Christopher is the founder of an online marketing company, specializing in Social Media Marketing. His interests include SEO, Social Networks, Affiliate Marketing, PPC marketing, and web development.
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If you are an online marketer or someone who wants to leverage internet marketing, there will be a few tactics that you will want to consider before planning to target your market.
It is vital to take time out to carefully construct a social marketing strategy if you want to stay away from dismal results. Here are 5 marketing strategies that could be considered before attempting to use social media for online marketing. Ask the following questions to yourself.
What is your ultimate goal?
Are you looking forward to use social media to brand your company or yourself? If so, your approach would be completely different than the normal link building activities. An online branding campaign will require more time and efforts. If you are simply taking the short-cut and trying to acquire backlinks in the effort to get visible on search engines, you would probably like to create a buffer between your social media profiles and social bookmarking efforts. In simple terms, to give your site an extra boost, promote and link the sites that already have authority.
Is the website a hobby or money site?
You probably don’t need to go over the turmoil of the social media campaigns if it is only a hobby site. However, if your website is meant to generate revenue for you, it should reflect in the efforts that you implement for your social media marketing efforts. There should be a fair amount of posts in the form of information, photos, videos and the content to your profiles. Take time to build a community of like-minded people and targeted audience who will be interested in your products and services. Join groups that fall within your target markets. If you are looking to generate revenue from your site, your goal would be to bring the customers in the sales funnel. Thus, all your efforts including the content that you create should be focused towards this aspect.
Who is your target audience?
It is the most obvious, however sometimes the efforts may go to some other direction forgetting all about the target audience. Before creating any piece of content you should know who it is you will be trying to get on social networks. You should create personas that give you an idea on how to communicate with the target audience. For instance, the persons who are interested in your products or services could be from the age group of 41-50. Thus, whatever you create should be done keeping in mind this fact, rather than creating content for the age group of 14-20. Unwanted efforts will only add to your worries as you would have used all your resources and money on something that is not fruitful for the business. Social networks like Zorpia are helping people in finding like-minded people.
Should you consider outsourcing your social media marketing efforts?
It could be quite a tedious and time-consuming process to create profiles, manage friends requests, queries, upload content and all the activities pertaining to the social media account. If you have kept apart a small part of your marketing budget for online marketing, you could consider outsourcing your projects. If your company is a start-up or you would like to see how the whole social media marketing process works, you could even try doing it for sometime yourself. It is only upto you to decide what your time is worth. You may also find that it is worth spending a certain amount of bucks on social media marketing efforts so that you could focus on the other aspects of the business.
