Using Social Media Marketing to Gain Sales and Leads

Social media marketing is one of the newer online marketing strategies. It’s also one of the most powerful. With so much content flooding Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+ and other social media sites, your business needs to be on these sites.

What is Social Media Marketing?

Social Media Marketing

Social Media Marketing (SMM) is an inbound marketing strategy used to generate leads through gaining attention and website traffic from social media sites. A quality SMM strategy usually includes creating content to share on social networks in order to attract a target audience.

Principles of Social Media Marketing

If you plan to use social media for lead generation or to gain more website traffic, you need to apply the right principles to your strategy. It requires putting together a plan before you start. You want to define whether you will be using your SMM strategy for lead generation, sales or both. It’s also important to detail how leads and/or sales can be gained.

In addition to a plan, you should provide a clear call to action when you share anything on your social profiles. Tell your customers to click over to your website and provide clear instructions on the action you would like them to take.

Your social media marketing plan should also include ways you will be creating a brand for your company or product. Since social media can be a very big component in branding, this is a principle you must remember. Including your URL or logo with every picture or post will go a long way for branding.

A final principle you must have to run a good social media marketing campaign is tracking. You need to know what is driving the success and what isn’t. The information you gather will allow you to make adjustments and fine tune your strategy.

Automating your SMM Strategy

Achieving marketing automation with a social media campaign isn’t always easy. There are many components you must put into place and not all can be automated. However, the elements you cannot automate with a tool or plugin, can be outsourced to an expert. For example, if you plan to use paid advertising on Facebook as a part of your strategy, you can outsource the management of your ad campaigns to an expert.

Social media marketing is a wonderful way to build a following, gain repeat visitors to your website and find new leads for your business. If you’re not sure how to create a good marketing campaign, make sure you seek out expert advice before spending your money.