These 7 tips to increase social engagement are worth knowing if you want to jump-start your marketing and brand-awareness campaigns.
Marketing is a difficult and ongoing investment that any successful company has to make. It is tedious and requires a lot of focus and discipline. Afterall, if it were easy everyone would be successful. It’s not. Which is why many companies hire experts to handle marketing efforts on their behalf. These efforts can include writing marketing plans, doing SEO, writing content, creating and executing PPC advertising, creating videos, and creating online public relations to let potential customer know who you are.
However. most small companies and start-ups don’t have the budget to hire outside companies, so they have to do it themselves, so these 7 tips to increase social engagement are a place to begin.
At the same time, companies large and small underestimate the value of marketing. In fact, when they face tight budget crunch from falling sales, many companies — large and small — look to cut their marketing budget first. They should be increasing those budgets, as marketing is the lifeblood of new sales, and sales are the lifeblood of any sustainable enterprise.
So it is important to plan ahead. Build a marketing plan (which will we’ll cover in a future article). A good marketing plan is your roadmap: what to do; when to do it and, how to zig and zag in an uncertain and ever-changing marketplace.
It all begins with brand-awareness. If potential customers don’t know who you are and what you’re about, you’re not going to close sales.
To that end, social media has the great potential of telling your story to a large audience. In the end, remember, that marketing is all about “telling your story”. But the old adage of “build it and they will come” doesn’t work in this case. The idea that you can simply build social media pages and post random articles and announcements is a waste of your valuable time. Thus, 7 tips to increase social engagement is your starting point, not the end all.
Before you begin, you need to ask yourself:
In part, your goals should include clear and concise messaging. And as my associate and friend Vinil Ramdev suggested, it should also include establishing yourself as an authoritative voice in your industry or product/ service sector. Some ways to do this include writing articles of interest, doing research and publishing white papers (maybe 4 a year), and even, when possible, getting yourself on the panels at events.
Having said that, let’s get to the heart of this article.
Identify Trends. Every industry sector has trends: the things people are talking about. A good start for this is to hop on Twitter or an industry-specific forum and check out what’s trending. Think about what you can add to the discussion.
