Every company has an elevator pitch—a twenty-second explanation of their purpose, and target market. As a networking tool, the elevator pitch can be quite useful. But as far as marketing goes, your elevator pitch is only the tip of the iceberg.
When it comes to marketing, it’s important to understand your own business in depth. Seems simple, right? Well, many businesses don’t take the time to set out a strategy before launching a marketing plan. You need to know if you’re targeting a vertical or horizontal market—do your services target specialized needs or a wide range? What do you consider to be your differentiator? Who are your biggest competitors and why?
In marketing, strategies are fundamental tools—and here at Social Media Contractors, we find that creating specific strategies for each individual client is absolutely essential.
Social media is all about connections; it’s about engagement, forming relationships, and personalities. So we want to know not only our client’s target market, but also what messages they want that market to receive. Furthermore, we want to know how they want these messages to be relayed—the tone and voice.
You can’t be the voice for a company if you have no idea what makes them unique—what they value. So, we ask them what makes them so special. And then we ask where they see themselves in the future, in order to better understand how we can develop their social media platforms to help them grow in the exact ways and markets they desire.
We find that detailed strategy sessions are the best way to grasp as much information about our clients as possible—and revealing as much as we can about them allows us to truly represent them in the social media world. This means not merely being the distinct voice of a company, but more importantly, using the right social media channels, in the best ways, to expand their target market and reach every part of their segment.
Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and more are all different platforms that need to be used differently. While a company’s target market and purpose may be able to fit into a twenty-second spiel, that doesn’t mean it applies uniformly across all social media platforms. For social media marketing, it is crucial that you are aware of what each platform is best for–the differentiating features, as well as its most common users.
Then, you create matches by pairing the client’s target audience and message with the social media platform(s) that best fit. At SMC we analyze each social media channel’s most frequent users and platform, deciding which ones match with our client’s strategy, and how we will execute each platform distinctly.
That’s the true measure of success in social media marketing—the extent to which you reach your target segment with the right messages. Rather than mass marketing, social media channels allow your company to reach every portion of your target segment, and in a way tailored specifically for them.
Don’t sell yourself short when it comes time to develop a strategy. Although it may seem simple, social media requires great attention to detail, a great understanding of your business, and an in-depth understanding of the nuances of each platform. And you can only execute a plan that pays attention to all three of those elements if you start with a strategy.