This post is around 15,000 words and encompasses virtually every social media strategy and tactic there is. Tactics can be searched using the Find function in your browser.

And if that’s not enough for you, click here for all of my social media posts from the beginning of this blog.

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Social Media Strategies vs Tactics

For past 12 years, I have been working in social media strategy. Over that time, I’ve learned what works and what doesn’t. For all the talk about how much things change, not all that much has actually changed from a strategy standpoint.

If that is true, and the web is so full of blog posts about social media strategy, why do we need one more?

Well, in the midst of the vast sea of listicle posts with practical helpful gems like “share great content” or “add sharing buttons to make your content go viral.” I almost decided to scrap this post entirely, but then I thought, “aw hell, why not blog those posts out of the water?” (pun intentional)

Look, after a decade in this business I’ve come to realize that few people truly understand the difference between a social media strategy and a tactic. In truth, there are only a few real social media strategies that work… mostly everything else that people tell you is just a tactic.

There are only 5 social media strategies that businesses really use, and that work consistently. The reason is that most businesses are have the same set of objectives: build awareness, generate leads, close sales. Most businesses think of social media as something exclusively for marketing and sales. So, while there are other strategies that can be used in specific circumstances, nearly every businesses will use one or all of the five following in their social media strategy.

These are the 5 most common and effective social media strategies for most businesses:

1. Create Content. Amplify with ads.

2. Engage people directly. #Conversations

3. Reach new audiences through intermediaries (influencers and media channels).

4. Analyze some aspect of social media data, quantitatively, to make better business decisions.

5. Use social media to conduct qualitative research to make better business decisions.

Like I said, while the list above does not represent every single social media strategy, it is applicable for nearly all of the situations I’ve encountered.

Social Media Strategy Basics

Keep in mind that a social media strategy cannot exist in isolation. You’ll need several other supporting factors such as a solid company culture, and the appropriate technology.

Many of the following tactics require your pre-existing understanding of the organization’s brand and its visual identity. You’ll have to have considered your pricing strategy, website conversion funnels, email marketing strategy, search strategy, your sales process, and more.

You need to know who your audience is, where they spend time online, what their pain points are, and how your product or service is the ideal solution.

The collection of tactics in this post is also not a substitute for a content strategy, so you’ll need to understand your topic categories, your voice, your publishing cadence, and much more. Perhaps I’ll write another post for that (if you’d like me to, say so in the comments).

It’s important that you know that you won’t be able to just write down these steps, check them off a list, and expect to get results. To win online, with other human beings, requires the expenditure of emotional energy, the use of empathy, and the diligence to follow up on your promises.

There is no one single way to win in social. Some will say to post at a specific time of day, or day of week. Some will suggest your use lots of color, or to be controversial, or to jump on trends, or ask lots of questions, or invest heavily in video. None of that is bad advice on the surface and none of it is good advice without more information.

• Yes, visual content tends to outperform text.

• Yes, you should probably have captions on your video so people can watch with the sound off. It’s also helpful for people with hearing disabilities.

• Yes, more people use social media during the day than the middle of the night.

But the most important thing is that you remember what your goals are, what time horizon you have to accomplish those goals, and what budget you have available. Once you know that, you can begin to make other decisions about what you should do.

Most social media marketing is brand marketing. There is no direct and measurable next action but rather consistent and ongoing messaging and actions to solidify brand positioning. However, there are direct response marketing strategies you can employ in social media. You just need to know when it is appropriate.

Profiles

The Profile is your homepage on each site. This is where people will go to learn about you, often before they even visit your website.

You need to consider how these profiles should look.

Who is it for? Should it be for customers? For investors? For employees and partners?

What do they link to? Normally, you’ll get one link in the bio to use. What should you do with it.

How is the bio written? It is casual or buttoned-up professional? Are you selling or using a softer approach?

Websites

A lot of your social media strategy is going to rely on having a well designed properly put together website to drive through traffic too. Even if you were entire social media campaign keeps people on Facebook, or Twitter, there’s a good chance that anyone who is sufficiently interested will come and check out your website.

Furthermore, if you get involved in any lead generation or sales activity, you’re most likely going to need to drive that traffic back to the website to convert rather than trying to close the sale on social media. Your website serves a variety of different purposes including facilitating conversions, providing social proof and other sales resources, and reinforcing your brand positioning. The website is where you should be able to send people to get additional information in context about who you are, what you offer, and what sets you apart.

Friction

It should come as no surprise that if you make it easier to buy from you, then you will get more sales than if you make it an arduous process. The same is true when collecting information from prospective clients. Typically, the less information you ask for, the higher your conversion rate will likely be (though quality may suffer). While there is no single rule that is always true in this it is pretty easy to understand that simplifying the process will improve your results. You can also use friction, strategically, when you want to filter out people who are not willing to go thru the effort.

Testing

Have you ever played darts blindfolded? Well, I wouldn’t recommend it. Further have you ever played darts blindfolded using only one dart? Again, I wouldn’t recommend it, and you’d be lucky to actually hit your target. Surprisingly, many marketers go into their job function with exactly this approach.

The truth is in order to be successful in marketing in 2019, you need to always be testing your assumptions. This means constantly A/B testing different audiences, different headlines, different content, etc. coming out of the gate you’d be lucky to hit it right on the head, and even if you did you wouldn’t know it unless you took other shots.

Time and Money

In an ideal world, a client has a lot of time and a lot of money to allocate towards a strategy. However, I know that that’s rarely the case.

A strategy is only as good as the amount of time and money one is able to spend implementing it. <— Click to tweet this

A Social Media Strategy is the result of three primary elements: Goals, Timelines, and Budgets. You should also include Audience in that list but for now, let’s stick to these three. When I design strategies, I recommend the appropriate approach based upon these factors.

This chart illustrates what you should expect based upon your mix of these two variables.

The Five Elements of Social Media Strategy

There are 5 elements of social media which are the building blocks of social media strategy.

Social Listening

Running searches on social media for keywords, phrases, branded terms, competitors, or key stakeholders is called social listening. This is the part of your social media strategy where you learn what people are saying about your brand, competitors, products/services, and your employees. It’s where you can learn about what questions they have. Use social listening to gain access to all of this is valuable and free information in order to help your achieve business’ goals.

Social Content

The best starting point before developing your content strategy is listening. Said differently, before you start creating and curating content, do your research. When you listen to your audience, see what competitors are talking about, understand the pain points your prospective customers have with your industry, you are in a far better position to create content for them. Your content strategy should include topics, formats and media types, publishing frequency, voice, and a section stating who the audience is and what they need. Content is an essential component of every social media strategy.

Social Engagement

At one point, engagement was the central theme of everyone’s social media strategy, though I’d argue few truly understood what that meant. At its most basic, engagement is simply the interaction between listening and content.

When your audience listens to you by consuming and interacting your content, and you listen to your audience by consuming and interacting with theirs…you have engagement. It is the two-way flow that distinguishes engagement from broadcast.

Social Advertising & Promotion

If you’re not promoting the content that you spent so much time and effort creating, it’s going to go unnoticed. So, you need to do the work to get your content in front of the right audience.

The days of reaching and influencing your audience with organic social media are long gone. You need to use paid promotion to get in front of  the right people.

Social Media Analytics & Measurement

The most crucial part of your social media strategy is how you measure its success. The goals you set  in the beginning of your campaign should determine whether or not it was successful and if you need to make improvements.

The Three Factors of Social Media Strategy Success

We do business with those we know, like, and trust. Therefore, in order to gain any traction, you must understand the interplay between these three attributes.

You must have people’s attention.

If you do not, then nothing you do can gain traction. (Know)

You must be likeable and acquire people’s affinity.

Being likable is the first step to having an engaged audience, it’s what keeps them coming back. It’s what makes them choose you over anyone else. (Like)

You must provide value to people.

If you do not, people will have no reason to follow you and no reason to buy from you. (Trust)

You need these three elements. If you are not succeeding, one of these is out of balance. Find out what it is and you can succeed.

Three Pillars of Social Business Success

A business will only thrive when its culture and talent, technology, and processes are fully integrated, aligned, and balanced.

A great strategy and best-in-class technology cannot make up for a culture that doesn’t buy in, or people without the requisite talent. Without the right people, it’s just a good theory.

A company with a great culture and talented people, with the right technology, is on the right track, but will lack direction and consistency without defined processes and strategies.

Finally, a company with talented people, a great culture, and well designed processes, will be unable to scale without the proper technology.

All of these three elements must work together to find success in any aspect of online marketing.

Social Media Strategy Objectives: Increasing Brand Awareness

Before embarking on a brand awareness campaign, it’s important to ask yourself a very important question… What do we want to make people aware of?

Are we launching a new product? Do we want them to know about her philanthropic activities? Are we trying to get them to see that we are different and better than everyone else? The answer is the last one is probably yes but the question should still be asked. Building brand awareness is not just a matter of being recognized but rather being recognized for something.

