Is your social media strategy currently meeting your business goals? What are your business goals? Making money is probably too vague.
If you don’t know the answer to those questions, log off of your Facebook and Twitter accounts immediately and put your focus here. In this interview, Julia Campbell, Digital Marketing Strategist at J Campbell Social Marketing, will explain why all of your marketing – including social media posts – needs to be intentional.
How can businesses prioritize which social media tools are most important to them?
It depends on what they’re trying to achieve! When starting with a client, I focus a lot of time on setting measurable, achievable goals and identifying a specific target audience. I caution against jumping right into any marketing tool, digital or otherwise, until we have a road map and can easily identify who we want to reach.
We work together to determine the measures of success. If we don’t know where we want to go, how can we possibly figure out how to get there? When goals are set and a target audience is identified, we can then drill down into tools based on what we want to accomplish and who we want to reach.
Which social tools do you utilize in your own marketing?
I love blogging on my own blog and on other blogs to increase my visibility and my audience. Blogging allows me to establish myself as someone who knows what she’s doing. It adds integrity to my business. I also love writing, so that helps!
I also use webinars as a marketing tool both to educate my audience and to expand awareness about what I do. Social media is the icing on the cake for me. My personal favorite platform is Twitter. I use it to communicate with my peers, reach influencers, and to see what is happening in the news and in my industry. The possibilities are endless!
What services are businesses most commonly using?
When I started, I focused the majority of my time on technical training such as “How to schedule a post on Facebook,” “How to upload a photo to Twitter,” etc. Now, I focus mostly on strategic communications consulting, such as helping my clients create a plan and giving them the tools and confidence needed to execute that plan on their own. I see myself as a personal trainer for digital communications. I’ll set you up with each platform and show you how to use them, but you’ll need to put my methods into practice to achieve results.
Where does content marketing fold into those methods?
Content marketing is everything! No one wants to see advertising anymore (except maybe during the Super Bowl). Creating useful, helpful content for your customers is the key to cutting through noise and clutter online. It’s not about YOUR message and YOUR agenda. No one cares! It’s about your customers, your supporters, your donors, your community, and what they want.
What motivates them? What interests them? If you want someone’s email, you better offer a killer free webinar or a fantastic e-book. You have to offer something of value to every person; because in marketing, we live in a very “What’s in it for me?” culture.
The same goes with getting likes and follows on social media. What incentive are you providing? Can I just get this information from your website? If so, why would I waste precious space in my news feed for your content? As marketers, we constantly have to ask ourselves if we are interesting, educational, entertaining and relevant. That’s a tall order, but it’s also a necessary one.
Tell us about a specific time when social marketing took a business you know to the next level.
One of my big nonprofit clients had no social media strategy and seemed to be spinning their wheels online. They weren’t posting anything of interest or of value to their supporters. I educated them on the importance of sharing success stories and personal testimonials about the people they had helped, donors who gave to their organization, and volunteers who had worked there throughout the years. Their engagement skyrocketed! Instead of posting something about their latest board retreat, they changed their perspective to focus on the donor and the supporter asking, “What would THEY want to see?” Stories work wonders!