4 Habits You Need to Ditch for a Successful Social Media Campaign
“Success” is a word that can only be defined as it relates to the achievement of a specific goal. When you look at the various components of your social media marketing campaign and declare it successful, are you basing that on a previously defined, measurable goal? Or are you seeing high rates of activity and new fans and assuming that equals success?
Anyone can click a “like” or “share” button. In fact, studies have shown that articles get shared on social media without even being read. So how can success be measured?
If you haven’t set specific goals with measurable outcomes for your social media marketing campaign, that’s the first thing you need to do. In addition to setting goals, here are 4 habits you need to transform if you want to be successful:
1. Stop copying other marketer’s strategies
When a business is running a highly productive social media marketing campaign, it’s tempting to want to reverse engineer and copy it. The problem is that what you see on the surface isn’t really the strategy. When you analyze someone else’s marketing strategy, you’re only seeing the components of execution. You won’t know what’s happening from the top down.
By observing, you won’t know what components are being launched together, separately, or if it’s all being used as a stage for introducing something like a new product in a couple of months. Trying to copy someone else’s strategy is like trying to put a piece of Ikea furniture together without the instruction manual. You might have all the pieces, but you won’t know how to put them together.
Instead, create your own strategy. If you see other marketers doing things that appeal to you, incorporate them into your strategy but make it original.
2. Stop copying other people’s marketing materials
A “swipe file” isn’t a collection of everyone else’s work that you can use after changing a few words here and there. A swipe file is intended to be a collection of your own work that you can use as inspiration for new content. Unfortunately, many people consider the internet to be one giant swipe file.
The problem with copying someone else’s work is you’ll never have an authentic voice. Your copy will read as though it’s artificial. The words might be there, but it will be empty.
For example, if you’re writing a sales letter for a weight loss product and you’ve never been overweight, you might be tempted to “borrow” some existing weight loss copy and tweak it. Since you’ve never had the experience of losing weight or being overweight, much of the content will be lost as you make your changes and replace important words to make it sound original. People who need to lose weight will read your copy and won’t be able to relate because it wasn’t written by someone with genuine experience.
You can still use general marketing principles, but when you’re authentic you won’t have to fake having the experiences you’re promoting to your customers.
3. Tell your story authentically
If your product or service can really help people improve their financial situation, you should be sharing stories they can relate to. Not everyone can relate to wanting to get rich so they can take endless vacations in the Bahamas. Instead, tell people the steps you took to finish paying your student loan debt obligations, or how you paid off your “30 year” mortgage by the age of 35.
4. Ditch the “rags to riches” story
The idea of a product or service providing the opportunity to go from broke to rich is appealing, but it’s not always real.
Some people either lie about their journey out of poverty or exaggerate it. You can see this clearly when people say things like, “I was so far down I qualified for food stamps with my 5 kids,” yet they fail to comment on the struggle of having to actually feed their kids on food stamps. Statements that lack emotional experience should make you wonder about their validity.
The rest of their story usually involves an expensive car getting repossessed, and having to live off of their savings for 6 months while they looked for a new job. Then suddenly they were making 6 figures.
Unless you’ve actually been homeless, broke, and had to feed your five kids on food stamps, find a different way to tell your story that accurately represents your experience. Be real with people. It doesn’t help to exaggerate your story. The more authentic you are, the more you will attract people you really can help.
