Social Media and Content Marketing Strategy
West Palm Beach

Social Media and Content Marketing Strategy

Often I am asked by entrepreneurs, potential employers, and fellow friends to develop some "grand scheme" of a 90 day marketing plan to revolutionize their social media programs.  They ask me,

"I wanted to ask you a question since you are the social media guru out of all my friends.  I have been tasked with putting together a plan to increase our social media efforts for my company.  What would you think are some major aspects to tackle when starting a social media campaign (FB, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.)?  Any good websites to check out? "

The fact is, there is no set ideal 90 day plan.  Social media evolves faster than just about any industry and is organically grown by spending time with your fans. However, there are concepts and ideas that can be applied across industries. There needs to be more of a focus on sharing and proactive conversations through segmentation to distribute your content instead of just reactive uploading.  Instead of me having to come up with some "genius marketing ideas," here is a free resource for you newbies that just works.

  1. Link Building/Public Relations: Reach out to six freelance journalists per day to pitch stories featuring your company and utilize Contently.  Conduct link building by reaching out to six media people  per day & sharing your companies' public resources. Create a media database for pitching stories to major print, TV, media, etc. Rinse and rewash.
  2. Blogger Outreach: Utilize Content Blvd, Zemanta, & Outbrain to connect your company with publishers who will post your content. Simplify blogger/publisher outreach by nailing down top bloggers in your industry or associations. Guest blog as much as you can and even just posting one blog per week can help drive traffic to your website.
  3. Content Creation: Add RSS Feeds and join other Groups/Publications like Business 2 Community, Social Media Today, and Buzzfeed. Be a prolific and dynamic copywriter, content creator, and curator with the ability to effectively tailor content for different audiences with a brand editorial calendar. Increase Slideshare presentations via email, regularly share things on LinkedIn and write a post about your industry trends, take Instagram photos when you give sales presentations, post something your fans on Facebook find valuable once a day, and don't forget to peruse through Reddit. If your B2B, whitepapers, e-books, and checklists are always valuable to other businesses.
  4. Increase Social Media Presences: You don’t have to update your social media networks everyday, but there are now 400! Drive social media strategies across platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube, continually refining and evolving based on performance and market trends. Host Google+ Hangout interviews with thought leaders in your industry and your customers, while utilizing Vine and Snapchat videos. For me YouTube is the most dynamic to create how-to videos, sales pitches, or recaps of the trade shows you attend. 
  5. Social Media Management: Monitor, manage, publish, listen, and respond to users appropriately with HootSuite.  Integrate Hootsuite into App Directory, YouTube, blog, e-mail marketing, and SalesForce. Provide day-to-day activities such as customer service, brand advocacy, community outreach and reputation management. 
  6. Create an Influencer Marketing Program: Establishing relationships with influential people who can amplify and expand visibility for your brand’s products and services should be a priority.  Check Klout scores of some of the most influential people in your industry and create campaigns around sharing content with them so that they will promote it.  There's a reason some companies get more attention; they go after those that can influence others.
  7. Pay Content Advertising: Budget digital advertising campaigns with StumbleUpon, Facebook Ads, Google Display Ads, Promoted Tweets, and other online advertising outlets.
  8. Storify: Create weekly stories of conversations on social media. Take a series of your company tweets or blog posts and turn them into an interactive slide deck or blog post that can be hosted and shared from your profile/embedded into external page.
  9. Social Selling: Potential investors, employees, colleagues, clients and customers are literally at your fingertips, but it is up to you to build relationships. That's what social selling is all about. The fact is social media can help you sell better because it's another touch point to build trust with people. Foster brand ambassadors that will share your content. Continually work to streamline and enhance the customer experience across all platforms.
  10. Create Distribution lists: All social networks should be segmented and many people aren't currently utilizing this important tactic.  For example, subscriber list and segmenting people on Twitter is more effective. Utilize tools like Insightpool to build fan base growth on twitter and engage with 10 people in proactive conversations a day. On LinkedIn, you can segment people by professional connections, customers, competitors, and thought leaders.
  11. Utilize Tools: Click to Tweet, OneLoad.com, Buffer, Tweriod, HubSpot, Uberflip, & Gaggle Amp. AddThis is great for putting sharing and follow buttons you see all over the place. Integrate buttons into Uberflip, social networks, newsletters, emails, etc. There is an extensive list of free tools out there.  See what works and adjust.
  12. Conduct SEO Content Analysis: Every month compile a SEO report of how content is performing by using SimpleReach, SEO Moz, Google Analytics, and Sharedengine.
  13. User-Generated/Sharing Contest: Continually create contests for your fans to share your content or have them produce your content for your brand to win a prize. Incentives get people to act.
  14. Monitor and Measure Key Performance Indicators (KPIs): You can't evolve without understanding impact and effectiveness of campaigns in order to track ROI with project management systems. Share insights with not just your marketing team, but company-wide and act on these insights to evolve and improve performance.
  15. Email Campaigns: Develop and manage all your email lists and campaigns using Mailchimp. Try integrating some of your videos, slideshares, or LinkedIn posts in these emails too.
  16. Social Media Websites: Track and stay up to date with social media and content marketing trends by watching the social media influencers. Some of my go-to resources are Globalsocialmediamarketing.com, Socialmediaonlineclasses.comInsightpoolSocial Media TodaySocial Media ExaminerSocial SteveBrian Solis, and Hubspot..

What tactics are you using?  Leave a comment to let me know or reach out to me at Globalsocialmediamarketing.com and let's work together.  Always open to creative freelance projects or sharing my ideas.

 

 

Frank Ramirez

Head of Products @ Vote Frenzy | MBA, Software Product Management

4y

What is needed here is a prioritized list that a very small team can execute.  These are all great potential channels  but truth be told maintianing a online presence  that is real and not drone like bot posts is very labor intensive. We all can use paltforms that post liek bots but that is totally disregards the identity of the community. You also cannot  really outsource effectivley either. The nuances of culture are important. So thanks for the article it is a  good list- just more tactical guidance for companies that are lean lean lean to maximize value  would help. For many amny small firms marketng  is not a dedicated job funtion so they need to focus, focus, focus.  For example; recent analyses indicated that the ROI of one social channel we use is 450% more effective than another - so we dropped 99% of our investment in the poor performing channel. You need to quickly experiment and measure and prue to define your marketing mix. Revisit only if a major change occurs.

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David Stoltz

Sr. Sales Operations Manager at Veeam Software

8y

Great article Ben!

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