Peer pressure is usually a terrible reason to do anything in life, but when it comes to marketing your business you want to pay attention to what the other kids are doing. Any company doing well enough to be considered your competitor is bound to be marketing themselves and—since it’s 2011—social media marketing is probably a significant part of their marketing strategy. If you want to to stay ahead while getting your social media marketing campaign off the ground, you’re going to have to know what they’re doing and do it better.
Know what they’re doing. One of the benefits of social media marketing is that your competitor’s marketing plan is right in front of you. You can follow them, Facebook them, read their blogs and see what patterns are and aren’t working for them.
Improve upon what they’re doing. As with any aspect of business, you don’t want to simply do what your competitor does. You want to come up with something new and better or, at least, improve upon what you see is already working and set relevant goals for each facet of your campaign. Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, blogs and the plethora of social media tools out there are all a part of the same world, but still very different animals.
Stay ahead of the game. Not every social media tool may seem appropriate for your business and your campaign, but you would be surprised at how you can leverage some tools. Explore creative ways of spicing up your marketing campaign and find ways to utilize avenues that your competitors have ignored.
There is a reason everyone is using social media—it works. Your social media marketing campaign will need to go through constant evolution in order to remain effective and knowing what your competitors are doing will be vital to keeping this evolution going strong.