So ask yourself a series of different questions before even starting here are a few:

• Who are we trying to reach and build awareness with?

• Why do we want them to be aware of us and what is the next step?

• What do we want people to be aware of?

• Which is the best format for communicating this information? Pictures, reports, emails, videos?

• How will we measure if our tactics are working?

Now that you’ve asked yourself those questions, you’re ready to start picking tactics.

Social Media Strategy Objectives: Driving Traffic

Before embarking on any sort of a traffic generation campaign it’s important to ask yourself three very important questions.

• Where are we driving traffic to?

• What is the purpose of driving traffic there?

• What do we want people to do once they get there?

If you’re driving traffic for sales that is different than if you were driving traffic to build a remarketing list, which is different from providing follow up customer service to existing customers.

Not all traffic is created equally, and not all traffic generation should be approached in the same way. It’s important to know the traffic on its own means virtually nothing. If you drive the wrong people to your site and they don’t take any actions, buy anything, learn something, or whatever else you’re trying to accomplish, then the effort was wasted.

There are several primary reasons why you would want to drive traffic to your site. The first, and most obvious, is that you’d like to introduce new customers to your brand and hope that they follow along a path to conversion. The second is that you might want to educate people in the middle of your funnel and build a remarketing audience so that you might keep in touch with potential customers. This can include attempting to get people to opt in on your website so that you may email them later.

When attempting to drive traffic to your website one important thing to keep in mind is that advertising and sales traffic will often come at a higher cost than the traffic generated from giving away free and valuable content.

And, as with all things marketing-related, you must ensure that you have the proper analytics and tracking in place so as to make sure that your efforts are being measured and analyzed.

Now that the context has been set, and you’ve asked yourself some questions, you’re ready to start picking tactics.

Social Media Strategy Objectives: Generating Leads

Most people are not in search of more opportunities to buy things. Suffice to say getting onto more sales calls is not on anyone’s agenda unless they are the seller. With that in mind it’s important to understand that getting someone to submit their contact information in order to have a sales call is among the most difficult things you can do in digital marketing. Like all social marketing, you can’t generate any leads if you can’t first capture people’s attention. Similarly, you will find that it is easier and less expensive to get leads from people who already recognize you either because they’ve had prior interactions with your brand, or heard about you through word of mouth.

Before embarking on any lead generation campaign you need to ask yourself a few very important questions.

• What are the various criteria that qualifies as a lead?

• What information do we need to capture?

• What is a reasonable cost per acquisition for new leads?

• What is a reasonable net cost per acquisition of new clients/customers?

• What is our current close rate on new opportunities?

• Where do we think we can best reach potential leads?

• What are our next steps once a lead comes in?

• Most importantly: Why would somebody give us their contact information?

Your offer needs to be more valuable than the cost of giving away contact information. Your solution needs to be more valuable than the time that they are giving to you.

In general, you can expect that the more expensive your product or service, the more expensive your leads will be. Likewise, the more competitive your market is, the more expensive you can expect your leads to be.

Now that you’ve asked yourself those questions, you’re ready to start picking tactics.

Social Media Strategy Objectives: Selling Services

If you wish to sell services using social media as your method of finding in closing new business, you must first understand social selling at a high-level. In this case we’re discussing services. There are two primary ways that sales can happen on social media.

The first, is by using social media tools in a traditional sales capacity. That is to say it is virtually no different than sending an email to picking up the phone to call someone. Selling directly, one to one is still highly effective method of bringing in new business. In this method of social selling it is about utilizing all of the tools that social media has to offer to put yourself in a better position to have warm sales discussions and higher probability of closing.

The second method of selling is anything to get people’s attention first. This is followed by illustrating that you understand the potential customer’s pain points and problems with an explanation of your service offering as a differentiated solution from the rest of the market. Finally, you’ll need to lead them off social media, likely to your website, where they will submit their information to become a lead and be moved into a one-to-one sales process.

There are, of course, exceptions to these rules. But, services are rarely purchased online as products are, generally requiring a stronger emphasis on relationship skills and interactions.

Before embarking on a social sales campaign on social media miss first ask yourself a few key questions.

• Who am I trying to sell to?

• Where can I find this ideal prospect?

• Have the prospects that I am selling to heard of us or had prior interactions with us?

• What is our ideal method of moving people through sales funnel? Automated? One-on-One?

• How are we priced relative to our competitors?

• Do we have sufficient sales resources to make the case that we are the ideal solution for this prospect?

• What problem are we able to solve that our target customer is experiencing?

Now that you’ve asked yourself those questions, you’re ready to start picking tactics.

Social Media Strategy Objectives: Selling products

Before embarking on a campaign to try and sell your products through social media there are a number of different things to consider. The first is that the way the people shop on social media is different than the way that they tend to shop otherwise.

If you are attempting to sell products on the Internet, via social media, you must understand the word intent.

The intent of someone using a social media site is not to find something to buy. Yes, it happens. But, it is not the intention of why they are there. By contrast when someone goes to Amazon.com or to Google.com they are typing something into a search box with the hopes of finding an answer to the query.

Therefore, it is silly to compare search and social selling of products on even footing. Simply put, people are in completely different mindsets as it relates to their usage of these utilities. On Social Media, you are often educating or enticing people who are passively engaged in other activities.

Further, among the most important considerations when seeking to sell on social media, is the understanding that content is the primary driver of social sales activity.

As with all things social media, we must understand that the default setting for most human beings on social media is a mindless scroll through their newsfeeds. Ads are often seen as unwelcomed Interruptions. As a result you need to think about your advertising differently. If your content is solely about your products you will have little success interrupting people to talk about yourself. By contrast, if your product can be woven into a compelling piece of media that captures people’s attention, explains the benefit of your product, you then have a better chance to drive people to your website to learn more or make a purchase. Very few products are actually sold on social media channels. In most cases social media is simply the driver of an interested customer to the website where purchased can be made.

Now that you have the proper context, you should be ready to start picking tactics.

Social Media Strategy Objectives: Providing Customer Service

Among the many uses for social media, customer service may be the most natural fit. Social media is the place where we go to complain, to talk about things we’re excited about, to call out brands, and you craft a narrative about who we are.

We have the profound opportunity to listen to our customers when they complain. We have the ability to craft resources that can be shared on social media to educate customers and address problems proactively.

Furthermore, customer service can become some of our best marketing. Everyone has heard of Zappos.com and the reason why is exclusively because of their customer service. You can buy shoes online just about anywhere nowadays, but it was Zappos who put footwear on the web on the map. And they did it by providing the world’s most extraordinary customer service. Those are the stories that spread and become some of your best marketing. But before you embark on a campaign to provide customer service via social media, you should know what you were about to undertake.

The second is to become a call center. When customers come calling either publicly or privately, you must be quick to respond empathetic and your response, and able to resolve the problem quickly and efficiently with the customer experience firmly at the center of your approach.

Neither of these two approaches will be objectively easy. However, both will be worth it. Self-serve resources online can dramatically reduce customer service costs. Additionally they can be used over and over and over again saving countless hours for your team.

The day-to-day, one-to-one customer service on channels like Twitter, Facebook messenger, or other social media channels can be extremely time-consuming, and at times, frustrating. Depending on the organization, this can be one comment per month or one comment every 20 minutes.

Before considering using social media as a customer service tool, simply understand these two approaches and whether or not you are ready to do it correctly.

Now that you’ve asked yourself those questions, you’re ready to start picking tactics.

Build Your Tactical Plan

How to use this section

Search by Goals, Time, Budget, Resources by using the Find feature in your browser.

• on Mac (⌘F)
• on PC (Ctrl F)

Options to search for:

• Goals: Awareness, Traffic, Leads, Sell Services, Sell Products, Customer Service
• Time: High, Medium, Low
• Budget: $0, $2,000, $5,000, $10,000
• Resources: Copywriting, Social Media Management, Design, Photography, Video, None

The Tactics

Post Videos Organically

• Goals: Awareness, Traffic, Leads. Sell Services, Sell Products, Customer Service

• Time: High: 1 Year+, Medium: 3 Month – 1 Year, Low: Less than 3 Months

• Budget Less than $2,000, $0

• Resources: Video, Social Media Management

If part of your social media strategy includes awareness, lead generation or sales, it’s hard to beat video. They’re primarily two different types of video proliferating social media the steps. One is the traditional landscape video. The second is the portrait story format video. Each of these is broken into longform and short form content. Each network is going to have different specifications on the Lankes and resolution a video. You should look each of them up as they change regularly. However when creating video it is advised that you create the video in a way where you are either shooting for both or you’re shooting two different videos at the same time for publication on either format.

When making longform video, it’s a smart idea to repurpose that video into shorter cuts of the same video. This allows you to take one asset and turn it into multiple assets.

Once you’ve created your video content, post it organically and in the proper native format on as many platforms as possible. Youtube, FB, Instagram, Twitter, Linkedin, etc

For stories: Instagram, Facebook, and Snapchat

It is strongly advised that whenever possible, you add captions to open the opportunity for people to be able to watch without sound.

