Social Media Marketing Done The Right Way

The social media marketing market is exploding and everyone’s jumping on the band wagon. It’s almost madness with people being addicted to social media to the point that life cannot be lived without it.

Bad for the person with the addiction but the good thing is that if you’re a business owner, social media marketing can be one of the most powerful marketing tools available today.

Social media in and of itself is very time consuming. People spend hours and hours on social media almost as if it’s a drug. On the good side, because so much people spend so much time on social media sites tweeting, liking, pinteresting and whatever else “ing” available you have an easy audience attention when you execute social media marketing right.

One of the biggest misconceptions of social media marketing is thinking that you can just send  a few tweets, like a few pages or posts, or upload an instagram photo of your business and your social media marketing will take off. This is far from the truth. Social Media Marketing done right takes a lot of time and requires specific strategy implementation to make it work right.

Before we get into the what makes social media marketing work, we have to look at real world marketing strategies that work. I like to look at marketing in steps or stages. Here’s my version of marketing in 3 steps:

Step 1, The Market– You  must have a market or a hungry crowd. When I say market, I’m talking about people that are actively seeking out an answer for their problem in which your product is the exclusive answer. When researching your market, the best market or markets (you can have several markets) is niche markets. A niche market is a specialty or a sub market of a general market. For instance there are many doctors and there are specialists. A specialist, although he is a doctor, is an expert in a specific field such has a heart specialist, or a neurological surgeon. They get paid a lot of money for what they do because they are good at what they do. A doctor can also special in more than one field. My niche market for one of my businesses for 10 years was a Hawaiian Food Caterer in Tucson where we were the only Authentic Hawaiian Food providers. There are tons of caterers, tons of restaurants but we were the only caterers that provided Authentic Hawaiian Food. We had no competition and we were usually the most expensive caterers in town but because of our specialty and expertise in the Hawaiian cuisine, our food was valued at a higher price.

Step 2, The Media – The media that you use is the venue that you use to reach out to your market. Media is anything that connects you to your market such as radio ads, personalized letters to your market, newspaper or trade ads, flyers, business cards, facebook, twitter, tv ads, etc… You get the idea. Media also involves the layout, color schemes, look and feel, and other things that match your market. For example, imagine if you were marketing your product to the girl scouts of Albuquerque. You wouldn’t use military color schemes with a touch and strong look and feel. You would use soft girl colors with girlish looking graphics. One take away here is that most people make the mistake of one size fits all marketing. On the contrary, the more you can customize and cater to your specific market the way they would like to be marketed to, you will find far greater results doing so then using blanket styled marketing media.

Step 3, The Content – I would have to say that second to targeting the right market, your message or the words that you use in your marketing campaign differentiates an okay performing marketing piece to an outstanding performing marketing masterpiece. Your marketing message should be selling what you offer in print or whatever media that you use. This step is universal to all forms of media whether it be offline or online marketing. One strategy is the Problem, Agitate, and Solve method. People respond to 2 things. They respond to how painful something is that want solutions for. Or they respond to how much pleasure something will bring them.

Most people that buy things buy them because they have a problem to solve. In the PAG method, you state the problem that they have. In my catering business, the biggest problem with hiring a caterer was that people was tired of eating the same food at parties all the time which in Tucson was Mexican food. I don’t know why this was but being Hawaiian growing up with a grandfather who was a Hawaiian chef, I was able to provide Tucson with it’s ONLY Authentic Hawaiian Food. I agitated the problem with something like, “Not only are their limited catering choices but the choices reflect on their hiring abilities. Everyone will complain, ‘Mexican food again? We always get Mexican food.” No one wants to be the bad guy at the party. Everyone wants to be the hero which is where I became the solution. Another better option from the hum drum same old same old food – Authentic Hawaiian Food. Everyone loved our food and raved about it.

This method works across any business field. The great thing about marketing is that you can be creative as you want and even create a market out of a market out of thin air. Look at Dominoes Pizza. When the first started out there were tons of pizza companies available. They didn’t create the best pizza in town. They started around the school campuses knowing at the time that the pot heads(market) would be hungry. They created the fastest delivered pizza. Thus blowing their competition out of the water.

You message and having a call to action or as in sales, your closing is also an essential key element in your content. Most people who think they’re in marketing don’t realize that marketing involves action to take place for it to be legitimately called marketing. Just as you would  fire an employee that doesn’t do what he’s hired to do, so it should be with your marketing or if you’ve hired someone and they’re not producing results.

On a side note, my background is marketing and we do offline marketing for various companies that give you a minimum 350% return on your investment. Call me at 520-392-5923 or email me at nextlevelwebdevelopers@gmail.com to schedule a FREE No Obligation Consultation, normally a $350 Fee while slots are available.

Step 4, Track Your Results – How well your marketing is performing or tracking the performance of your marketing campaigns and strategies is a huge marketing mistake most people make. You have to track your results. Let me say that again. You must track your results! If you’re not tracking your results then your marketing efforts may be falling on the wayside. Tracking also allows for you to determine and re-strategize to improve or make changes to your marketing so that the adjustments produce the intended results.

So let’s take things a step further. Now that we’ve laid the foundation for marketing, social media marketing is no different.

Here’s my short list of social media marketing essentials:

1. Online Market – Like offline marketing, online marketing is the same. You must have a market. In some ways, online marketing can be a lot easier to find a market because of the power of search engines. If you know what your market looks like and what they’re looking for, you can search for places that they may be in and write articles or comments that direct them to your social media site or website.
2. Media – The beauty of online marketing is that you can be a whole lot more creative with what you put out there. It’s not simple as click and go because there are certain things you have to know to make your marketing pieces look the way you want it to look on a facebook page or twitter. There are a lot of tools that we use to make this happen. As we mentioned earlier, social media marketing is very time consuming and unless you have precise strategies that accomplish specific outcomes, you will be wasting a lot of your precious time. Call us at 520-392-5923 and we’ll do the work for you.
3. The Content – Writing the copy for your social media marketing on a regular basis, month after month, week after week can be a very daunting task. Unless you are a trained professional and writer, creating and maintaining your online marketing will take you away from your real business. As it is with offline copy, you the content must guide and direct your customers to take specific actions that lead to making purchases or making purchases directly. And like it is with offline content, if your message doesn’t produce you increased revenue then it’s not truly marketing. Marketing whether it’s online or offline is simply selling in print form on the screen or on paper. We’ll do the work for you as well as maintain your marketing campaign. We have our Social Media Content Creation Package to create the marketing campaigns for you. After you’re content is created we have our Social Media Content Care Plan where we maintain your ongoing social media marketing campaigns. Call us at 520-392-5923 or email us at nextlevelwebdevelopers@gmail.com.com for more details.
4. Tracking – As with offline marketing, you must implement tracking devices to be able to track a like or a click to order to know whether or not a marketing campaign is working. Not only do we provide the social media marketing services above but we also provide you with live access to see for yourself how well a marketing campaign is performing. You wouldn’t run a business without knowing what your sales at the end of the day was at. So it should be with your marketing.

For more information on our Social Media Content Creation Package and Social Media Content Care Plan, call 520-392-5923 or email us at nextlevelwebdevelopers@gmail.com to request information.