My 3 Month Strategy to Guaranteed Growth and Lead-gen on Social

I am thoroughly enjoying teaching a private Marketing and Social Media strategy course at the moment. The best part is that while teaching I am able to verbalize all my strategies into all sorts of cool new mantras to explain basic principles of Marketing. In this post I will write about how I use Stop. Measure. Analyze. Strategize. as part of my "3 month cycle to guaranteed growth and lead generation using social media." How do you achieve this in 3 months?
STOP:

• Posting everything and anything to social expecting it to get you anywhere.
• Assuming anyone cares about your brand.
• All automated messages, responses, posting, re-posting.
• Thinking you can do it all for free and start thinking about paid promotions.

In other words, it's time to really understand social and how it can help you. It's time to get strategic.
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Month 1 - MEASURE and ANALYZE
In order to get strategic you need to look at everything you have been doing historically, and how effective it was as a strategy. Set benchmarks for followers, engagement numbers, reach, type of content etc... Now look at what similar companies/people/brands in your space are doing. Who are their followers, how do they post, how do they engage, what seems to work? Make a note of it. During this month DO NOT STOP POSTING, what you actually need to do is post more, post often, change it up. This is the month to see what works and what doesn't. Not just for you, but for people similar to you. The insights you gain will help you with your strategy.

Month 2 - STEADY GROWTH
I call this the growth month. Focus now on applying the insights you have gained during your MEASURE month into actionable posts. By now you should be posting more often, in the right place, focusing on a particular type of follower/influencer. Your main goal this month is to get your follower and engagement numbers steadily growing. Why? because it means you are doing something right. Once you are getting it right applying it to a strategy will guarantee success.

Month 3 - STRATEGY, STRATEGY, STRATEGY
This is the month you can start to plan how to keep growing and turn your captive audience into a potential leads. By applying the lessons you learned in the first 2 months you should now know for sure:

• Who your audience is
• Who the main influencers are in your industry
• How different people engage on each platform in your social arsenal
• What content works and does not work
• What your competition is doing and how you can do it better

NOW - you need to start running social specific campaigns, both paid and organic. You may even find you need a separate campaign for each social channel because different audiences use different social channels, well... differently. You may find you have no need for one particular channel. You may find a niche that has not been filled and decide to concentrate on creating a plug for that hole (think communities, groups, etc...). Whatever you do in this month, if you did month 1 and 2 properly you should see much higher returns for your time, effort and money. We call that guaranteed MROI.

Month 4 and Onwards - STOP. MEASURE. ANALYZE and continue STRATEGIZINGTo make sure you never lose sight of that not so elusive successful end-goal, never ever stop measuring, analyzing and strategizing. It is the only way to guarantee #MROI.