Social Media Marketing Campaigns
Social Media Marketing is a form of online interactive marketing consisting primarily of off-site activities intended to spread a message between users. By utilizing certain platforms and building your companies social media profile, a marketer can increase inbound links, raise organic search ranking, maximize brand-awareness and create a corporate image online.
Social Media Sites and Tools
Social media sites include Digg, Delicious, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Wikipedia, Flickr and many more. Each SMM campaign will vary greatly depending on the industry and the type of content, message or video that has been developed. Despite this great divergence between campaigns, the principal benefit of SMM remains the same: if unique or interesting content is spread amongst the online social media, it is likely to spread quickly and virally from user to user.
Benefits of Social Media Marketing
- Strengthens Customer Interactions
- Successful SMM campaigns establish a direct medium for communication between a company and its customer – or potential – customer base. This particular benefit can be cultivated through podcasts, corporate blogs, wiki’s, customer forums, Facebook, MySpace and several other social media resources. These efforts often results in a higher level of trust between consumer and business entity, more reliable customer feedback and even improved product development.
- Link Popularity and Website Traffic
- Internet users who see or read a company’s a specific packaged message may choose to link to the content from their profile pages on different social media sites. This improved link popularity, in turn, raises organic search rankings in Google, Yahoo!, MSN, Live.com etc. and drives more relevant traffic to a company's website.
- Heightens Brand Awareness
- By increasing visibility amongst a potential customer base as well as in the organic rankings for search engines, SMM campaigns provide the additional benefit of increasing brand awareness.
Star Nine Marketing’s Social Media Marketing Services
Strategy Development
As stated earlier a successful SMM campaign will vary greatly between industries. Nevertheless, Star Nine Marketing takes a similar, integrated approach to developing and implementing each client’s specific social media strategy.
The strategy development phase always begins with an assessment of client strategies including an estimation of the target ROI, budget and the intended reach of the campaign. This process allows the Star Nine SMM and SEO teams to work together to identify the proper metrics to be tracked and tested once the campaign gets underway.
Next, our team works together with the client to locate the target audience of the SMM campaign and the appropriate social media channels through which to reach them. Finally, once this analysis is completed, Star Nine Marketing’s team can identify what type of message (list article, podcast, video, etc.) will be most engaging, and, therefore, more likely to spread virally through the network.
Content Creation and Distribution
This process is without a doubt the most crucial to the success of the SMM campaign and where Star Nine Marketing’s combination of analytical marketing skills and creativity play the most vital role.
In the creation phase, our SMM team works closely with our clients to develop optimal content both for customer engagement and potential for viral distribution. By leveraging the power of these social media networks such as Digg, Delicious, YouTube, Facebook, Technorati, etc. the client can receive the greatest benefit from the creation of this message.
Campaign Tracking and Monitoring
Using our proven SMM campaign management system, our teams set up the appropriate analytics and tracking tools to monitor the “buzz” and reach of viral distribution for the specific piece content.
Metrics to track this “buzz” include blog comment activities, new natural links created, the number of social bookmarks received, number of YouTube views and forum activity attributed to the specific social media campaign. Additionally, using standard website analytics tools, social media campaigns can and should be integrated with traditional online marketing resources like search engines to provide another judgment of their effectiveness.