Run Video View ads

• Goals: Awareness

• Time: Medium: 3 Month – 1 Year, Low: Less than 3 Months

• Budget: $10,000+, $5,000-$10,000, $2,000-$5,000, Less than $2,000, $0

• Resources: Video

Video view ads are among the most inexpensive you can purchase on social platforms. Many platforms are heavily pushing video and as a result have lowered the price for these ad formats. Not every network allows for video ads. You can run video view ads on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube. Additionally on Facebook and Youtube, you can show others ads to people who have engaged with one of your video through a process often referred to as remarketing.

It’s important to note that if you use the video view ad tactic in your social media strategy, you should be clear that it is not a direct marketing activity, but more of a brand marketing activity.

Run Engagement Ads

• Goals: Awareness, Customer Service

• Time: Low: Less than 3 Months

• Budget: $2,000-$5,000, Less than $2,000

• Resources: Copywriting, Social Media Management

Judging by the number of boosted posts I’ve seen, this seems to be one of the most common tactics in a social media strategy. However, this tactic is really only useful if you understand what it accomplishes.

Engagement ads are designed to solicit people to like, comment or share (retweet or repin). The goal is to get people to interact with your content in some way. On some platforms you can then re-market to people who have had those engagements with your content. These are also fairly inexpensive ads that you can reach a large number of people with.

Run Traffic Ads

• Goals: Awareness, Traffic, Customer Service, Leads

• Time: Low: Less than 3 Months

• Budget: $10,000+, $5,000-$10,000, $2,000-$5,000, Less than $2,000

• Resources: Video, Copywriting

Traffic ads are very straightforward and should be part of most company’s social media strategy. Their entire raison d’être is to bring people to your website. Generally speaking, when running a traffic ad you can expect your cost per click and click through rate to be better when you are promoting content rather than simply advertising your company. For example if you drive people to a blog post on your website, or an interesting resource, that will generally give you a lower cost per click then if you were just to say buy from my company or learn more about us. Traffic ads are generally the most widely available objective on all platforms.

Find and Join Meetups

• Goals: Awareness, Leads

• Time: Low: Less than 3 Months

• Budget: less than $2000, $0

• Resources:  None Required

Few brands or people think that meeting in real life could be part of a social media strategy, but I’d strongly advise it. Meetup.com, and other event-based sites, are a great way to meet people in real life who share similar interest to you. Additionally, there are meetups and events for people of every possible interest including… What your prospective clients would be interested in.

Find the meetup that is most in line with the goals you are trying to achieve, and then attend that event to meet people. Bring business cards but more importantly collect them and follow up.

PS a business card is not permission to add someone to your newsletter. That’s a trashy move.

Find and Join Groups and Forums

• Goals: Awareness, Leads, Sell Services

• Time: Low: Less than 3 Months

• Budget: $2,000-$5,000, Less than $2,000

• Resources:  None Required

Online groups and forums are another great place to meet new people. The big mistake the people generally make is that they joined a new group and begin aggressively marketing themselves.

This is a bad tactic.

Your social media strategy should compel you to behave more thoughtfully. When joining your group the 1st thing you should do is listen. Get to know the people in the group. See the sort of content they’re posting. Identify who are the influential members of a creep. If you can get to know the moderator or admin of the group. The key is to become a member of the group not an advertiser in the group. So, seek out groups that contain a number of people that would fit into the target audience you seek to reach and build brand awareness with us. Then follow the rules behave accordingly and meet new people.

Build a Community

• Goals: Awareness, Leads, Sell Services, Sell Products, Customer Service

• Time: High: 1 Year+, Medium: 3 Month – 1 Year

• Budget: $2,000-$5,000, Less than $2,000, $0

• Resources: Social Media Management

“Building communities” is the corner square of social media buzzword bingo. But despite the over usage of the phrase, there’s plenty of good reasons to make building a community a central tactic in your social media strategy.

The thing that most people get wrong about building a community, is it they think that it is a short term tactic, and that it may be easy. Nothing could be further from the truth. Building an active and thriving community takes consistent nurturing and work. All of us have enough distractions in our lives that getting someone to choose to put their attention in your group as a post to somewhere else is a full-time job.

If you want to create a successful group where people give you their attention, you have to make it worth it. That means you need to do your homework, you need to plan, and you need to put in the work day in and day out.

Find Tweetchats

• Goals: Awareness

• Time: Low: Less than 3 Months

• Budget: $0

• Resources: Social Media Management

Though not the cornerstone of social media strategy that they once were, Tweetchats are still an interesting way to meet new people and showcase experience and expertise.

The way a tweetchat works is that the host of the tweetchat chooses a hashtag that is not otherwise in use. By following this unique hashtag people are able to follow a single thread of conversation and engage with one another, without the distraction of the full Twitter stream.

The tweetchat typically follows a question and answer format. The admin or host of the Tweetchat will pose somewhere between 3-10 questions, and open it up to all who follow the hashtag. What transpires after that is a free-flowing multi-directional conversation in which people can talk about all manner of different ideas and opinions relative to the question that has just been asked.

Partner with Micro-Influencers

• Goals: Awareness, Traffic, Leads

• Time: Medium: 3 Month – 1 Year, Low: Less than 3 Months

• Budget: $5,000-$10,000, $2,000-$5,000, Less than $2,000

• Resources:

Micro influencers can be defined in a variety of different ways. Some people make the cut off 5,000 followers, others will say 10,000, and there are certainly tens dozens of other cut off points arbitrarily chosen.

Micro-influencers should be thought of as a person who has a small following and within which they have some reasonable measure of attention. These are individuals who are not used to being page large sums of money for their reach. But from time to time are offered small sums of money or free product in order to create content or begin a conversation with their audience. Influencer marketing allows brands and individuals to reach new audiences that already have an established and trusted relationship.

Micro-influencers can use their influential power to persuade their audience of your product’s value with reviews, testimonials, and special offers.

Partner with Industry Influencers

• Goals: Awareness, Leads, Sell Services, Sell Products

• Time: High: 1 Year+, Medium: 3 Month – 1 Year, Low: Less than 3 Months

• Budget: $10,000+, $5,000-$10,000

• Resources:

Industry influencers are defined differently than micro-influencers or celebrities, though they may fall into one of those two groups as well. Industry influencers typically are subject matter experts in their field, and widely known among a particular industry. The size of their audience can vary greatly, but what is consistent is the trusted relationship their audience has with them within their industry.

Working with industry influencers is typically more expensive than working with micro-influencers, but it doesn’t always have to be. In some cases industry influencers can give you access to an audience through an existing publication that they may write for, podcast that they run, or YouTube channel that they regularly create content for.

Industry influencers can use their influential power to persuade their audience of your product’s value with reviews, testimonials, and special offers.

Partner with Celebrity Influencers

• Goals: Awareness, Traffic, Leads, Sell Services, Sell Products

• Time:  Medium: 3 Month – 1 Year, Low: Less than 3 Months

• Budget: $10,000+

• Resources: Social Media Management

Partnering with celebrities is a different animal entirely from other influencer marketing. Celebrities are generally used to being paid large sums of money for their influence. Celebrities in this case would be defined as people who is audiences expand well be on a particular niche and who are known by large groups of people from varying backgrounds and interests. In most cases celebrity influencer marketing is pay for play. In some very rare cases a celebrity may be so interested in your product or service that they are willing to talk about your product for free.

With celebrity influencer marketing you are in a sense making a small trade a reach for trust. Most people can see that celebrities endorse products because they are paid to, this means that their recommendation is slightly less trusted as it is understood they are being compensated for their opinion.

However because of celebrities substantial reach in many cases the investment may still be worth it. Celebrity influencers can use their influential power to persuade their audience of your product’s value with reviews, testimonials, and special offers.

Be ready to engage people who comment on the post of the influencer to capitalize on the attention this individual or channel creates.

Analyze Your Analytics

• Goals: Traffic, Sell Services, Sell Products, Leads, Awareness, Customer Service

• Time: High: 1 Year+, Medium: 3 Month – 1 Year, Low: Less than 3 Months

• Budget: $5000-$10,000, $2,000-$5,000, Less than $2,000, $0

• Resources:  None Required

Peter Drucker is famously quoted as saying “you can’t manage what you can’t measure.” In a proper social media strategy, it’s extremely important to carefully choose what you measure, and how you make decisions based upon that information.

For instance you might choose to look at the number of social followers of your direct competitors. While that measure may seem important, the number alone doesn’t tell you the whole story. You’ll likely have no idea where they acquired those followers from, how truly engaged those followers actually are, or how much those followers buy from their company. Even if you could know some of that information, it’s hard to see how that information would help you improve your business objectives.

By contrast running social searches and identifying trends in the complaints that people post about your direct competitor is extremely valuable.

