So you want to use social media to help market your business? Maybe you’ve already started but aren’t seeing the results you expected? Either way you need to go through this Social Media Marketing Checklist to make sure you are marketing on social media the right way.
You’ve already seen other marketers who are doing great using social media marketing. That’s not surprising, when you think about it, because social media IS where your best prospects are hanging out!
What you don’t see are the hundreds and thousands of marketers who are doing it all wrong. They’re shoving their opportunity or products down people’s throats, spamming groups with their links and making annoying comments on other people’s posts.
This is not how to behave on social media. People don’t log on to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest to be sold – they want to be entertained.
Maybe you’ve tried some of these overt marketing tactics? No suprise, then, if they haven’t worked for you. But don’t despair, it’s not too late to change your ways for the better…
Here’s how to market on social media the right way
Once you go through this checklist you’ll take away all the worries you may have about marketing on social media the right way. Just tick off each question as you go and make sure you’re doing the right thing.
And be honest with yourself. If you follow this checklist faithfully you’ll be certain to pull in more leads and prospects in the next 90 days than you ever thought possible.
Sound good?
OK, let’s go…
Check #1 – What’s your target?
The first mistake that every new marketer on social media makes is not to have a clear idea of what they want to accomplish.
It’s no good just saying ‘I want more leads’ or ‘I want more sales’. As with every strategy you must have a clear vision of what you are trying to accomplish if you stand any hope of achieving it.
So get clear in your mind what your target is for your new social media marketing plan. Be very specific. Give a number for one or more of these goals that you feel you want to achieve in the next 30 days:
- How many followers do you want?
- How many Likes and Comments do you want to see for your Posts?
- How many Views and Likes to your Page?
- How many Leads do you want to generate?
- How many Products do you want to sell?
- How many new sign-ups to your email or Messenger list do you need to make?
- How much do you want to earn from your strategy?
Your target should be big enough to make you uncomfortable but not so big that there is no way it is achievable.
For example a lot of people say they want to earn $10K a month without ever having earned a dime online before. While that is a good target to aim for once you’ve got something working, it is frankly unattainable in your very first 30 days.
Your target should be achievable so that you can give yourself a well-deserved pat on the back once you’ve made it. But, there again, don’t make it SO easy that you don’t bother to do much work to get to it.
Check #2: Who is your target audience?
Billions of people turn to social media every day. With the best will in the world, you can’t target all of them. In fact it is nonsense to try and even do so because it will just cost you too much time and money for negligible results.
It’s a BIG MISTAKE to try and target everybody!
Everybody is not your target audience. Only a small percentage of people who are likely to see your Post, Page, Video or Ad is going to be interested in what you have to offer. People don’t care about your product or service if they don’t know you, so stop trying to force it on them.
Far better to make sure that the people who ARE interested in what you can offer them can easily FIND YOU.
For example if you’re into Health & Fitness then who exactly do you want to talk to?
- People who want to lose weight?
- People who want to get fit?
- People who want to build muscle?
- People who want to combat their illness?
- People who want to look younger?
You cannot serve all of these. Pick one and target that specific audience. The key to marketing to a target audience is to help them find YOU. Make it easy for them to seek you out, see you as an authority or expert who can help them get to where they want to be.
To define your target market, ask yourself these questions:
- How old are they?
- Are they married, with a family, or single?
- Are they self-employed or working for someone else or a stay-at-home parent?
- How much are they earning?
- Where do they live – rented property, city apartment, own house?
- What are their hopes and dreams?
Use this to build up an Avatar of the perfect prospect, someone who you would really like to help or work with.
Next you want to work out what is keeping them awake at night, worrying them, making them sweat and twist and turn until the early hours of the morning?
- What is the biggest problem they are facing?
- Why are they in this kind of trouble?
- What are the underlying factors that have got them into this position?
- Who are they struggling for – themselves or their family or both?
- How can YOU help THEM?
- What will happen after you help them solve their problem?
- How will their life change?
The point of this exercise is to give you a vision of the ideal person that you can help so that you can focus on providing valuable content to your target audience that will attract them to you.
