Did you know social media is the number one daily activity among Americans, topping time spent on email and Google? According to a survey, 93% of marketers use social media to promote their business.

1. With the holiday season right around the corner,
now is a great time to get your A-game email
marketing ready. According to technology market
Research firm, there will be 196,300,000,000
Worldwide emails sent and received every day in 2014.
Yes, that is nearly 200 billion emails sent out and received
Every single day.
In reality, most business email marketing is ineffective. It doesn't grab the recipient's
attention or the emails get deleted without being opened. Use these 13 email marketing
hacks to create emails that capture your customers' attention, receive a high open-rate and
produce conversions for your business.
1. HAVE A PLAN.
Blindly throwing together an email message and sending it out without a
plan in place is completely unproductive. What is your goal? If every single person on
your email list opened the message what would you want him or her to do? Visit a
particular page on your website to read additional information? Click through and
land on a product page to complete a purchase? Identify the goal before you do
anything else.

2. But before diving into paid ads it is
important to build out your social channels
with rock star content, quality customer service,
and eye-catching visuals. Once you optimize your social
channels for success, you will not only gain loyal brand promoters, but you
will begin capturing leads and converting visitors into customers.
For those of you who have let your social channels develop cobwebs and
cockroaches over the past year, here are six social media strategies to take
control of your social channels and give them a much needed facelift in the
New Year.

3. SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING STRATEGY
#1: CREATE A GAME PLAN & STICK TO IT
If you have no execution strategy, your content
is likely going to fall through the cracks. Set a limit
on how many tweets you have to publish per day.
This number can be adjusted as needed, but having a
number you have to hit, even something as small as four
tweets per day, gives you a benchmark and a goal at the very least.
TIP: Investigate how often your competitors are posting and conduct industry research to
see the ideal amount of content to publish per day on each channel. You want to be active,
but not overly active.
Compile all content in an easy-to-read editorial calendar. Google Excel Docs is a good place
to start. Set up a weekly, shareable publishing calendar, then separate by social channel,
and provide columns for co-workers within your content team to provide their feedback
before posting. Plan ahead, but continue making additions as necessary, for example if a
great PR hit is published cover this in a timely manner even it was not on your original
posting schedule.

4. Look into social media management platforms,
like Hootsuite, Buffer, and TweetDeck, to help
schedule posts ahead of time, monitor and
manage your social feeds, and access performance
analytics.
SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING STRATEGY
#2: TREAT EACH CHANNEL AS AN INDIVIDUAL ENTITY
Each social channel needs to be treated as a separate entity. There can be content that is
spread across all channels – for example if your business was recently acquired by a global
company, this is likely news you want to share across the board, but you should adjust your
strategy depending on the audience for that channel.
For example, LinkedIn tends to have a more business-focused audience looking for in-depth,
educational content, compared to Instagram, which is likely to have an audience looking for
engaging visual content. Pay attention to your follower demographic on each channel to
publish content that appeals to them.

5. SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING STRATEGY
#3: GO ABOVE & BEYOND IN CUSTOMER SERVICE
If a visitor tweets at your handle or posts on your Facebook
page and never receives a response, trust is lost. Due to your lack of communication,
the dissatisfied potential lead is now turning to your competitors to seek answers to
their questions. On the other hand, when you deliver a thoughtful response in a
timely manner that visitor is flattered and intrigued by your brand. It’s humanizing to
take the time respond to a personal inquiry, and it builds your authority.
Negative feedback needs to be addressed as well, preferably with patience and
respect. But think of your social channels as an opportunity to display how awesome
you treat your customers.

6. Take these four steps to boost the happiness of your
Twitterbirds:
• Assign a first responder to post and monitor each
channel your brand has a profile on.
• Create a troubleshooting library of common bugs or complaints
that arise, and how to handle these issues. This will ensure the issue
is addressed properly and in a timely manner. (NOTE: If the issue needs
further investigation or requires confidential information, have the user
email support, send a private message, or call your help line.)
• Be creative – use giveaways, personality, and a sense of humor to engage followers and convert them into
free brand promoters.
• DO NOT IGNORE any comment posted to your account on social, whether stellar or critical. No need to create
brand detractors!
SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING STRATEGY #4: EMBRACE MISHAPS
We are humans, so mistakes are unavoidable. This is especially true when it comes to the fast-paced world of
social media. Rather than flat out ignoring these hiccups, embrace them. I am not saying that when a comma is
missed in a tweet you should announce this small grammar error, but DO NOT delete the tweet. It has already
been published, and followers are more likely to notice if you are continuously re-posting. For larger mistakes,
like a product error or multiple overcharges to customer credit cards, you’ll want to proactively respond in an
apologetic, actionable manner, and send out content from your social accounts apologizing and addressing
how the error is being handled so customers are aware.

7. SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING STRATEGY
#5: TRACK & TALK!
Tracking is often perceived as tedious and
time-consuming. It can be, but it only needs to take
a few hours each month. Set aside time to review
metrics that are important to your business on a monthly
basis (preferably the first day of the month). Here are some stats to
focus on: number of posts, follower growth, clicks to your site/products, page views, post
likes or shares, impressions, etc. Look at each channel separately, and compare to your
largest competitors to get a sense on how you’re matching up (or how you’re CRUSHING
them!).
If you’re crunched for time and analytics is not your thing, invest in software to help track
data. A lot can be tracked using free social media tools like bit.ly, Google Analytics, and
Hootsuite. Diving in to see which content received the most clicks, shares, etc. will show
you what to repurpose in the future. Look for common themes in your analysis, for
example if advice posts with numbers in the title perform wonderfully on Facebook then up
these on that platform.

8. Share your results and set monthly strategy
meetings with your different marketing forces
within your company to plan for the future.
Working collaboratively and taking a step back to
brainstorm and reevaluate your strategy can
drastically improve your social efforts. Also leverage other
departments within your business. Various teams like client
services and sales might have stellar ideas for social since they are the
people who communicate with prospects and customers on a daily basis.
SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING STRATEGY #6: STAY ACTIVE ON GOOGLE+
Many of you may be raising an eyebrow, but Google+, often viewed as the Facebook
wannabe, is not going away anytime soon. In fact, it’s only becoming more and more
important for businesses to actively engage and grow their circles on this platform. When you
search on Google you will notice that Google+ is everywhere. If your business is actively
posting on Google+, you will receive essentially free ad space when users search for you on
Google.

9. Notice when I do a search for Salesforce not only
does their Google+ follower number display, but
there’s a call-to-action to follow their brand, as well as
recent posts on their Google+ page, on the right side
of the SERP.
According to a survey, leading marketers believe the number of Google +1’s plays
the second largest part in determining search engine rankings. This isn’t proven to be true,
but clearly marketers are seeing that Google+ is affecting the visibility of their content on
Google.
Google+ is also integrated with YouTube, so users are unable to comment on the platform
without being opted into Google+. Essentially Google is making having a Google+ account
pretty much essential.
What will you do to improve your social media marketing efforts in 2015?