Looking at how many likes a photo gets isn’t nearly important as knowing the conversion rate on your remarketing campaign. Looking at the data to see what time of day your particular audience is on Facebook can be extremely valuable. Figuring out which age range or geographic location produces a click-through at the lowest cost is valuable.

You should be looking at what social sites your website traffic is coming from. Look at the quality of traffic originating from any social media site. Tracking what social media activities drive leads. Looking at your Analytics tells you where to dedicate your time moving forward.

The point is, measure what matters. Measure what you want to manage. The things you choose to manage should somehow help you make payroll.

Atomize Content for Maximum Distribution

• Goals: Awareness, Traffic, Leads, Sell Services, Sell Products, Customer Service

• Time: Medium: 3 Month – 1 Year, Low: Less than 3 Months

• Budget: $10,000+, $5,000-$10,000, $2,000-$5,000, Less than $2,000, $0

• Resources: Design, Video, Copywriting, Photography, Social Media Management

Why make one piece of content when you can make 20? Many organizations go into the business of content production and spin their wheels, waste their resources, and consequently see little results from all of their work. Instead, understanding the simple principle of repurposing content can help you to get much more mileage out of every piece of content.

Content can, and should, be atomized (broken down into smaller units) or repurposed among many different platforms and media types. This ensures that it has the highest chance of reaching its maximum potential by appealing to audience members with varying needs and preferences.

For example, when creating a video for use on social media what should it aspect ratio be? Should it be a vertical rectangle a horizontal rectangle or square? Depending upon the social site you’re using the answer to that question will change. But, if you approach your content production with the objective of creating multiple pieces of content out of any one piece of content, then every single video should turn into multiple videos.

There should be a long cut, and several smaller cuts. From those videos you should be able to pull some screenshots and layer over quotes stats brother information to be used as social graphics. The transcripts from those videos can be turned into Podcasts or blogs. You can send out each piece of content via email. And if your content is comprehensive enough it can even become a slide deck.

Once you begin thinking of your content in this way, you realize that by creating one single piece of content intelligently, the output can be 20 pieces of content that can be posted all around the web organically and for use in advertising campaigns.

A social media strategy must consider your goals, timeline, budget and audience. Content atomization can help in virtually all of these areas.

Start a Podcast

• Goals: Awareness, Traffic, Leads, Customer Service

• Time: High: 1 Year+, Medium: 3 Month – 1 Year, Low: Less than 3 Months

• Budget: $10,000+, $5,000-$10,000, $2,000-$5,000, Less than $2,000

• Resources: Design

Starting a podcast is all the rage these days. All the kids are doing it!

A podcast can be a great way to get your name out in front of an audience and worthy of consideration for your social media strategy. By designing a show that is exclusively for a particular interest, you create the conditions for building brand awareness among a highly targeted audience.

It’s not just a podcast itself that helps you to build brand awareness, but all of the activities that are required to have a successful podcast. This includes all of the promotion and planning that goes into the podcast. It includes the outreach to guests for the show, or the interactions you might have researching a particular topic. The research you do prior to launch will help you better understand who your audience is as well as give you a good reason to reach out to your target audience after you launch. Additionally, each guest that you bring onto the show now has a good reason to share their episode, thereby increasing your potential reach.

The average podcast lasts 7-10 episodes before people give up. While there are examples of hit shows with a limited number of episodes, it is generally whether you stick with the show over the long term that separates the real winners from losers.

Start a Youtube Series

• Goals: Awareness, Traffic, Leads, Sell Services, Sell Products, Customer Service

• Time: High: 1 Year+, Medium: 3 Month – 1 Year

• Budget: $10,000+, $5,000-$10,000, $2,000-$5,000, Less than $2,000

• Resources: Video

Becoming a “YouTuber” sounds so glamorous. You imagine going viral, getting billions of years, and deciding what to do with all of that ad revenue. But running a successful YouTube channel is not just about making funny prank videos. It’s a lot of work. From coming up with a concept, to the pre-production of each episode, to the actual production of each episode, and then there’s the editing… But you’re still not done because you still need to promote the episode. All that said, Youtube should be a site worthy of serious consideration for your social media strategy.

It’s been mentioned ad-nauseum at this point but YouTube is the second largest search engine behind Google, which consequently owns YouTube. Therefore if you want to be discovered as a video maker your best bet is to produce those videos and put them on YouTube for visibility on both YouTube’s search engine and Google’s.

HARO

• Goals: Awareness, Traffic

• Time: Low: Less than 3 Months

• Budget: $0

• Resources: Copywriting

HARO or Help a Reporter Out is a site where you can sign up to get email notifications and alerts when a reporter is looking to write a story about a particular topic. Once you sign up with HARO, you will start receiving a list of different topics that reporters are looking to write about in your email inbox.

Each day presents an opportunity to potentially contribute to a story that could go on to be published in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Wired, or any other online and offline publication. Simply monitoring this site on a regular basis is an extremely passive way of finding opportunities to get your name out there.

Guest Blogging

• Goals: Awareness, Traffic

• Time: Medium: 3 Month – 1 Year, Low: Less than 3 Months

• Budget: Less than $2,000, $0

• Resources: Copywriting

When trying to build brand awareness, it’s important to get out in front of new audiences whenever possible. Guest blogging is an extension of traditional PR and also an excellent link building tactic. Writing for publications that reach your target audience gives you the ability to get out in front of audiences and showcase your thought leadership.

One of the fastest ways to find guest blogging opportunities, is to make a list of all of the publications you would be interested in writing for, and then find the contact information for all of the managing editor’s or particular topic editors. Then begin your outreach. Ensure that you are not simply using a template and blasting generic pitches. Do the hard work of figuring out how you fit.

One resource I suggest is learning from Geeta Nadkarni

• Baby Got Booked
• #43: How to Fire Your Expensive PR Firm | Geeta Nadkarni

Another option would be to go to Google and type in the keywords that are relevant to your business and audience, followed by the word “write for us” or “become a contributor.” This is frowned upon from a Link Building perspective, but if you’re trying to get your name out there, it can’t hurt.

Appear as a Guest on Podcasts

• Goals: Awareness, Traffic, Leads, Sell Services, Sell Products

• Time: Medium: 3 Month – 1 Year, Low: Less than 3 Months

• Budget: Less than $2,000, $0

• Resources: Copywriting

Similar to starting your own podcast being a guest on somebody else’s podcast is a great way to reach a new audience. Many podcast or’s are constantly searching for new and interesting guests. To start go to iTunes and search for the keywords relevant to your business. This will help you to find podcast that your target audience will likely be listening to.

Look for popular podcast and start there then work your way down. In order to get booked as a guest on the podcast, you’ll need to write an interesting and convincing pitch as to why you should be a guest. This will need to be written for each and every podcast that you pitch.

An alternative to doing this work yourself is to hire a company that books interview guests such as Interview Valet.

Increase the Size of Your Following with Automation

• Goals: Awareness

• Time: Low: Less than 3 Months

• Budget: Less than $2,000

• Resources: None Required

This tactic may be a little bit controversial but here we go…

There are three main scenarios that illustrate how to build a following on social media as a product of several factors.

1) You might be a celebrity so people already know you and are ready to follow you.

2) You post legitimately interesting content on a regular basis, you’ve carved out a niche, and you are worth following in a way that just about anyone can see.

3) You are just like everybody else and trying to figure out how to grow your following.

If you fall into that third camp, which most people do, then your method of growing a following is a much more difficult, uphill climb. One of the most common ways that people build a following, though generally frowned upon in social media circles, is to follow people and wait for them to follow you back. Those that don’t follow you, you unfollow. Rinse. Repeat.

This process can be quite arduous when done manually, but can become quite easy when using automation. I’m not advocating for this approach, I merely letting you know that it exists.

Some examples of software are re-follow for Twitter and Gramista for Instagram.

Increase the Size of Your Following with Remarketing Ads

• Goals: Awareness

• Time: Low: Less than 3 Months

• Budget: $10,000+, $5,000-$10,000, $2,000-$5,000, Less than $2,000

• Resources:  None Required

One of the best ways of growing you’re following on social media is to attempt to engage people who have already had an interaction with you or your brand. Perhaps the most effective way to do this is to run remarketing campaigns across different social platforms with people who have visited your website in a pre-defined period of time. Another option is to suggest that people follow your page based upon a different interactions I’ve had with your brand on social media such as engaging with the page post, or watching a video.

Use Alerts and Listening Tools for Newsjacking and to Ride Trends

• Goals: Awareness, Customer Service

• Time: Medium: 3 Month – 1 Year, Low: Less than 3 Months

• Budget: $2,000-$5,000, Less than $2,000, $0

• Resources: Social Media Management

Newsjacking and trend-hunting are two closely related ideas of following what is already getting attention online and drafting behind it to draw attention to yourself. Important point about both of these ideas is to make sure that it is congruent with your brand identity and your objectives. Simply jumping on the train because it is hard does nothing for your brand if the trend or idea is in conflict with what you do or completely irrelevant to your objectives.

