Many businesses recognize the value in social media marketing. While marketers do struggle with lead generation and measuring ROI on social, there is no question that social media needs to be a critical piece of your marketing mix to boost sales and your online reputation. However, as a business owner, it’s a challenge to figure out who is the best person or agency to handle your organization’s online presence or even what the job entails.

Whoever you crown as your company’s social medial ninja must be able to develop content strategy, brand awareness, generate inbound traffic and cultivate the resulting leads. Here are the seven components of social media that your ninja must follow to succeed:

Clear Objectives

Set realistic goals. It isn’t enough to say you “see” results, they must tie back to your objectives. You’ll never know social media ROI without first setting objectives. For example, at OpenMoves, we use five objectives for Facebook marketing:
1. Increase Likes
2. Expand Reach
3. Boost Engagement
4. Grow Leads
5. Boost Sales

Great Design

Visual content has a lasting effect. Whether it’s your status updates, your landing pages or your Facebook ads, what the audience sees is what they’ll remember. Make sure it’s consistent, compelling and gets your point across.

Solid Content Strategy

What you post on your social channels is the foundation for all your other social media marketing. The social media manager must perform a “brand discovery,” which outlines what makes your business unique. This includes your core values and beliefs and the reasons people want to buy from YOU. The answers should be in-depth and detailed.

The second part of your brand discovery describes your ideal customers. What are their interests? What problems can you solve? Where do they spend their time? How can you help them? Quality information that’s relevant to your ideal customers attracts them and sets your social marketing up for the next steps.

Promotion Strategy

You need to continually grow your fan base. Social advertising is a valuable tool to get your message heard. However, social ads don’t look like the ads you’re used to seeing. They differ in content, placement and targeting. The best way to grow your Facebook page is to utilize Facebook Ads. A small budget with carefully selected photos and ad copy (with a clear call-to-action) will increase likes and foster engagement.

Engagement Strategy

Your social media ninja should listen, respond, ask questions and engage with your audience. There should be careful consideration of how he/she responds to organic (non-paid) leads. People will ask questions and the social media ninja should have knowledge and/or experience of the sales process to respond correctly. If a lead asks a question, answer it and follow it with a question back to them.

Conversion Strategy

With growth and engagement strategies in place, the ninja’s job is to convert fans/followers into customers. The more advanced form of Facebook marketing utilizes Facebook ads and optimized landing pages to capture leads and convert them into sales. We have found most dealerships and other businesses need advice and support with conversion strategy.

Measure & Analyze to establish ROI

Measure results on a weekly basis. As mentioned earlier, your results must tie back to your objectives. Factor in your time, effort and budget to determine if your efforts succeeded. And use the latest social media dashboards such as HootSuite and…

In summary, if your marketing department can follow these seven commandments your social media efforts will pay off and if you don’t have an in-house ninja that can do the job, our social media team will be happy to help out.