ideas.

17. Promote Services

Service businesses face the difficult challenge of keeping clients interested in their business, even when they aren’t looking for services at different times of the year.

Email gives you the opportunity to keep your client’s attention without overwhelming them with unwanted information.

Related Article: Need an FREE Offer for Your Email Marketing? We’ve Got 7

18. Grow your Audience

We know as a small business, it’s not always easy to stand out in a crowded market. Email marketing allows you to build an audience that is interested in hearing from you, without having to pay for other advertising channels.

19. Stay Organized

Reaching out to clients on an individual basis can be a costly and time-consuming process. Email helps you save time by reaching out to your wider audience, while still delivering a message that’s personal and relevant to them.

Bullet Journal - Time Management Method

Just schedule your emails at the beginning of the week and you’re done.

22. Increase your Value

When you adopt a communication strategy that fits your audience’s needs, you’ll have more people paying attention to your message and get a higher return overall.

23. Attract New Clients

In addition to connecting with the people on your email list, you can also share your newsletters and announcements on your own social media networks to bring new people to your business.

24. Improve Visibility

As much as you’d like to think customers know about all of the different products and services you have to offer, there’s a good chance that many of them don’t.

Taking a more pro-active approach to your marketing could prove to be exactly what you need to improve exposure to the services you offer.

25. Save Time

Once you learn the basics, you’ll be able to put together a plan to get your emails out to your audience of subscribers in less time.

Record Your Personal Best

The biggest benefit of email marketing is efficiency. You might think it take a lot longer to create an email than it actually does! But we have a ready made template so it’s easy to pull together an email quickly.

Start Your Success Story…

If you’re already using email marketing and have seen great results, we’d love to hear your story in the comments below!

If you’re not using email marketing, and are interested in seeing how it could benefit your small business, you can try it for free.

Start your FREE 30-Day Trial of AWeber Today!

Talk Soon,
Nicky and Dave

Previously, we wrote about the importance of using Call To Actions effectively in your Email Marketing.

Once you have your CTA button, you must now create or pair it up with an Offer. First, you must offer valuable content that positions you as an expert in your field. Secondly, it must give them incentive to act on your offer.

Today, we’re going to suggest offers that can turn a visitor or email receiver into potential customers using 7 Different Offers you can provide them.

Let’s get started!

1. Offer a FREE Trial or Test Drive

It must be offered for a LIMITED TIME!

This can be done in a number of ways – you could let customers to look around your website, use your service or watch a series of videos showcasing your product.

You can use an app to record screenshots of your product or service. Once people start using your service, they will hopefully love it. This creates customers and spreads your reach.FREE Trial Today2. Provide a FREE Consultation or Audit

Get your web visitor to complete a survey or quiz, and give them some helpful feedback based on their responses. There are ways to automate this process similar to all those viral BuzzFeed quizzes on social media.
Feedback to Your Customer
Try Qzzr for creating quizzes.

Just make sure the information or insight you provide is not offered somewhere else on your site.

3. Give a FREE Coaching Session

This is a step up from #2 and obviously a lot more time-consuming.

However, the Internet presents a lot of easy ways to work around this. This is done particularly through services such as Google Hangouts or Skype. By doing this you can serve several potential customers easily at once.

4. Invite Beta Testers

Are you in the process of launching a new product or piece of software?

Then get testers so you canbe given the crucial feedback you need, while also helping spread your news via creating reviews. You can get a bunch of testers from websites such as Beta List.Proof

5. Use the Facebook Sign Up tab

The goal of social media is create demand for your product or services. But make sure you are moving people into your sales funnel effectively by getting them to sign up for your email marketing.

The Facebook Sign Up tab allows visitors to your Facebook Business page to sign up for newsletters right from Facebook. Thus saving them a step and making it easier to build your list.

6. Send a FREE FAQ Guide

What 10 questions do you get asked all the time by your customers? Or what should they know?