David Meerman Scott coined the term newsjacking back in 2011. He defines it as “…the art and science of injecting your ideas into a breaking news story so you and your ideas get noticed.” Learn more about Newsjacking here:

What Is Newsjacking?

Try SEMRush Content Marketing Tool, Google Trends, Ahrefs Content Explorer, BuzzSumo, Twitter Trend Search

Create a Roundup Post

• Goals: Traffic

• Time: Medium: 3 Month – 1 Year, Low: Less than 3 Months

• Budget: Less than $2,000, $0

• Resources: Copywriting

Find influencers online and ask them questions to build a expert roundup blog post or PDF.  Use Google Forms, Gravity Forms, Ninja Forms, etc and ask a few questions about a specific topic to be pulled together into a single post of advice.

Once complete and published, let everyone featured in the guide know about it and encourage them to share to their networks. Ideally, you want to give them all a single link to share so that that you can track the aggregate performance. Alternatively, give them each a unique link and track the performance of each influencer individually.

Next, amplify this post with ads. Ideally, amplify the post to fans of the influencers in your guide and make sure that the image used in the ad features that influencer.

Run a Contest or Sweepstakes

• Goals: Awareness, Traffic, Leads

• Time: Low – Less than 3 Months

• Budget: $10,000+, $5,000-$10,000, $2,000-$5,000, Less than $2,000, $0

• Resources: Copywriting, Social Media Management

Just because contests and sweepstakes are a transparent way of engaging an audience, that doesn’t mean it’s not effective. You’ll want to be sure to to pay attention to the rules and regulations on each platform surrounding how you can run sweepstakes or contests within the terms of service. Contest and sweepstakes are particularly more effective when you build an aspect of viral sharing. Whenever the sweepstakes or contest can amplified by way of people organically sharing it, you can be sure that that contest is going to be more successful than one that does not rely on that lever.

Encourage people to turn on notifications

• Goals: Awareness

• Time: Low: Less than 3 Months

• Budget: $0

• Resources: None Required

Looking to grow your YouTube channel? Interested in making sure that your Instagram posts are noticed? Or do you want to make sure that people read your blog with each new post? I’ll make sure that you ask people to both subscribe and turn on notifications for when new content is posted. They may not do it but if you don’t ask it’s unlikely that they’ll remember to.

Host an AMA on Reddit

• Goals: Awareness

• Time: Low: Less than 3 Months

• Budget: Less than $2,000, $0

• Resources: Copywriting

AMA, short for Ask Me Anything, is a great way to answer (and collect) all of the questions people might have about your business. AMAs can be hosted on Reddits AMA subreddit (r/AMA) or within most specific subreddits to ensure the most targeted audience.

Rent a Billboard

• Goals: Awareness, Traffic, Leads

• Time: Low: Less than 3 Months

• Budget: $10,000+, $5,000-$10,000, $2,000-$5,000

• Resources: Design, Copywriting, Photography

It might seem counterintuitive to rent a billboard in order to start and execute a social media campaign, but there is nothing wrong with connecting the physical world and the digital world. Using a billboard is simply about providing clear and easy instructions on how to engage online. This can include a hashtag, A short and easy to remember web address, or even a subreddit. You are simply using a physical property in the real world to connect people to a digital property or they can be engaged… and remarketed to.

Consider how the physical and digital world’s connect in your social media strategy.

Create a Robust Blog Post or Piece of Content and Amplify with Ads

• Goals: Awareness, Traffic, Leads, Sell Services, Sell Products, Customer Service

• Time: Medium: 3 Month – 1 Year, Low: Less than 3 Months

• Budget: $10,000+, $5,000-$10,000, $2,000-$5,000, Less than $2,000

• Resources: Design, Video, Copywriting

At the beginning of this post, I mentioned that there are 5 options in a typical social media strategy. This is one of them. People want to read, share, and bookmark interesting content. It’s one of the reasons we all use social media in the first place, to discover something that is entertaining and informative. When you create a robust blog post, whitepaper, report, or infographic full of valuable information, people will be more likely to click on it in the first place, and definitely more like to share it.

If you want to generate traffic, you can be sure that if you use ads, someone will visit your website. But when you create a piece of content that solves one of your customers specific problems, you create an opportunity to bring the right traffic at a fairly low cost if your ad is targeted properly.

Content ads outperform straightforward advertising every time. Figure out the questions that your customers have, or the pain points that they experience, and create a piece of content that helps to solve that problem.

You better believe that I am advertising this post, because if I’m going to put this much time and energy into a post the answers as many questions as this post hopes to answer, I believe it’ll perform better than if I just said “hey, I know a lot about social media, hire me.”

Create a Robust Blog Post or Piece of Content and Use Social Media to Find Link Opportunities

• Goals: Awareness, Traffic, Leads

• Time: Medium: 3 Month – 1 Year, Low: Less than 3 Months

• Budget: 2,000-$5,000, Less than $2,000

• Resources: Copywriting

Links still matter in SEO. Anyone that tells you differently is misinformed. And while this post isn’t about link building there’s no reason that you can’t use social media to find link opportunities. This tactic belongs partly in your social media strategy, partly in your link building strategy.

As you’re designing your content, a blog post that’s unique interesting and full of valuable information for target audience, you should also be looking out for opportunities for other blog posts and resource pages to link to your comprehensive post. When you find those pages social media can often be an easy way to reach the editor or lead blogger of the publication or resource page.

Crosspost to Medium, Linkedin or Facebook Notes

• Goals: Awareness, Traffic

• Time: Low: Less than 3 Months

• Budget: $0

• Resources:  None Required

Outside of simply sharing the link to your favorite social media platform, you can also take the content of your blog podcast or YouTube video and publish it as a new blog post on Medium and LinkedIn or Facebook notes. You can either share the entire blog post or simply a snippet and preview of the larger blog post. In either case you want to link directly back to the larger blog post to drive traffic back to your website.

Use Youtube to Drive Traffic

• Goals: Awareness, Traffic, Leads

• Time: Medium: 3 Month – 1 Year, Low: Less than 3 Months

• Budget: $10,000+, $5,000-$10,000, $2,000-$5,000, Less than $2,000

• Resources: Video

While the primary value of posting videos on YouTube is engaging people on the YouTube platform to watch your video, there’s an opportunity to drive people off of YouTube, to your website. This can be done in one of two ways.

The first way is in the video content to suggest that people visit your website to learn more about something.

The second method is to put links in the description.

The success of this tactic relies on two pieces. One that you capture people’s attention and imagination using video on YouTube. The second piece is that once you have their attention you insert calls to action in your video or video descriptions.

Comment on Blog Posts

• Goals: Awareness, Traffic

• Time: Low: Less than 3 Months

• Budget: $0

• Resources: Copywriting

Commenting on people’s blog post may seem like an old-school social meida strategy circa 2010, but nowadays, more than ever, bloggers appreciate it.

As our attention moves from blogs and independent websites to social networks, the comment section of many blogs remains empty. However that’s not to say that people don’t still look through the comments for additional context information and opinions related to the content of a blog post. Using blog post comments effectively to drive traffic to your website can feel like a tight-rope but it’s actually quite straightforward.

On the one hand you want to say something value and relevance in the comment of the blog post, but on the other hand you want to drive traffic to your site. That just means that in order to do this properly you need to actually provide a comment that is unique, interesting, valuable, relevant, while also being ready with a link to a piece of relevant and valuable content that builds on the conversation.

Answer Questions

• Goals: Awareness, Traffic, Customer Service

• Time: Low: Less than 3 Months

• Budget: Less than $2,000, $0

• Resources: Copywriting

Can “be helpful” be considered a social media strategy? Maybe. Ask Marcus Sheridan.

One thing that you will see across the social web is an activity often referred to as “soft searching.” Soft searching is the act of asking a question on social networks and letting your contacts chime in with an answer.

There are also designated question-and-answer sites on the web, such as Quora where you can ask questions and members of the site can answer.

In both of these cases if you know the questions to search for and can be prepared with great answers to questions, you will find opportunities to drive traffic.

Much like commenting on blogs the key is to put value at the top of your priorities. That means that your first priority is to actually answer the question, not drive traffic. But if the question requires a comprehensive answer, it opens the door for you to provide a link to either a YouTube video or a blog post that provides additional contacts that wouldn’t fit in a simple answer on a forum or a social media post.

Pin Your Post

• Goals: Awareness, Traffic, Leads, Customer Service

• Time: Low: Less than 3 Months

• Budget: $0

• Resources: None Required

While I wouldn’t bet my business on this particular tactic, it can definitely be helpful.

On both Twitter and Facebook you can pin a post to the top of your feed. The benefit of this is that when new visitors come to your profile they will see that post as the first post on your profile.

On Instagram, You can add story highlights to the top of your profile. When new visitors come to your Instagram profile they can see each of these highlights within which you can direct people to blog posts, or YouTube videos, or any other sort of link. If you have a business account and over 10,000 followers you can add direct links as well.

