Growing your online audience is never easy. It takes a lot of time and effort to grow, maintain and sustain your followers and fans. It doesn’t happen over night and requires a strong commitment to developing consistent messaging, engaging content and a listening culture to ensure that customers are being heard.
In order to execute a social media marketing strategy designed promote awareness and grow your audience, you have to first build a solid foundation.
- Have you set up and optimized your online channels?
- Do you know where your audience lives online?
- Are you actively engaging with your customers where they are online?
- Have you mapped out content that serves both your long-term and short-term goals?
Everyone wants to have fans, but it’s what you do once you have them that is the bigger challenge. How will you manage the followers you have so they feel valued, while investing time and effort into acquiring new ones?
When I work with my clients, we spend time not only understanding who their targeted audience is, but developing the content that is likely to engage them and bring new customers. We evaluate the content based on metrics that are specific to the client’s needs. Is it enough to get a lot of likes, comments and shares? Or is more required — like click-throughs and downloads? Transactional goals are important but they are specific to the client.
They say, ‘if you build it, they will come.’ But it’s important to recognize all the steps needed in between — ‘if you build it, manage it, cultivate it, re-evaluate it, engage with it, listen to it, and learn from it — they will come.’