Last week we covered the basic tools for launching your first online marketing campaign.

Now we will lay out an action plan for implementing those tools to successfully promote your brand online and grow your customer base. Here is the first in a series of practical, real-world tips.

What is the first step?

• Tool: Social Media
• Action: Claim your brands on popular networks

Before getting started you need to register your brand name on all the social media services you want to use such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and others.

Aside from those sites you plan on using immediately it’s standard practice to go ahead and register your brand name on as many other services as possible to protect it from being registered by others.  

For example, even if you don’t plan on posting videos to YouTube right away, you should go ahead and register your brand name on that service in case you change your mind in the future.  

There are services that will do this for you but we recommend using some of the free services available to identify the sites on which your brand name is still available and doing as much of it yourself as possible.  

Most sites can be registered very quickly and you want to get used to doing this yourself if you plan to minimize marketing costs.  

It goes without saying that you need to keep a list of the services you register as well as - the username, password and recovery email.  The best choice for this task in my opinion is a simple google spreadsheet. It's free, you can share it with other members of your team, and best of all the spreadsheets live on the cloud, which means they can be accessed and updated from multiple devices.

Here are some links to name check services to get you started:

• http://namechk.com/
• http://knowem.com/
• http://www.usernamecheck.com/
• http://checkusernames.com/

This is just the first step in mastering brand awareness and reaping the benefits of social media marketing.

Here's a quick look at our action plan in organizing a successful social media marketing campaign. I'll be writing about these topics in the weeks to come. It's a lot of ground to cover but well worth the trip. If you have questions, don't hesitiate to leave them in the comments section below.

1. Social Media Marketing (today's topic)
2. PPC Advertising
3. Content Marketing
4. Email Marketing
5. Lead Generation
6. Organic SEO/SEM
7. Conversion Optimization