On YouTube, if you’re able to have a channel welcome video for new visitors and returning visitors. You can use this post and very much the same way as a pin to Facebook or Twitter post.

Additional ways you can employ the same idea or to create content that sits in your cover image or profile photo of the direct people to specific resources.

Understand the Funnel: Use Remarketing

• Goals: Awareness, Traffic, Leads, Sell Services, Sell Products, Customer Service

• Time: Medium: 3 Month – 1 Year

• Budget: $10,000+, $5,000-$10,000, $2,000-$5,000

• Resources: Video, Copywriting

This is perhaps one of the most essential modern day tactics in a social media strategy. You’ve probably heard a lot of talk about “the funnel.” To make it simple, you just need to understand that not all of your buyers are at the same stage. Some of them don’t know who you are yet, some of them know who you are but aren’t ready to buy, some of them know who you are and are ready to buy but are looking at their different options.

The point is is that you cannot treat every prospective buyer the same way. And you shouldn’t market to every prospective buyer the same way. The information that someone needs when they’re first getting to know who you are is different than the information they need once they’re ready to start their buying decision.

This is why remarketing is such a valuable tool in a modern marketers talk it. What remarketing does is give you the ability to get back in front of someone you’ve already established a touch point with. It should come as no shock that you’re going to have a higher likelihood of success when marketing to and trying to sell to someone who’s already interacted with you then someone who is brand new and doesn’t know who you are. Virtually every social media site gives you the opportunity through advertising to put an ad in front of a group of people that you’ve had a previous interaction with.

The most common way of this is doing website retargeting. This involves putting a tiny snippet of code generally in the head of your website code. This opens up the opportunity for you to show an advertisement to someone who is visited your website. When the code is the price applied properly you can target people based upon the pages that they visited on your website, or just having visited the website at all. Typically this can be narrowed by a certain time frame. For example you should be able to target people who have visited your site within the last seven days, that is a different audience and the people who have visited your site in the last 180 days.

Strategically deploying how you use remarketing website visitors can help you to generate more leads by getting in front of people who you’ve already interacted with.

Another method of retargeting is using something known as the custom audience. Many social sites allow you to upload an email list of existing customers, people who have opted into your newsletter, list of phone numbers, and other data that can be used to build a list for advertising targeting. Obviously the terms of service on all of these sites encourage you and require you to use ethically sourced lists. That is, list of customers, or people who have explicitly opted in to receive your email communications. But there is no doubt that there are plenty who use this capability outside of the terms of service.

Another means of remarketing to people who have had a prior interaction with you is relatively new. On Facebook Instagram and YouTube you can show ads to people who have engaged with your content on those social media sites. These are commonly referred to as engagement remarketing.

For example on Facebook, you can show an advertisement encouraging people to buy one of your online courses based upon their previously having watched 50% of one of your video ads.

Engagement remarketing opens up a wide variety of opportunities to build a true funnel. You can show a video add to a large group of people. Then people who have watched a certain percentage of that video can be shown a second advertisement that gives them additional context and reasons to buy. Then people who visited the website based upon that second advertisement can then be encouraged to come back to the website and buy or fill out a contact/lead form. This is a fairly standard funnel on Facebook.

The final component of remarketing to discuss is what’s known as a look-alike audience. All of the social media sites have large swaths of data on everyone of its users. They know what we’ve clicked on, what we’ve liked, what we’ve shared, and who we follow.

Because they have so much data on so many people, they also have the ability to draw similarities between different users. For instance if your customer list or website remarketing data shows that men between 30 – 35 year olds, who like NASCAR, and live in the Northeast, are the ones most likely to purchase your product and visit your site, social media sites can often find you additional users who are not on your list that share similar characteristics. The data that these sites have runs very deep, well beyond gender, age, location, and basic interests. These lookalike audiences can be quite complex, and are worth using when trying to expand the reach of your ads to similar audiences as those you already have access to.

Share Links to Gated Content.

• Goals: Traffic, Leads

• Time: Medium: 3 Month – 1 Year, Low: Less than 3 Months

• Budget: $2,000-$5,000, Less than $2,000

• Resources: Copywriting, Design

This is one of the more well-established lead generation tactics in digital marketing and should be strongly considered in your social media strategy. This tactic includes the use of content which can only be acquired in exchange for an email address (or other contact information). The basic components of this tactic require only a few elements.

• The first is that you have a really good piece of content that your audience will want so badly, that they will readily exchange their email address in exchange for access.
• The second thing that you need is a method in which to capture that email address and provide access to the piece of content.
• The final component of this tactic is the method of driving traffic to that conversion point.

This is where social ads are exceptionally helpful. However organic social media content and postings can be effective as well, though less predictable.

Once you have all of those pieces set up, the next thing to do is run your social media advertisements to the proper audience in an attempt to drive traffic to the website where they will hopefully convert. As always A/B testing is encouraged regarding your headline, ad Copywriting, and imagery.

Run Lead Form Ads

• Goals: Leads

• Time: Low: Less than 3 Months

• Budget: $10,000+, $5,000-$10,000, $2,000-$5,000, Less than $2,000

• Resources: Copywriting

Want to generate leads? Maybe you should consider lead generation ads for your social media strategy. Lead form ads are not available on every social media advertising platform. However on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn these ad units are available.

These forms can be used for two different methods of lead capture. The first method of lead capture is to go directly towards asking for contact information to discuss a sales opportunity. In this case you ask for name contact information etc. Submission of this form should trigger your standard sales process.

The second method of using these lead forms, is to plug them into either your CRM or email marketing software. In this way they can be used to either trigger a sales email sequence, or in a similar way as using a lead form on your website, can be used to provide valuable content in exchange for an email address.

Make sure to check whether the social media site’s lead form ads integrate with your email marketing software or CRM.

Create a Chatbot Funnel

• Goals: Leads, Customer Service

• Time: Medium: 3 Month – 1 Year, Low: Less than 3 Months

• Budget: Less than $2,000

• Resources: Copywriting

Think of a chatbot like a decision tree. You ask a question, and then provide a few limited options. From those options, you provide another layer of limited options, and so on…

Chatbots can be extremely useful for answering a lot of common questions that your perspective buyer might have. They can also be used to move people through the initial stages of product/service research and into a sales conversation.

Chat bots are not available on every platform. In fact the only one that’s really taking advantage of it is Facebook. You can create your Facebook chat bot on Facebook, but it is advised that you use one of the third party tools that are designed specifically for creating chat bots. Two of our favorites are Chatfuel and Manychat.

Once you have added someone to your chat bot list, they become part of a list that you can communicate with again until they unsubscribe. In this way it is similar to email marketing. You can send them broadcast messages and sequences of messages. You can build in triggers based on specific words or options that are selected.

In our opinion, one of the most important part of using a chat bot is to be very clear that it is an automated sequence and not a human being, and that if at any point someone wishes to speak with a human being that there is an option to do so.

Network Your Way to Sales Targets

• Goals: Awareness, Leads

• Time: Medium: 3 Month – 1 Year, Low: Less than 3 Months

• Budget: Less than $2,000, $0

• Resources: None Required

You’ve probably heard that old expression “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know”. Well, it was true then, and it is true now. One of the beautiful things about social media is that it exposes the social graph that connects people together. That means that if I’m looking to meet someone, I can seek out and find who our mutual connections are. LinkedIn makes this especially easy, but Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram do not make it difficult either.

A cold conversation is no match for a warm conversation. If you have the opportunity to reach out to someone through a warm introduction there is no question that you should take that over reaching out to them cold.

When you do this, you are leveraging the social capital of another person. The person making the introduction for you is vouching for you, and putting their name and reputation on the line to make the introduction for you. Obviously, this means that you should respect that gesture to the fullest extent.

For more on effective Networking, David Burkus’ most recent book is excellent.

Read Friend of a Friend . . .: Understanding the Hidden Networks That Can Transform Your Life and Your Career

Watch David’s TEDTalk

See Who’s Interested in You

• Goals: Leads

• Time: Low: Less than 3 Months

• Budget: $0

• Resources: None Required

For all the hard work you can do marketing yourself, running searches and reaching out, there’s an easy way to see who might be interested in you. On LinkedIn, you can see who has looked at your profile. Many people overlook this feature, and they shouldn’t. Not everyone who looks at your profile is interested in doing business with you. But there is a reason that they came to your profile. Be sure to look through this list of people on a regular basis, and reach out to those that you think might be a good opportunity to work with.

Create Long Form Video

• Goals: Awareness, Traffic, Leads, Sell Services, Sell Products, Customer Service

• Time: High: 1 Year+, Medium: 3 Month – 1 Year, Low: Less than 3 Months

• Budget: $10,000+, $5,000-$10,000, $2,000-$5,000, Less than $2,000

• Resources: Video

The longer the video, the more significant the commitment the viewer must have should they choose to watch it in its entirety.

