How To Plan and Deploy a Cohesive Social Media Strategy

Identify Your Objectives

It is a well known fact that you will experience problems in hitting a target if you have not first identified it. Toward that end, it is important to first decide what it is that you wish to accomplish with your social media, content marketing and SEO marketing strategy. This could vary based on your company’s needs. Your goals could be to increase awareness or to boost sales. Regardless of your specific objective, it is important to ensure you have set a specific goal before actually beginning to work on your marketing strategies.

Far too often, many companies fall into the trap of realizing that they need to focus on SEO, social media, and content marketing, and then disparately approaching them. Each one is important, but each individual marketing strategy also rests on the other two.

Start with Content First

Social media is without a doubt vital to any successful marketing campaign. With that said, in order to develop a successful social media campaign, you need good content. Your prospective customers will not follow you on Twitter, Facebook or any other channel if you do not provide relevant, interesting and valuable content. This means that before you can even begin to think about launching a social media campaign, you must first have a solid content marketing plan that includes quality material.

The key with a successful content marketing campaign is to make sure it does not come off as too promotional. You will not see much success if all of your content is about your company, your deals, and offers. The best course of action you can take is to position your company so that you are recognized as an expert in your respective field. One way to do this is by producing content that includes helpful resources, tips, guides, etc. Many firms are hesitant to provide this type of information for free because they believe their customers will not want to pay for their services. The goal here is for your target customers to be so impressed by what you have to say that they will begin to follow you regularly and contact you. Additionally, it is important to remember that it is possible to give away some information but not everything.

Plan your Social Media Strategy Around Your Content

Once you have a solid content marketing plan in place with a content production calendar, you can then begin working on your social media marketing plan and finding the best venue to promote the content you have created. Social media gives you a wealth of options to choose from, including such channels as Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus and LinkedIn. In deciding which platform is best for publishing a specific piece of content, it is important to take a variety of factors into consideration, including the type of content you want to publish and the typical audience for that platform.

Analyze, Rinse and Repeat

Publishing your content on social media is where you can take advantage of true SEO benefits. Google Analytics and other social media tools, such as Social Media Tracker or Socalight can give you tremendous insight into which type of content was most appealing to your target audience. Review the number of page views you received from each piece, but do not forget to also evaluate the number shares, likes, comments, and retweets, as this can provide you with insight, as well. Reviewing these types of analytics will give you the ability to fine-tune and optimize your content so that it will be more appealing and drive better results as time goes by.

Originally titled “Bringing SEO, Social Media, and Content Marketing Together” and published on Launch&Hustle.  It is republished here with permission.