4 Steps to a Successful Social Marketing Campaign (Part 2)

Last week, we gave you two essential steps to take when planning a social marketing campaign - build a clear-cut, realistic strategy, and use a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool to complement the strategy. There are two final steps to take in order to execute, track, measure, and take action.

Invest in a marketing automation solution

We all have inboxes loaded with invitations to events and webinars, promotional offers, articles to consider, and more—and the fact is, email marketing is here to stay. In reality, some of it can be very helpful because marketers are always looking to be in the right place at the right time with the right customer. And if you’ve put something of genuine interest in front of your prospect or customer, they will take action.

Simple email marketing services give you the basic statistics, including who opened, clicked or unsubscribed from your campaign. But full-suite marketing automation tools, like ClickDimensions, take it many steps further than email marketing. These powerful solutions can be fully integrated into a CRM solution and act as both big brother and your super-efficient marketing assistant. Marketing automation solutions capture and measure online behavior, including activities from people on your website and information from landing page forms and surveys, or from your subscription centers. As this digital behavior builds, so does the lead score—giving social marketers substantial information.

Good content is crucial

You have the strategy and vision, the executive buy-in, and the right CRM and marketing automation tools for your team. But even with all that, your social campaign can struggle to hit goals. For real ROI, it is critical to have the right message for your target customers at the various points in the buying cycle. 

• Find the right messaging for your specific audience. Those who get your emails will only keep reading if they see that what you’re promoting—whether it’s a product, service or event—is valuable to them. This means you need to begin with an attention-grabbing opening, explain how they will benefit, demonstrate how the product or service is unique and keep the messaging clear and concise. Focus on the customer—not you.
• Keep search engine optimization (SEO) in mind so that those not on your email list can find you. These days, SEO works for much more than just websites. You can write for SEO in emails, social media channels and even through video transcripts. Decide on a few key words or phrases that best describe what you’re promoting, research them to ensure people will search for those terms and strategically place the terms in your messaging.
• Offer valuable content that works for your customers. A whitepaper or case study that discusses how great your company is won’t do anything for your customers, except maybe turn them off from your product or service. Instead, offer them practical advice or information that they can use in their businesses and that will highlight you as an expert. For example, if you are a pharmaceutical company, you can offer a comparison sheet for customers to determine whether what they’re experiencing is either allergies or the common cold. If you are an electronics company, provide an e-book that explains how to install a wall-mounted television. 

A successful social marketing campaign should start with a detailed strategy, utilize CRM software, integrate a marketing automation tool and offer good content. But the part that ties all of this together is simple—know and cater to your audience. Take the time to truly understand what they want, and you’ll gain long-term loyalty from them.

By Andree Dolan of Sikich, a national CRM and ERP Gold Competency partner and full-suite provider of Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Microsoft Dynamics AX, Microsoft Dynamics GP, Microsoft Dynamics NAV  and Microsoft Dynamics SL