The Wolf Of Wall Street is the latest movie craze starring Leonardo DiCaprio as he depicts the hedonistic lifestyle of the real Jordan Belfort who rose to notoriety by scamming millions of dollars out of investors during the 1990’s. While he may not have been the greatest person, he is currently a motivational speaker and founder of his “Straight Line” sales method that gave rise to his successful career as a stockbroker. Why was Jordan Belfort the Wolf of Wall Street? While his practices may have been illegal, it was because of his strategical planning, relentless approach, and dedication to being successful that brought his name into the spotlight that gave rise to his legacy. Find out how you can start being “The Wolf Of Social Media” today (without breaking any laws, of course)!
Develop A Game Plan
Before you jump head first into anything, it’s important that you have a game plan ready. You need to strategize! As a marketer, the first thing you’re going to want to look into is segmenting your market. Basically, what this means is that you need to narrow down your target market very specifically. There are various ways of doing this. Remember that you want to be as specific as possible in this process and create different categories to organize them into. Different ways of segmenting your market include categorizing by demographics, education, income, and even psychographics.
Establishing A Buyer Persona
Once you have defined your target market, who exactly is in it? For example, let’s say you’ve segmented your market into college students aged 18-24 year olds with a strong interest in environmental issues. You can break this segment down even further by establishing a buyer persona. With the information that you have gained through segmenting your market, create a buyer persona that is related to who you’re trying to target. In the earlier example I mentioned, your target market consists of college students that are interested in saving the environment. How would you give your ideal customers an identity? Let’s call your first buyer persona “Artsy Kate”. This person is a female in college that is aged 18-24 years old. Her hobbies include painting, writing poems, listening to obscure bands, and volunteering at the local animal shelter. She attends a liberal arts college and participates in student activism. What kind of image are you drawing in your mind right now? I may have just described the typical “hipster” that lives in the Village of Lower Manhattan in New York. Establishing a buyer persona helps you envision what your ideal customers looks like. This will also help you understand how you should be marketing to your target market and knowing what tactics will work or not work.
Align Content With Interests
If your ideal customer is Artsy Kate, what kind of content will you be pushing on your social media channels? Your content needs to be aligned with the interests of your target market. You’re not going to be posting stuff about the Super Bowl when Artsy Kate probably doesn’t care about it. Posting things about different ways you can reuse that glass bottle or creative methods of saving electricity would do a lot better to increase engagement with Artsy Kate rather than posting something about sports. While some of this may be pretty obvious, it’s easy to forget if you haven’t established any buyer personas. Research is extremely essential in getting to know what your ideal customers are interested in. Put yourself in Artsy Kate’s shoes, what kind of content would interest you the most?
Your Company’s Voice
How are you communicating with your customers? You’re going to want to keep in mind the tone of voice you use when you’re writing your your blog posts. Is your company “hip and trendy” or more professional? The way you talk gives your company an image. This goes back to your buyer persona. You always want to keep them in mind. How do they converse in everyday conversations? What kind of jargon do they use? If you’re marketing a company that deals with suits and ties in the office, you’re not going to want to talk to them like you would with your roommate back in college. Get all the lingo down before you start posting away on social media!
Social Media Strategy
Once you do all the research, now’s the time to plan out your attack for social media domination! There’s lots of things you need to consider here. I think one of the first things you should do is to find out when your users are online the most. With Facebook, it’s easy to figure that out by just heading over to your page’s insights. You can then pinpoint at which hour your posts do the best. For example, your posts may be getting the most amount of views and engagement between the hours of 11 AM and 1 PM. What does this mean? This could mean that most of your page’s posts are seen when that person is on lunch break at work.
Another thing you want to consider is the type of posts on your page that do better than others. Are your photo posts doing better than your video posts? If you’re posting a video on your page at 9 AM, maybe the reason why you’re not getting the most views is because that during this hour, people are just getting into the office and they most likely won’t be able to play a video because it has sound. Consider scheduling videos to go out during off hours. You can even start implementing GIF images. These animated images are getting quite popular!
As a social media manager, you want to engage your followers into discussion and generate activity on your page. You’re a marketer and what are marketers good at? We’re really damn good at thinking. Digital marketing isn’t too much different from traditional marketing. While our methods vary, the concepts are the same. Our field is constantly changing and always evolving. To be “The Wolf of Social Media”, you need to be dynamic in your thinking. Just like fashion, one trend may not be in style for very long. Change is the only constant and it’s our job to keep up.
What Strategies Are You Implementing For Your Social Media?
To be able to implement your strategy effectively, as a marketer, you need to be a creative thinker. Remember the saying “think outside the box”? There’s no definite answer as to how you can dominate your social media game as there are multiple approaches to the problem. However, what you do want is a method that works best for you and your team. Writing out a processes checklist is a great way to get all of the steps in your strategy visualized.