Example: FREE BOOK… Limited Time OFFER!
                    Plus BONUS Video

How to Pick the Best Online Business eBook 2nd Edition bannerWrite these down with the best answers you can get, and save everything as a ebook or PDF. Offer it in exchange for an email address with the option to receive new updates by signing into your newsletter.

7. Host a FREE Webinar

This is a strong incentive for business-to-business and very similar to #3. However, a webinar is a bit more formal. Send invitations and offer valuable insight.

Plan a PowerPoint presentation loaded with good information, record the webinar for later use, and make sure to leave time for open forum questions at the end.

We Recommend that you do your Webinars with Webinar Jam and then for later use automate with Ever Webinar.

Webinar Presentation

Want more Help with your Email Marketing?

We are here to help. Get ACCESS to the Best FREE Tools and Resources for Entrepreneurs by going to our Tools and Resource Page or Subscribing to our Entrepreneur Newsletter.

The best Entrepreneurs learn how to use attraction marketing which is the concept of leading with value to attract your perfect prospects to you. Which is important when doing Email Marketing effectively. We recommend that like us and our mentors that you check out the affiliate program that teaches Entrepreneurs attraction marketing and much much more.
Check it OutIf you want any more help then just Messenger us (Private Message Us) at our Facebook Messenger link – m.me/EasyOnlineBizSolutions

Talk Soon,
Nicky

The point of any marketing message is to get a response, and to get a response you need the coveted trifecta of email marketing:
A strong subject line, a solid offer and a clear call to action (CTA).

When you create an email marketing campaign, a CTA is vital

“Capital Letters Were Always The Best Way Of Dealing
With Things You Didn’t Have A Good Answer To”

– Douglas Adams

When and how to use capital letters can be a problem. When writing casually to friends it’s acceptable to drop capital letters. but if you are writing anything more formal then you need to use capital letters correctly.

We are always amused – and slightly terrified – by people who regularly write their Facebook status updates and other things like entire emails in all caps.

We don’t really know why they haven’t learned yet that WRITING IN ALL CAPS IS EQUIVALENT TO SHOUTING.

Really. It doesn’t matter what you’re saying. You can be the nicest person, writing a perfectly harmless statement, but hit that Caps Lock button, and suddenly you sound like a raging psycho.

So what’s up with that?

Incidentally, those that overuse Caps Lock sometimes also have the habit of writing things in bold too. As in, whole paragraphs. Which is ridiculous because when you write everything in bold, you have missed the whole point, which is to emphasize a specific word or phrase.

We are sometimes guilty of this.

Remember, the whole point of writing is to clearly communicate a message.

Two Reasons NOT to Use All Caps

Reason #1. People don’t really like listening to those that Shout.

You can’t blame us, really. It’s something we learn from the time we’re kids: Shouting = Not Fun. That means we’ve probably in trouble.

So we shut off, don’t really listen, start wondering how to cover our asses in case we really are guilty of something, and hope you’ll calm down sometime soon before you give yourself a stroke.

Message NOT received.

Reason #2. A block of text in all caps is actually more difficult to read.

‘Tis true. Studies have shown that text written in ALL CAPS is 40% less legible than text in Caps & lowercase, or just lowercase.

We’re not exactly sure why – some people say it’s because lowercase letters differ more in shape and therefore provide greater contrast, but personally, we think it’s the SHOUTING. Now we’re back to Reason #1.

So if you’re an incorrigible all-capper, do yourself a favor. Just kill the Caps Lock button and come back down to lowercase with rest of us. we promise you won’t regret it. 🙂
Want to create a powerful sales copy?
Then start making these mistakes.

Typing in All Caps

The 5 Rules of USING Capital Letters

Rule 1: To Start a Sentence

There are no exceptions to this rule.
This means that, after a full stop,? and ! you always use a capital letter.

