How About It?

8 Essential Elements of a Social Media Marketing Strategy
Source: Houssem Daoud, socialmediaexaminer.com

Do you need help getting started with your social media marketing strategy? Do you know what to include? Goals and objectives guide your social media strategy to help you successfully connect with your customers.

#1: Identify Business Goals
Every piece of your social media strategy serves the goals you set. You simply can’t move forward without knowing what you’re working toward. Look closely at your company’s overall needs and decide how you want to use social media to contribute to reaching them. You’ll undoubtedly come up with several personalized goals, but there are a few that all companies should include in their strategy—increasing brand awareness, retaining customers and reducing marketing costs are relevant to everyone.

 

#2: Set Marketing Objectives
Goals aren’t terribly useful if you don’t have specific parameters that define when each is achieved. For example, if one of your primary goals is generating leads and sales, how many leads and sales do you have to generate before you consider that goal a success? Marketing objectives define how you get from Point A (an unfulfilled goal) to Point B ( a successfully fulfilled goal). You can determine your objectives with the S-M-A-R-T approach:

Setting yourself up for failure is never a good idea. If you set an objective of increasing sales by 1,000%, it’s doubtful you’ll meet it. Choose objectives you can achieve, given the resources you have. You’ve taken the time to refine your goals so they’re relevant to your company, so extend that same consideration to your objectives

#3: Identify Ideal Customers
If a business is suffering from low engagement on their social profiles, it’s usually because they don’t have an accurate ideal customer profile. Buyer personas help you define and target the right people, in the right places, at the right times with the right messages. When you know your target audience’s age, occupation, income, interests, pains, problems, obstacles, habits, likes, dislikes, motivations and objections, then it’s easier and cheaper to target them on social or any other media.

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The Crystal Ball

Microsoft Windows 10 Shines a Light on the Future of Advertising
In the Future, The Device Won't Matter. Windows 10 Begins to Show the Way

Source: Tom Goodwin, Adage.com

 

Microsoft arguably didn't see the transformative power of the internet coming and missed the boat with mobile, but the launch of Windows 10 from Microsoft this week shows remarkable clarity and consistency on the future of the internet and the opportunities it creates for marketers.

 

Micosoft's Windows 10 is a software platform designed to pull content from anywhere onto everything. It's about a single app store with apps that work on every screen. It's about responsive design, where everything is optimized to the user's context. In short, it's about a philosophy of thinking about devices as relatively dumb screens through which we pull optimized content -- it's a world of thinking of media or the devices we use to consume it as a context, not as a channel.

 

This can have profound effect on marketing. Instead of looking at the world in terms of devices and aligning budgets and ads around specific devices -- whether it's a smartphone, tablet or TV -- marketers can now start to embrace this new world where virtually all media is digital, and start creating ideas around these new contexts for advertising.

 

Personalized screens create "flow advertising"
As the nature of the internet changes to become a vast cloud of data that our devices reach into and pull content from, something else changes -- the content becomes organized around people, not devices.

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