Social media marketing has a host of tips and tricks that we are all supposed to learn, memorize, apply, test, and tweak daily. Sometimes more than daily. But really, social media marketing can be summed up in 3 very important points.
What are the 3 M’s of Social Media Marketing?
Message– Decide on the message you want to convey to your audience. This can be a solution to a problem, a perspective, an offer, a product, or a service.
Monitor-You are the messenger, and your audience is the receiver. You must be able to monitor what your audience is receptive to, what they want, how they spend their time and money, where they hang out, what makes them tick, how they engage, and what they want more of.
Measure– The only way to know if your money and efforts are working is to measure your results. Success is however you choose to measure, which can be profits, leads, email addresses, percentage of sales, number of sales, web clicks, re-tweets, shares, or page engagements.
Message
The message marketing is a strategic, yet creative process. There are a myriad of ways to send a message, just like there are a myriad of ways to create a painting, but they key component is knowing the message you want to send before putting the paintbrush to the canvas, so to speak.
What message do you want to send to your customers or clients? The first and most important message should be who you are, what your company stands for, what your company offers, why your product or service is better than your competitors, or why they should work with you. This is often referred to as the Unique Selling Proposition or USP. It is helpful to write out a few options and choose the one that works best. Twitter allows each tweet to be 144 characters, and this is also a good standard for the length of your USP. Short and to the point. You can go into more detail later, after you get their attention. From there, you can elaborate on your message by posting to your social media platform. You may choose photos, quotes, articles, videos, coupons, testimonials, or stories, or even better- a combination of all of these. Just make sure that the posts reflect your message, and your message speaks to your audience.
Monitor.
Monitoring your social media pages can be very time-consuming, but it’s necessary to maximize your efforts. You can drastically reduce the time you spend manually monitoring posts by using 3rd party trackers, but either way, you must be able to watch your posts so that you can sharpen your strategy and more effectively reach your audience.
Questions you should ask while monitoring your social media posts and campaigns
- Who am I reaching?
- Is my audience using smartphones or desktops to engage with my company?
- How does my audience spend their money?
- Are they purchasing what I am offering?
- Can they afford what I am offering?
- Am I creating an emotional bond with my audience?
- Do they prefer one product or service over another?
- Why?
- Why not?
- Is my offer something my audience needs?
- How am I conveying this?
- Does my audience prefer long content or short?
- What type of posts or offers do they respond most to?
- What gives me the most conversions?
- What time of day do I receive the most interaction from my audience?
- What social media platform does my audience prefer, use, and share my business with?
Measurement
Finally, you must measure the effects of your social media campaigns. First, decide on the metric you want to measure- sales? Lead conversion? Captured contact information? Enrollments? Or something else? You may also want to measure several of these, as I do for my own business. Sometimes capturing leads during one campaign is more important than a sale if I am trying to boost numbers for a webinar for example.
Next, you must measure the effect your campaign had on your audience. This is the tricky part because it is often difficult to measure whether your marketing impacted customers or there were outside factors that played a part in your outcome. But without means, systems, or data, it is hard to know what was successful, why, why not, and whether money was spent or invested.
What questions should you ask to measure your social media campaign?
- Which team member drove the desired action the most?
- What message or post was the best received?
- What did it cost to acquire a lead?
- What did it cost to make a sale?
- How many points of contact were made before a sale was made?
- How close to our goals did we come?
- Did feedback improve our goals, products, services, or profits?
- How effective was the targeting?
- Were the goals met?
- How can we be more effective in the future?
Numbers are important in measuring the effectiveness of a campaign. Know what your goals are before you begin a campaign, watch the engagements of your posts during a campaign top tweak as needed, and then weigh the final results before starting another campaign. What metrics or 3rd party sites have you used to help you track your social media campaign’s effectiveness?