However if in the sentence you have a clause in parenthesis (brackets) or sequence separated by dashes, and if these end with a question mark or exclamation mark, you should continue with lower case after the second bracket or dash.

Rule 2: Titles

In titles, capitalise only the important words, not minor words such as ‘and’ and ‘but’.

‘Title Case’, with all the important words capitalised, is rather out of fashion at the moment.

Example: “When to Use Capital Letters”

In title case, in this example, ‘Use’, although small, is an important word in the title, and should, therefore, be capitalised. ‘To’, however, is not important and therefore not capitalised.

Rule 3: For Proper Nouns

Proper nouns name something specific, for example, Jane, John, Oxford University, Denver, Qantas, Microsoft, Everest, Sahara.

Proper nouns (nearly) always start with a capital letter. There are exceptions to this rule and in marketing sometimes lower-case characters are purposefully used for some proper nouns. Examples include iPhone or eBay.

The word ‘I’ is not a proper noun, but a pronoun. In English ‘I’ is always capitalised.

Rule 4: Acronyms

Acronyms generally work like title case.

The easiest way to work this out is to write out the full title, and then you can see which words don’t need to be capitalised.

Let’s make this clear with a few examples:
British Broadcasting Corporation – BBC
Department for Education – DfE
Manchester United Football Club – MUFC
United Arab Emirates – UAE
World of Warcraft – WoW

Rule 5: Contractions

Contractions are like acronyms, but also include one or more letters from within the same word.

So capitalise the initial letters of words, but not subsequent letters within the same word.

Examples of this include HiFi, which is short for ‘High Fidelity’, and SciFi, short for science fiction.

Following these rules will generally help you to work out when to use capital letters. They definitely did for us.

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Learn Copywriting and Do it yourself with Million Dollar Copy

million dollar copy

How to become a six figure copywriter – 7 short videos on becoming a great copywriter.

This Copywriting training is part of a huge library of training from online business to Entrepreneurial and personal development training. They come as video and or audio files in a bundle.

You purchase the bundle in this case it is the G500 Pack. You own all the tracks. AND own the licence to resell them. Which means with one referral sale you have the cost of the G500 back. Yes 100% return and you still keep the recordings.

Learn more about the G500 Training Library and Million Dollar Copy

We are here to help. If you want any help in your Entrepreneurship endeavors, just Messenger us (Private Message Us) at our Facebook Messenger link – m.me/EasyOnlineBizSolutions

Get ACCESS to the best FREE tools and resources for entrepreneurs and business people by going to our tools and resource page or Subscribing to our Entrepreneur Newsletter.

Talk Soon,

Nicky

Webinars are used in different sectors (professional, educational, entertainment, media) for different purposes.

Internet marketers, bloggers, developers and small businesses often use custom webinar applications in various forms to connect with their loyal customers and teams working in remote areas. This is such a powerful medium to reach out to the consumers, peers and business partners without any hassle.

We have selected 5 of the best webinar software options available today that are quite easy-to-use and cost nothing. Read more

Do you post videos on Facebook?
Have you ever re-targeted your audience of your Facebook LIVE or past uploaded videos?

Most people know about retargeting through the Facebook Pixel.
Now, Facebook allows you to retarget using video.

As Facebook has been emphasizing live video and video in the news feed, we are especially excited about these video retargeting features. Anytime somebody sees at least three seconds of a video (recorded or live), Facebook takes note of who they are. Read more

What better way to display your brand’s human side to your customers than to show the people behind the business or company?

You can now do that free, easier and more effective with the use of Facebook LIVE. So you have no excuse to not have it apart of your marketing plan.

Facebook LIVE Videos experience three times the engagement of typical videos shared on social media, with millions of users tuning in around the world. Read more

So you want to make the ultimate promo video for your business, eh?

Want to learn how to create an affordable promotional video for your business and increase sales using Facebook?

Video is a powerful tool to use when speaking to your marketing audience. There are several elements that, when put together, can result in one heck of a promo video for your brand.