Long form video is ideally suited for middle and bottom of the funnel marketing, and customer service. These longer videos provide enough runway to educate the prospect, explain a product or service and its benefits. It is long enough to differentiate a solution from a competitor.

Formats for the video could be a storyline, interview, webinar, presentation, training, web series, etc.

An additional benefit of long form video is that it can be chopped into smaller videos for additional distribution. See Content Atomization.

Run Conversion Campaigns

• Goals: Leads, Sell Services, Sell Products

• Time: Medium: 3 Month – 1 Year, Low: Less than 3 Months

• Budget: $10,000+, $5,000-$10,000, $2,000-$5,000, Less than $2,000, $0

• Resources: Design, Video, Copywriting, Photography

First, a Conversion is to be defined as:

the action you wish for someone to take.

A conversion can be a sale, an opt-in, or simply landing on a specific page of the website. This definition is important.

Conversion campaigns are designed to track specific actions that are being taken on your website as a result of social ad campaigns. These actions include page views, registrations, leads, and purchases. To track these actions, a snippet of code, commonly referred to as a pixel, from all relevant social channels needs to be added to the code of your website (or added to Google Tag Manager). Common ecommerce platforms, like Shopify and WooCommerce, integrate nicely with most social channels to help make the setup and tracking faster and more efficient. Using event specific codes such as “Add to Cart” or “Complete Registration” can be added on specific pages for more accurate tracking.

You can assign a value to a conversion or integrate it with your website to track conversion amounts.

When someone takes the action that you want, the social site will capture that action and optimize the campaign around the information captured on that conversion. For instance, for every person who buys something from your website via a Facebook ads, Facebook will then adjust the ad campaign to be seen by more people who share interests and demographics with the people who have converted.

Conversion campaigns exist on most social ad platforms and can, generally, include various media types including: text-only posts, videos, graphics and photos.

If you are trying to generate ROI from your social media activities, then conversion ads should be strongly considered for your social media strategy.

Run Product Catalog Campaigns

• Goals: Sell Services, Sell Products

• Time: Medium: 3 Month – 1 Year, Low: Less than 3 Months

• Budget: $10,000+, $5,000-$10,000, $2,000-$5,000, Less than $2,000, $0

• Resources: Photography

Product catalog campaigns are a type of ad that can be run on Facebook and Instagram. This campaign is a type of conversion campaign that automatically promotes relevant products to your audience. The set up involves connecting your ecommerce site to your Facebook Ad Manager to create a product catalog. Once your product catalog is setup, you can target dynamic ads at users who have expressed interest on your website, in your app, or elsewhere on the internet.

Product catalog ads are an easy way to remarket with minimal effort. These automated ads can be targeted to those who abandoned their cart, view a page for a certain amount of time, or click on something. They can also be used to upsell related products or to request for a review after the product has been received.

Offer a Promotion, Discount, or other Sales Offer

• Goals: Awareness, Leads, Sell Services, Sell Products

• Time: Medium: 3 Month – 1 Year, Low: Less than 3 Months

• Budget: $10,000+, $5,000-$10,000, $2,000-$5,000, Less than $2,000, $0

• Resources: Copywriting

Social promotions are largely impacted by exclusivity and time.

Exclusivity: Offer special promotions only to those who like/follow your business, have subscribed to your email list, or have previously made a purchase.

Time: Offer promotions for only a short amount of time, such as a Flash Sale. This psychologically makes users want services now out of fear they will miss out on a good deal.

Types of promotions include: percentage off order, promo code, BOGO, referral code, upsell, added value offer, contests/sweepstakes, etc.

If you want to use this tactic to raise awareness, build social sharing into the conditions.

Move Social Activity Into An Email Drip Campaign

• Goals: Traffic, Leads, Sell Services, Sell Products, Customer Service

• Time: High: 1 Year+, Medium: 3 Month – 1 Year, Low: Less than 3 Months

• Budget: $2,000-$5,000, Less than $2,000, $0

• Resources: Copywriting

Email Marketing is still among the highest converting digital marketing tactics around. Automation helps to make this process easier and more targeted.

Both paid and organic social media activity can drive people to an opt-in point that triggers an email drip sequence. This opt in has further value in that the list of emails camptured can become a custom audience for social ad remarketing. The same is true for using the remarketing pixel to retarget people who visited the page but did not opt in, or people who hit the confirmation page after the opt-in.

Automated emails that can be sent to customers who take specific actions on your website are an easy way to remarket with minimal effort. These automated drip emails can be sent to those who abandoned their cart, view a page for a certain amount of time, or click on something. The goal is to remind a user that they were interested in a certain product and to keep it fresh in their mind until a purchase is made.

Automated emails can also be setup to send to existing customers. This includes upsell opportunities for related products or a request for a review after the products has been received. You can also create an education campaign for new customer that helps to properly answer frequently asked questions.

Engage Potential Customers with Live Chat

• Goals: Leads, Customer Service

• Time: Medium: 3 Month – 1 Year, Low: Less than 3 Months

• Budget: Less than $2,000, $0

• Resources: Social Media Management

Live chat is the leading form of digital contact method, beating out email and social media.

Today, more than 30% of customers expect live chat on your website – and for customers that visit your website on a mobile device, this number is as high as 62%.

Setting up a live chat feature on your website allows for immediate engagement with potential customers. It offers a fast and easy way for customers to get in touch with questions concerning a purchase, as opposed to picking up a phone and calling. It also ensures that a sale is not lost because of a lack on information.

Get Serious About Personalization

• Goals: Awareness, Traffic, Leads, Sell Services, Sell Products, Customer Service

• Time: High: 1 Year+, Medium: 3 Month – 1 Year, Low: Less than 3 Months

• Budget: $10,000+, $5,000-$10,000, $2,000-$5,000, Less than $2,000, $0

• Resources: Copywriting

Utilizing personalization in your digital and social marketing can increase sales by an average of 19%.

Various ways to personalize include:

• Targeting ads of products that the audience has already shown interest in

• Targeting specific content to niche interest groups

• Using a call to action that is both dynamic and relevant to the previous behavior of users

• Using Smart Fields on download form that already include the information of the recipient

• Adding the name of recipient, company’s name or any other topic of interest to a subject line

• Sending a follow-up email that thanks the customer and includes future recommendations.

One-to-One Social Outreach

• Goals: Awareness, Leads, Customer Service

• Time: High: 1 Year+, Medium: 3 Month – 1 Year, Low: Less than 3 Months

• Budget: $5,000-$10,000, $2,000-$5,000, Less than $2,000, $0

• Resources: Social Media Management

Aside from the possibility of going viral or becoming internet famous, the big reason why virtually everyone initially fell in love with social media, was the opportunity to connect with other human beings one-to-one without an intermediary.

There’s no other way to say this, sometimes you just have to do the manual work. By going on social media sites and running searches for various keywords you can cover conversations that are relevant to you and reveal a potential sales opportunity. You can do this on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and even Instagram. When you find someone that is engaging in a conversation, or asking questions, that you can provide value to, and that can lead to a sales conversation, that is an opportunity that you should take advantage of.

This is no different than if you were to go to a networking event and overhear someone talking about a pinpoint that your company provides a solution to. You were simply using the magic of technology to identify those conversations amidst the noise.

Social channels can be used to build meaningful relationships with people. This can include peers, competitors, prospects and anyone who shares a common interest. This type of outreach, however, is not easy. To succeed at this aspect of social requires people to take a genuine and empathetic approach to connecting with others. People tend to respond better to being spoken with than talked at. Methods that feel spammy, ingenuine, or intrusive will not gardner any type of results.

Engaging others with personality and value is key to success in one-to-one outreach whether your goals are building brand awareness, generating leads, selling services or services, or offering customer service. If you can offer people something to prove your product’s worth BEFORE you ask for them to buy, it is more likely for a sale to take place later on.

Host a Webinar or Live video

• Goals: Awareness, Traffic, Leads, Sell Services, Sell Products, Customer Service

• Time: Medium: 3 Month – 1 Year, Low: Less than 3 Months

• Budget: Less than $2,000, $0

• Resources: Video, Copywriting

Live video was all the rage for a short period of time. It still has plenty of applications though. Using Periscope for Twitter, Facebook live or Instagram live, you can create live video and answer questions from the audience in real time. On Facebook and periscope you can then save those live videos permanently to your page. Those videos can then be amplified using advertising. Besides live video you can go the traditional route of running a webinar. Webinars are a great way of exposing new audiences to information, tactics, and strategies from your thought leaders.

Webinars and live videos are a great way to showcase your expertise. The difference between using a live video or webinar for brand awareness versus lead generation  versus any other purpose, comes down to the call to action. Those calls to action will make sense in certain types of videos better than others.

For instance a webinar you might use for brand awareness would be very, very high level on a particular topic. It’s your 101 version of the lecture.

The webinar you do for lead generation will likely need to include more information, deeper insights, and a greater showcase of expertise. Additionally the generation webinar or live video, there should be some form of an offer or next step.

