How to Build a Social Media Army

The superheroes in Marvel Comics’ Avengers series often join forces, commonly in some sort of shiny form-fitting clothing, to defend the weak and powerless. Whether it was Thor’s bulging biceps, Ironman’s impressive armour or the Hulk’s super strength – at some point or another, I’m sure that something about this bunch has probably caught your attention.

Typically, the road to beating the baddies is generally an uphill one. Even superheroes need to hone their super powers, overcome a few hurdles, plot their defence and ultimately work together to save the world.

While your social media strategy may not call for the same techniques required to defeat a super villain, marketers can learn a thing or two from the Avengers. Here are a few ways that social media marketers can embrace their inner superhero and build their own social media army.

Training your team

It takes a lot of hard work to be the best. Ensuring that your staff understand the value of digital/inbound marketing and social media is all about training. If they don’t understand what social media and inbound marketing can do for the business, chances are that they won’t do it very effectively.

Conducting workshops and teaching your team about the importance of this content is a social media management essential. Part of this training should focus on teaching staff about your business model, all the ins and outs of the product, your content strategy and how best to engage with customers.

Working together

While each of the Avengers is a superhero in their own right, the real magic happens when they come together. Harnessing the power of collaboration is all about encouraging your staff to work together to complete tasks themselves, rather than outsourcing work to others.

Content is a great way to do so. Before paying other writers to author blogs, why not motivate your staff to try their hand at writing content. Not only will this add to their digital/inbound knowledge, but it also allows them to put all of the knowledge they gained during their training to good use.

The best offense is a good defense

Defending the free world is a prerequisite on any superhero’s day planner. As a marketer, your aim should be to defend yourself against employee fatigue. By creating a solid content plan, an organised social media planning calendar, spreading the responsibilities for creating content and posting that content, you will eliminate irregularity and ensure consistency across all social accounts.

And why is consistency so important? Not only does it give your business a distinct identity, it also differentiates your business from your competitors, ensures your message stands out in customer’s minds and increases customer loyalty.

Changing your strategy

It’s generally around the middle of the movie that the good guys hit a stumbling block. At this point they usually do a little soul searching and realise that defeating their foes may require them to rethink their game plan.

Where the marketers of old were focused on hard selling, they now need to be thinking about hard content. From blogs and emails to white papers and eBooks, providing useful content is one of the best ways to target customers at any stage of their buying journey.

The key with this content is to provide customers with a compelling enough value proposition so that they are willing to give you their contact information. The idea behind premium content is to market the information as “exclusive” and to convince them that the content has a higher value.

Social media provides a great platform to promote this content and to focus your strategy on getting visitors back to your own website to begin their journey with your business. Get this strategy right and you will have a solid lead generation system that’s future proof.

Making the most of tech

Speaking of content, and sharing this content, technology provides marketers with a great opportunity to promote their content to the masses. Would Thor have the same oomph without his hammer? And what would Iron Man really be able to achieve without his armour? Sure, they’d all still be superheroes but their gadgets make their jobs a whole bunch easier. Marketers should think about social media in the same way.

Using marketing software can enable you to post content on behalf of your whole team. This helps to avoid a big issue for marketers and sales teams alike. Internal email asking everyone to help and share can often be hard to make stick and often only 5% support without more follow ups and aggressive KPIs.

All of this costs time, leads and sales.  Software can help you remove this and if you’ve got a team of 40 for example sharing instantly straight from your marketing department, you’ve just built a social media army and a force to be reckoned with.

At the end of the day, it’s through the efforts of a great team that success is achieved. Whether you’re a social media marketer or a superhero, the principles are the same – if your team know what they need to do, if your attack is well organised and if you’re using the resources you have at your disposal, it’s only a matter of time before you overcome your adversaries.  

Are you keen to build a social army and take your social media management to superhero heights, download our Ultimate Guide to Social Media.

from HubSpot Marketing Blog http://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/how-to-build-a-social-media-army