Relate to your followers while staying relevant to your brand

You always want to social media marketing plan template be thinking in the mindset of your target consumers. Likely you’ve already established a few buyer personas and have an idea of the makeup of the leads you’re nurturing and the customers you’re delighting. But now you need to think about why they’re on Instagram. To kill time? To see what’s up with their friends? To check-in on what their children are up to? Let’s pretend you sell financial consulting services and you’ve established that your clients love sport cars and tend to follow popular car brands on Instagram. Ok, perfect solution: post pictures of fancy sports cars! Right? Well, not quite – you need to keep relevant to what you’re selling so perhaps you post an attractive sports car, but write a catchy description reading “Wouldn’t you love to buy this lightning fast beamer? You can if you start making better financial decisions! Call us today for a free 30 minute consultation.” And then stop posting cars for a while because you don’t want your market to think you sell sports cars.

Build a community around an actionable hashtag

The great thing about this strategy is that it can be leveraged across other social networks social media marketing company like Twitter and Pinterest, but works so well on Instagram and is the perfect way to get your audience to engage with your brand. Nike did it so well with their winter campaign Choose Your Winter. Being an avid runner and one of the crazy people that runs the Charles River in 10 degree weather during Boston winters, I might be a bit biased, but Nike really did knock it out of the park with this campaign. Not only is the timing exceptional, but it gives Instagram users the ability to interact with your brand. Since the campaign launched in mid-November the hashtag #chooseyourwinter has gained substantial ground on Instagram. Instagram themselves have recognized Nike for having the ability to start a movement with their #runfree campaign months back.Smaller brands can leverage hashtag campaigns as well. Take Infatuation for instance, a trendy restaurant review site founded in 2009, which I wasn’t even aware of until I started seeing their renowned hashtag #EEEEEATS all over my friends food pictures on my Instagram feed. I kept wondering what was up with the EEEEE’s? Why five E’s? I don’t get it…Until I quickly realized this hashtag was created by the guys at Infatuation to create an online food community for “anyone who is serious about food, but doesn’t take food too seriously,” according to their site. And it’s worked absurdly well with over 350,000 posts shared using the prevalent hashtag for foodies all over the map.Every brand needs a community to support it, vouch for it, and give it a personality. That’s not a new development in the marketing world.

Brands had communities long before the digital age. For example, my favorite mom-and-pop sporting goods store informally supported a community that gathered there regularly for coffee, banter, stories, and discussion. Topics included the best products and brands that catered to social media marketing world our outdoor pastimes … and lots of tall tales! We ended up buying things there, too.Today, with so much of consumers’ lives and our world’s commerce going through online channels, it must be harder to build such a sense of community and feeling of belonging around your brand, right? Yes and no.Yes, there is still some challenge around finding people interested in your product or service, getting them to come to “your place,” and engaging them with like-minded individuals. But in many ways, the digital world has spawned almost endless ways to build a large online community of friends and advocates of your brand.Your online community members need a way to get together. Create a hash tag, and use it everywhere and often. A hashtag is the magnet that brings folks together.