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Social media marketing tips from a dad with young kids

Social media marketing tips from a dad with young kids

I told myself I wouldn’t do it. I was not going to be the dad who slung around timeless, annoying and cliché parenting phrases in raising my children.

But then I became a dad, and suddenly I have an endless reservoir of auto-generated responses for every incident that happens around our home. For example, one of my children will run to me after an unintended tumble off the sofa, and I automatically throw out the never-helpful, “Sweetie, you need to be more careful.” Like that’s at all helpful after the fact.

Charlotte digital marketer with childrenWell, not all parenting one-liners passed down through the generations are unhelpful like that one. In fact, as a dad who’s also a marketer, I see a lot of cross over between the things I say to my children and some strategic marketing best practices, especially within emerging digital mediums, which can be every bit as unpredictable as small children.

Following are three questions that I ask all too often around my house, and how they can be applied to your organization’s social media marketing endeavors acheter viagra sans ordonnance.

Where do you think you’re going?

isaiah smith - the social media planMy wife and I have 3-year-old twins, and at a very early age, we learned that our boy twin, Isaiah, was a severe flight risk. If you left any exterior door of our home cracked for even a second, he was gone. Thankfully, he never got far. Upon seeing him bolt out of the house, we’d always run him down and immediately say, “Where do you think you’re going?”

That same question has to be answered for any excursion into the world of social media marketing. Before you spend a dollar buying ads, sponsoring content or even launching your brand’s presence on a social media platform, review your organization’s strategic business goals and objectives.

There should be a direct connection between your activity on social media and your company’s overall strategic plan. From there, you need to develop a social media strategic plan that ties into the master plan.

According to a June 2015 report from Simply Measured, social media accounts for approximately 10 percent of digital marketing budgets in 2015, and that number is projected to grow to 22.5 percent in the next five years. If that’s true for your marketing spend, do you know exactly where it is you’re going?

Oh, as for Isaiah, we eventually installed a 6-foot privacy fence around the back yard and childproof mechanisms on our doors that even some adults struggle to navigate. He’s nice and safe now.

Can you use your words?

moriah smith - the communicatorIsaiah’s twin sister, Moriah, is a communicator. She has an extensive vocabulary and endless things to say, but she doesn’t always use her words. Often she’ll scream, whine or just point her way to what she wants, which is often for her brothers to just leave her alone.

I liken that approach to invasive, interruptive digital marketing tactics. Like a complete screen takeover on a website I’ve just entered or a display ad that starts playing (loudly) on my screen without my permission. Don’t get me wrong, these tactics can be effective, but I really prefer for brands to use their words to engage me in a more meaningful way.

Content marketing is a great strategy to get your message out there in a way that’s relevant for the reader and highly targeted and measurable for you. Pew Research Center’s Social Networking Fact Sheet estimates that 74 percent of online adults in the U.S. use social media sites; 52 percent use two or more. The odds are good that your target audience is on social media, and quite possibly, is using more than one site.

Don’t miss the opportunity to share your brand story consistently across these platforms, and don’t leave your content completely to chance with organic posts that risk low impression rates and subsequently low engagement.

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