Can you believe it? Even just a decade ago there were many businesses that didn’t think they needed an online presence.

Fortunately most business owners and entrepreneurs understand the importance of having a strong online presence where customers can find them.

However, just having a website isn’t enough.

You need your messages to be found and seen via promotional campaigns. And, leveraging your experience, services and products via a social media marketing strategy will help your business grow.

If someone knows you already and wants to look you up a little more, that’s one situation.

However, what about people who don’t know you?

What about those young customers or potential clients who want to see what you’re actually about, what your company’s philosophy is?

This is where a good social media marketing program can make all the difference!

Social media marketing is an essential part of any campaign to get attention to your business, blog, or cause.

Anyone who wants to get their name or message out there, and who wants to get the most they can out of everything the world wide web has to offer,

What Does Social Media Encompass?

Social media can be a bit of a nebulous term, but if you want a social media campaign that truly brings home the results that social media masters can pull off, you need to be able to tackle social media as a big picture campaign.

A great YouTube video campaign is good, a strong Twitter account (and creative tweets) can go viral easily.

Facebook is still the largest visited social website in the world.

Any one of these individually can give very good results but why settle for good when you can take all of them together to get extraordinary results?

What Exactly Is a Social Media Marketing Campaign?

A social media marketing campaign takes advantage of the many different websites that attract people to interact.

Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, and Pinterest are just a few examples of the many different social media websites that have millions and millions of users visiting on a daily basis.

Each one is very different and covers a variety of niches and types of interactions.

Social media gives individuals, non-profit organizations, companies, and even political and social causes a chance to interact with people who are actually looking to connect and who are open to that back and forth interaction.

Social media also gives a chance for any organization or company to show their personality, share information, or build trust.

This can be done organically, but each of these options also have paid advertising or paid marketing options.

A full marketing campaign will not only hit a broad variety of social media websites that match a business well, but also use both organic and paid methods to drive traffic.

With the right plan, a good social media marketing campaign can be an absolute game changer for any business.

While there are many different ways to get there and make that game-changing impression, all the best campaigns rely on three steps that are an absolute necessity for a winning social strategy.

Let’s look at a simple 3-step social media marketing strategy that you can use.

Step 1: Understand Your Core Purpose Behind the Campaign

Every campaign talks about getting traffic and getting conversions or making money, but the core reason behind any social campaign revolves around three pillars:

1. Engage with your clients and followers
2. Offer exceptional value that causes them to take action
3. Careful restrained marketing

Every campaign, no matter what specific techniques it uses, need to work around these three important pillars to get the long-term response you want.

Engaging your clients and customers can take many forms.

Ask them questions, offer a gift for filling out a questionnaire, or bringing attention to a value-heavy offering and really focusing on giving individual responses to people who are looking at what you’re offering or giving feedback.

This isn’t a time to share, but that interaction and trust building can really set a positive tone across your entire campaign.

Offering great value is really self-explanatory.

Some examples:

• A video
• Free tool or widget (calculators are popular)
• a PDF e-book
• a free sample: offer something that makes their lives better.

This gives you a chance to really show the high quality of your work and build a solid reputation as customers share what you’re offering with other people – putting you in front of new eyes who otherwise would have never seen you.

Finally, be restrained in your marketing.

A general rule of thumb is only 5-10% of interactions should be pushing for a sale or purchase, if this is your goal.

Interact, educate, and build trust with the other interactions.

People will act much more positively towards anything you have to offer.

Step 2: Understand the 3 M’s for a Successful Campaign

The three M’s are monitoring, measuring, and managing.

While the best social media marketing campaigns are well planned, everyone knows you have to be able to adapt a bit.

You want to monitor the early response, and perhaps even shift your social efforts based on if one or two actions are getting huge responses while other efforts aren’t doing much.

Measuring is a given. You want to know how many impressions you’re getting, how many visitors, how many clicks, calls, and actions.

Without any way to measure the effect of your campaign, how do you know how to adapt and get the most out of your efforts?

Remember these three M’s when managing any social media marketing campaign (especially when putting out money for paid results).

You will quickly learn how to master adapting and shifting a good social media campaign that is in progress.

Step 3: Learn All Your Potential Attention-Grabbing Options

This is where having a creative mindset really pays off big time. How are you going to get attention or set up an event worthy of sending paid searches to it?

Are you going to offer a contest with a major prize? Free coaching sessions or business coaching?

Money, time, coaching, are all common options but what about something different? Offer a contest to create a new logo or get weird pictures with celebrities.

Try starting some random memes that go viral – there are literally a nearly endless array of options when it comes to getting attention and setting up a campaign to go viral.

GoDaddy used to intentionally make racy or offensive commercials to get attention and generate a lot of conversation.

Neil deGrasse Tyson gained enormous attention by creating incredible facts and comparisons that took some topics many considered dry and brought new life into them.

Many snack, soda, and beer companies had some of their best advertising due to hilarious Super Bowl commercials and social media.

This doesn’t mean you have to spend a million dollars, offend people, or be a super genius to get the attention you want to your social media campaign but these extremely different examples should go to show just how many different options there are.

Don’t limit yourself!

Everyone is always looking for new and interesting information or something that entertains them.

You never know what the next big idea is so don’t be afraid to try some out of the box ideas and see what catches.

In Conclusion

When it comes to getting your message out, there are few mediums that work better than social media.

But there are right and wrong ways to do that.

How often has an intern put out a bad tweet and managed to get their employer in serious trouble or cause a public relations fire storm?

On the other hand, someone like George Takei has shown how an amazing social media marketing campaign can take on a life of its own that goes even above and beyond anyone’s expectations.

By mastering the steps of being creative, knowing the three M’s, and understanding your core purpose, you will quickly master the art of social media marketing.

DOWNLOAD OUR BEGINNER’S GUIDE TO SOCIAL MEDIA NEXT:

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