A Simple, Successful Social Media, Email Marketing Strategy

I'm very active on social media.  It's a part of my marketing and it complements what I do to promote myself via email.   I consistently publish content sharing content that's valuable to my target audience while educating them on what I do.

Let me explain how this works to:

• keep me top of mind with prospects and customers,
• encourage others to refer me business, and
• establish me as an credible resource  in my area of expertise,

Content is King

My social media and email marketing is all about content.  Social media (in my case Facebook, Linkedin and Twitter) and email are the way to get the message out, but the most important part is the content itself.  I tell a story that my audience enjoys and appreciate while establishing me as an expert in the space.

In my case, I'm an Infusionsoft Certified Consultant.  My team and I build membership sites and online courses for Infusionsoft users.  Our membership site tool of choice is Memberium.  We also work with our customers on online course definition and marketing.

Since that is what we do, I concentrate and publishing content serving the needs of business owners with information.  They are typically speakers, coaches or consultants focused on a specific niche.  They have a practice and now want to deliver their program as an online courses or membership program.

So my focus is on delivering value to that audience.

Anyone considering a social media or email broadcast marketing strategy needs to first understand their target audience.  You need to know who they are, what they need, what they want and how you can serve them.  Defining a very specific customer avatar is a good start.  That way you write for that person addressing them personally.

I publish content belonging to one of the following three general categories:

1. How-to articles explaining some aspect of membership sites and online courses.
2. Small business advice.
3. Resources for Infusionsoft users in general.

I recommend doing something similar for yourself.

How Do You Publish the Content

I publish my content systematically on my website blog.  I come up with the content.  I work had at coming up with a good headline.  I find an image that calls attention to some aspect of the article.

There are several reasons for publishing your content as a blog:

• As blog articles are published, the search engines take notice.  You establish your site as a resource providing good information when people search for your keywords and phrases.
• If your website is built as a lead capture tool (and it should be), publishing your content on the blog brings more people to your site so they can learn about you.
• The blog serves as the archive for all your content you have available.

If you have a consistent flow of blog articles, your social media and email marketing become easy.  You have the content.  The headline gets shown on the social media post.  The headline becomes your email subject line.  The image then appears nicely, and as large as possible if you've selected your images right, on social media.

For social media, I recommend using CoSchedule.  It installs as a Wordpress plugin.  It enables you to post your blog article automatically to a good number of social media services.  I use it to post my blog articles to Facebook and Linkedin.  CoSchedule has a headline analyzer.  It will rate your headline and give you suggestions for improving it.  You can test multiple headlines repeatedly and it scores them giving information on how to improve it.  It's a good resource.

Consistently Publishing Content

Publishing content consistently takes planning.  I already mentioned that you have to know your audience so you are serving their needs.  The next thing is to consider different ways of producing your content.

The most obvious one is you write your content.  I shoot for 500 to 750 work blog articles.

A second format that everyone should consider is to record them as video blogs.   If you're a decent speaker, recording a video using your phone or webcam will do just fine.  This approach has the advantage of showing you as an expert speaking to your audience.  This is a great way to connect with them.  I would work to quickly get past any concerns over how you come across on video.  Most people are overly critical of themselves and avoid video because they don't believe it's good enough.  It probably is.

To take your video blog to the next level, get your video transcribed and use that as copy to go along with your video blog.  You get the benefit of content for the search engines.

Another idea is to record your video blog, or maybe just do an audio recording, and send that to a copywriter.  They can then use it to write an original articles using what you sent as the basis for it.  If you connect with the right copywriter, you should be able to get it written at a reasonable price.

When recording video blogs, I have found it useful to plan out the month.  Select a theme and then come up with working headline for each week.   Then come up with talking points for each headline and record them all in one pass.  If you are recording your videos that way, make sure to your shirt so you aren't recording a group of videos weating the same thing.

Showing Up Everywhere

With your content flowing consistently, then the goal is to appear like you are everywhere.  When you publish your blog articles, you post it on your Facebook profile, Facebook company page and any groups you run.  If you participate in groups that have you target audience, publish it there too.

Each time I post a blog article, I email out a message with a teaser and a link to your articles.  I vary my formats sometimes including the entire blog article in the email and other times providing the first few paragraphs followed by a "read more" link to the blog article on my site.

Additional steps you can consider is to re-target your audience with Google or Facebook ads.  Anyone that visits your site is targeted to get ads served up to them with similar messaging.  Since ads are only shown to people that have visited your site, your cost remains low since they are only served up to people who have visited your site.

I use a tool called Adroll.  It's very easy to use serving up retargeted ads.  You can have a lot of fun with this producing ads that offer a similar call to action to the one your readers saw when they visited your site.

There are other options as well.  The key, however, it to start with the content customized to the needs of your target audience.  You do that consistently and then you promote, promote, promote.

Hope this helps.