The webinar you do to sell a product or service will likely be targeted to those who have already interested with your business. It need to include information and insights that the viewer needs in order to make a decision. Therefore, the sales webinar or live video should include some form of strong call to action or promotional offer.

Finally, webinars can also be used for Customer Service. When your business develops a new product or service, or creates a new feature, a webinar is a great way to educate existing customers and give them the opportunity to provide feedback.

Host a Meetup or Event

• Goals: Awareness, Leads, Sell Services, Sell Products, Customer Service

• Time: Medium: 3 Month – 1 Year, Low: Less than 3 Months

• Budget: Less than $2,000, $0

• Resources: None Required

Hosting a meetup or event is a great way to meet new people and create a community. IF you play your cards right, you can then migrate this community into a place where you can remarket to them. This requires that you find a way to either capture their email address or direct them to a page with a remarketing pixel.

Once you have access to their contact information or have brought them to a page with a remarketing pixel you can then target them in advertising campaigns on social platforms.

One suggestion is to use the Discussions tab to engage the Meetup members. This can help to provide guidance about what is most important to the members, and create an opportunity to guide the members to join a FB group, visit a webpage, or join an email list.

At the Meetup,you have the opportunity to talk to people one-on-one, ask questions, and even offer your members to chance even sample your products or services. Those who attend the event can be offered exclusive promotions towards a future purchase or free/discounted add-ons. These personal engagements and extra value offers are what can turn potential customers into lasting, loyal customers.

Finally, don’t forget that these Meetups are a prime opportunity to capture content. Use this opportunity to capture video or audio, share slides, or put together a blog post. All of the content that comes out of the Meetup can be used to promote future Meetups, or market your business.

Create Templates for Various Responses

• Goals: Awareness, Traffic, Leads, Sell Services, Sell Products, Customer Service

• Time: Low: Less than 3 Months

• Budget: Less than $2,000, $0

• Resources: Copywriting

When your entire team is ready, your business is in a better position to win in every area including marketing, sales and customer service. It’s important to remember that anyone on your team could have to handle a customer service issue an at given time – even if they are not in a customer service role. At the same time, every employee has the opportunity to generate leads, or build awareness. Everyone needs to be on the same page regarding brand voice, tone, and messaging. This will create consistency across all employees and communication channels and will help to reduce or eliminate any confusion or frustration on the customer’s end.

Everyone should be prepared to deal with issues or any questions that may arise unexpectedly. This is why you should create a list of responses to any and all types of customer service issues, standardize what information is sent to new leads, and provide uniform language to describe the brand.

These templates should be written out and available to everyone on your team. All issues, whether big or small, should be included and have well thought out responses that will elicit a satisfied customer.

Once these templates are put in place, it’s important to give your team the flexibility it needs to make changes on the fly in service of owning that customer interaction.

Some tools that can be helpful for creating these consistent templates are TextExpander (cross platform) and Cheatsheet. As an aside, I absolutely LOVE TextExpander.

Set Up Automated Responses and Bots

• Goals: Customer Service

• Time: High: 1 Year+, Low: Less than 3 Months

• Budget: Less than $2,000, $0

• Resources: Copywriting

In today’s era of constant connectivity, customers expect answers immediately. Whether or not that response is gotten could be the difference between a customer choosing your product/service over a competitor’s.

This can easily be done for most questions with a simple chat bot. Certain words or phrases can trigger responses for FAQs pertaining to hours, location, services/products, returns/exchanges, shipping, etc.

An automated response can also be triggered outside of office hours to let customers know that someone will respond as soon as possible.

Run Social Searches and Join Conversations

• Goals: Awareness, Leads, Customer Service

• Time: High: 1 Year+, Medium: 3 Month – 1 Year, Low: Less than 3 Months

• Budget: $2,000-$5,000, Less than $2,000, $0

• Resources: Social Media Management

When building your social media strategy, do something unconventional: actually invest time and energy (maybe even money) into social listening. Social listening can help you proactively listen to conversations happening about your business or industry so that you take part in them. It has benefits for building brand awareness, generating leads, and providing customer service.

Social media monitoring and social searches can be used to find people and build awareness with people who would be ideal prospects, if they only knew about your brand/product/solution. Once you find them, initiating a conversation can help to generate leads.

Doing this can also help you to proactively provide customer service by identifying customer pain points to provide fast, direct responses to questions, complaints, and comments. It can also be used to surface feedback that can help improve or differentiate your brand, product, or service.

Not everyone who talks about your brand on social media will tag you so start by finding people who are already having conversations that you can organically participate in. The easiest way to do this is to use social search engines and search by keyword, branded term, industry term, or influential personality in your organization.

If you are a local business, often times you can use geographic search to find local issues and conversations, and nearby influencers.

Reward Loyal Customers

• Goals: Customer Service

• Time: High: 1 Year+, Low: Less than 3 Months

• Budget: $10,000+, $5,000-$10,000, $2,000-$5,000, Less than $2,000, $0

• Resources: Copywriting

Customer service is often overlooked in social media strategy. This is a mistake. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that companies that focus on happy customers and referrals tend to have a more positive social media presence than those that don’t.

Customer service is much more than just turning unsatisfied customers into satisfied ones. Hopefully, the majority of your customers are already happy and loyal to your product or service, so it is important to keep them that way. Rewarding your best customers is a straightforward way to accomplish this.

Using rewards to incentivize existing customers will ensure that they remain happy customers while also bringing in new sales through referrals.

Types of rewards include:

• Early Access Programs

• Exclusive Discounts

• Events

• Referral Discounts

• Customer Exclusive Contests

The key levers to pull are grouped into the following three categories:

1. Added Value

2. Discounts

3. Status

Leverage Internal Communication and Transparency to Create Better Customer Experiences

• Goals: Awareness, Traffic, Leads, Sell Services, Sell Products, Customer Service

• Time: High: 1 Year+, Medium: 3 Month – 1 Year

• Budget: $2,000-$5,000, Less than $2,000, $0

• Resources: Social Media Management

Among all of the tactics listed in this post, this one may have the most far reaching implications. Creating a strong company culture can have a profound impact on every aspect of the business including marketing, sales and customer experience. Internal communication and transparency are essential to foster an environment where employees feel heard, valued, and appreciated. When employees are happy, it shows – especially in the digital age that we live in.

Your internal culture is the same thing as your brand so you need to make sure your employees are set up for success through strong internal processes. Don’t neglect this area of your business for your social media strategy.

If you, as a company, put employees first and customers second, then in turn your employees will put customers first. Having an open and transparent office environment where employees can openly communicate with one another allows for this type of operation. When your team feels a sense of ownership in their company, they are more likely to proactively promote the interests of their company which leads to greater reach and influx of opportunities.

This is especially useful because among the best ways to grow your organic reach is to leverage the aggregate reach of your employees. In most cases the combined reach of all employees of an organization exceeds that of the company’s brand of channel. On top of that, the trust and relationship to each individual employee has built with their own network exceeds that of the trust the most organizations are able to build with their audiences. By creating processes and incentives for your employees to become involved in the social sharing of content that the organization producers, you give yourself a better chance of reaching a larger audience with a higher degree of trust.

Ways to improve your company’s internal communication and transparency include:

• Investing in internal communication tools, such as Slack , Microsoft Teams or Yammer

• Clearly communicating to your team about company news, hires/fires, new business, etc.

• Acknowledging the work and accomplishments of your team externally

• Providing employees with company content to share with their networks

• Encouraging and participating in non-work-related conversations and activities

Create Easy Ways for Customers to Provide Feedback

• Goals: Sell Services, Sell Products, Customer Service

• Time: High: 1 Year+, Medium: 3 Month – 1 Year, Low: Less than 3 Months

• Budget: Less than $2,000, $0

• Resources: None required

Receiving customer feedback is vitally important for the success of your business and the happiness of your customers.

Company reviews can be a powerful tool for your business if leveraged correctly. This valuable feedback can provide you with insights for things you’re doing well, things that need to be improved, and things that you need to add or eliminate.

Testimonials and social proof help drive sales because they make customers feel good about their decision to choose your product. Positive social proof can validate potential customers’ decision to buy products or services, or give undecided prospective customers the final push needed to make a decision to purchase. Do not underestimate the impact that a stranger’s words and opinions can have when when it comes to things like price, location, and quality.

The easiest way to generate review and feedback is to launch and ongoing campaign to encourage reviews on Facebook, Google, Yelp, and Amazon. These are likely the main channels people look to when they want to read or write reviews. Theses sites are also easy to monitor and respond to.

More advanced marketing platforms like Yotpo or Trut Pilot can easily integrate with your website and email marketing to solicit direct reviews. These types of tools are great if you want to request reviews from your customers after they have made a purchase or have been a customer for a certain period of time.

Finally, working with third party sites to review your products and/or services is another way to seed social proof on the web for prospective buyers who are in the information gathering stage of their buyer journey.

Testimonials work well in both video and written formats and should be front and center on your website.