Many website owners take on the role of social marketing themselves and it can often be a great idea. After all, who knows your products/services best and who is best placed to answer any questions? You are!
The problem with undertaking the social marketing role yourself is knowing where to start and what to do. We have published many posts here that may answer some of those questions. However, reading those articles and then hitting the various social sites will not help much if you don’t have a plan and, more importantly, a set of goals – a reason for undertaking that marketing.
If your goal is simply to increase traffic – forget it. You may find some extra coming in but often it is hit and run traffic. Your goals to be defined in more tangent way. For instance:
- Gain an increase in reader and subscriber numbers
- Build a newsletter subscription list
- Give away more products (eg, ebooks)
- Increase product sales
- Increase advertising revenue
- Increase affiliate revenue
To reach these goals your social marketing does need to deliver more traffic. However that traffic needs to be targeted towards your goals. As I mentioned earlier, having a 100% increase in visitors is not going to do you much good if the conversion rate is 0-1%. If you can receive traffic that is targeted towards your goals, you may be able to increase conversion rates to 10-20% or more.
Once you have established a goal, for example, you may decide you want 20% increase in newsletter subscriptions. Your social marketing should be targeting that outcome. Rather than encouraging people to visit your site, you should be selling the benefits of your newsletter and encouraging them to visit and sign up.
Define your goals before you start a social marketing campaign and you chances of achieving those goals will be greatly enhanced. Use a scattergun approach and not only will you not benefit, you wont know how successful your social marketing has been – you cannot measure an unknown.