Check #3: Which Social Media Platform will YOU Master?
Most new marketers believe that they have to spread themselves thinly across a multitude of social media platforms to achieve success. They spend hours dabbling in Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter and YouTube to little effect.
Do this and you’re aiming for failure. Spread yourself thin, like this, and you’ll quickly become discouraged by the minimal interest and interaction you achieve.
Instead, pick one Social Media strategy and focus all your energies on it until you master it. Only after you have achieved mastery (and can practically do it on autopilot) can you move on to another platform.
Here’s a guide to help you choose the ideal platform to master:
- Which do you feel most capable of using?
- Which is of most interest to you (do you use it already)?
- Where is your audience most likely to hang out?
- Which is the platform on which your audience is most likely to interact with you?
- Based on your current lifestyle, which is likely to appear most attractive to your audience?
For example you may already have a lot of Instagram followers based on images you’ve been posting. It doesn’t take much of a twist to start to turn these followers into prospects, leads and customers.
Or you’ve been making funny or interesting videos on your YouTube channel and have built a series of subscribers.
If you’re just starting out, however, I recommend Facebook as a good place to begin focusing your strategy, simply because there are a number of great techniques you can use to attract people to you.
As I’ve said, the main thing is to pick just ONE platform and master it. Don’t agonise about your decision, just get started and worry about getting it right later.
Check #4: What IS your Social Media Strategy?
Up until now you’ve probably been taught or shown a zillion ways to try and trick the system. You may even have bought into software tools that purport to get you Likes or followers or views and subscribers without having to do much work.
How’s that worked out for you?
Frankly none of these reportedly labor-saving tricks and systems actually work. That’s because the companies that run social media platforms are already aware of them and have policies and algorithms that defeat all attempts at cheating or gaming the system.
So what should you be doing?
That’s simple. You should be concentrating on providing content that your target audience (remember them?) will find helps them, even if it’s only in a small way. It’s your content that is going to attract people to you.
Simply create content that shows that you empathise with their problem or predicament and show or hint at meaningful ways that can help them get themselves out of trouble. That will establish you, in their eyes, as an authority or expert that they will be delighted to follow.
What sort of content is suitable for your target audience?
That depends on the actual platform and is likely to be one of these:
- Story Posts
- Inspirational image quotes
- Live videos
- Success stories
- Lifestyle images (before and after)
- Funny, entertaining or viral memes or videos
Naturally, it is an ideal strategy to mix and match several of these and, whatever you choose, you need to inspire your audience to believe that they can achieve their goals, take the necessary steps to get closer to them and follow the simple steps that you show them to create small wins.
As long as you keep posting valuable content, your followers will continue to grow and some will join you, follow your recommendations and buy from you. Bear in mind that a lot will also stay on the sidelines, watching you.
That’s OK because, as long as people are following you, your authority and personal magnetism continue to grow. You are simply and easily building a tribe of people who are willing and ready to take your advice.
Whether they buy now or later doesn’t matter and you don’t need to concern yourself about that. Because all you’re doing is attracting the people who are most likely to buy, whether it is today, tomorrow or years in the future.
Check #5: How are you tracking your results?
Here’s a big tip: Top Earners always track their results. This allows them to test and tweak their strategy to optimize the work they are doing and show them what is working and what isn’t.
Then what do they do? They discard the methods that don’t work and build their business on the systems and strategies that DO work.
Social Media platforms all provide some obvious methods of tracking your success, such as Likes, Followers/Subscribers, Comments and other methods of engagement.
In addition, you can use tracking links to measure the success that you are having in directing people to your own website(s), blog, squeeze/landing pages and, from there, to your offers, products or opportunities. My favorite tracking tool is ClickMagick as it is the most flexible and informative I’ve found so far.
Here’s a guide that you can use to decide how you can best track your results: Guide To Click Tracking
What’s next?
Everything that you’ve been following in this Social Media Checklist is part of the Attraction Marketing method of using your favorite social media platform to build a tribe of people in your target market who want you to help them and guide them to achieving their goals.
To find out more about how you can use Attraction Marketing as your social media strategy, I have a key training video that you can watch right now…