Understanding your target audience, their customer lifecycle and creating the right content to suit them is paramount for effective social media marketing. Here’s how.

Sponsored content: This article was commissioned by Marketo to let readers know they can access their free copy of the ‘Definitive Guide to Social Media Marketing’.

 

More consumers than ever are using social media to research products and brands, which means there’s never been a better time to optimise your social media strategy.

A new whitepaper by Marketo, titled the ‘Definitive Guide to Social Media Marketing’, details the key steps to creating a winning social media plan by breaks the process down into a few key areas.

 

Step 1. Understand your audience

Understanding your audience requires personas based on background, goals, source of information, preferred content, objections, and product interest.

Personas help to determine the type of content you need, and the tone, style and delivery strategies required.

 

Step 2. Map your goals to the customer lifecycle

Map out your customer lifecycle into six stages: awareness, engagement, purchase, retention and loyalty, growth, and advocacy.

Beyond the usual purchase funnel of awareness, engagement and purchase, the lifecycle of a good social campaign should involve growth and advocacy, to open up opportunities and spread awareness among other consumers. Creating trusting, long-term relationships with your customers is one of the most effective ways to increase revenue, and social media makes this possible. The value of a customer is not just about their individual value, but is also about the value of their networks. Your goal is to offer a great customer experience to encourage your customers to become brand advocates and refer your brands to their friends.

 

Step 3. Create the right content

With the proliferation of marketing messages, one of the only ways to break through to your audience is with content that is relevant, useful, valuable and interesting to your targets. Because of the one-to-one nature of social media marketing, your buyers expect your brand to behave like any other person on the platform. Your content needs to not only offer value but meet their expectations

Define your writing style, driven by the target personas you are trying to reach. Scale your content using the four Rs:

 

• Reorganise: Use sections of the same piece to create smaller breakout pieces which are more relevant to the chosen platform model,

• rewrite: Extend your investment when creating content by using existing content,

• retire: It’s best to remove content that’s outdated. Social media sharing is instantaneous, and the last thing you want to do is make your brand appear out-of-the-loop, and

• redesign: In some cases, all your content needs is a fresh design. Your assets can feel old because creative visuals are no longer on trend, and you can take an existing asset and design it differently to make it relevant for a segment of your audience or certain personas.

 

Also, choose the right image and video assets to support your content. Visuals allow you to boost engagement with content by appealing to emotions, creating intimacy, and encourage shares.

Check out the full version of Marketo’s ‘Definitive Guide to Social Media Marketing’, which offers more detail on building an outstanding campaign, and provides detailed instruction and tips and tricks for individual social platforms including Facebook. Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, YouTube, Periscope and Snapchat. It also includes information on developing a social media advertising campaign, a social media calendar and a social media marketing team.

 

Click here for your free copy of the guide

 

 

 

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