Not sure where to start when it comes to social media marketing? Build a winning campaign with these top tips from a leading Social Media Management Agency.
Social media has completely transformed the marketing landscape and is now a substantial aspect of most marketing strategies. Consumers are buying in a different way, and brands have had to adapt, using social media as a way of building brand loyalty and communicating with their potential and existing customers.
It’s evident that social media marketing is a key element for success in marketing, and many businesses realise the potential for business growth through this avenue of digital marketing.
The commercial benefits of using social media marketing are now so great that any business not implementing this relatively cost-effective resource is missing out on a remarkable marketing opportunity.
Social media marketing is a cost-effective way to increase exposure; incorporating a social media strategy into your overall marketing strategy will increase your business’ visibility and ultimately provide a high ROI.
Engaging with such a broad audience of consumers means more people interacting with your content, which leads to increased brand awareness. Each post that is shared, liked or commented on will introduce your business to a new network and potentially new customers.
The more people who know about your business, the better.
Increased exposure means more inbound traffic. By building your social media presence you will increase your exposure, which in turn leads to more people visiting your website. With things like Pay-Per-Click advertising, your business can quickly and easily drive traffic to your website, at a relatively low cost.
Social media also has an affect on your search engine rankings. While it’s not directly improving your Google ranking, if you’re creating high quality content that integrates your keywords, then your followers will be inclined to share and engage with your content. It’s also an avenue for you to build a reputation with industry influencers; this has potential for backlinks if they write about your business, which directly improves rankings.
With increased visibility, comes more opportunities for conversion. The more you build your brand reputation, the more your following will see you as a subject matter expert. Building trust, brand loyalty and brand authority means you’re more likely to be at the top of mind when they’re wanting to make a purchase.
Social media encourages relationship development; customers feel closer to your brand if they’re able to comment and query, and know that they’ll get a personalised response rather than a generic one.
Social media is an easy way to gain marketplace insights. Social media tools provide amazing insights into your audience’s behaviour and preferences, allowing you to gain great insight in real time.
Now that you know the benefits of social media marketing, what’s the best way to go about it? The good news is that it is relatively simple to get it right.
However, the bad news is that it takes time; social media success doesn’t come overnight. It can take years to build your brand authority, as well as your following, so think of it as a long-term strategy, rather than a quick way to sell your offering.
Use these top tips from a leading Social Media Management Agency for a winning campaign:
Keeping it simple to start with is probably the best way to go when embarking on creating a social media campaign for the first time.
Taking your time to get it right is key; having a sloppy social media presence can have a negative affect on your brand.
Planning is also a must to ensure that your campaign is executed flawlessly in a professional manner.
1. Know Your Customer
One of the major benefits of social media marketing, is that your advertising can be hugely targeted. Each social media platform has major insights into their users, which are your customers. They know everything from what they like to do, where they like to go to where they live, and so much more.
These specifics are extremely valuable to your business, so knowing what your ideal customer looks like is so important to getting the most out of social media marketing.
Knowing your customer allows you to directly target them. What does that mean for you? You’re communicating to the exact person that buys/ would buy your product or service; there’s nothing more valuable than that.
Flip the coin, and you quickly learn what they don’t like. Having a platform that allows followers to not only positively but negatively engage with your business 24/7 can be a challenge. However, if you’re listening to your customers, you can get real time feedback on what their objections or pain points are.
The key to capitalising on this is to listen to your followers, and adjust your social media offering accordingly. If you don’t make the necessary adjustments, you could lose credibility and your following quickly.
2. Define What You Want to Achieve
Any Social Media Management Company will tell you that knowing what you want to achieve is imperative to social media marketing success.
Knowing what you want to achieve will have a huge affect on how you interact with the platforms and execute your campaign. Before creating your social media campaign, you need to know what you want to get from it; define what a successful campaign looks like for you.
Do you want to increase awareness of a certain part of your business? Do you want to drive traffic to your website? Do you want to increase engagement? Etc.
Whatever a successful campaign looks like for you, make sure you identify the key components and detail them specifically.
3. Identify the Best Way to Reach Your Customers
Each social media platform has a different user demographic. Now that you know who your ideal customer is, you need to ensure that you’re reaching them through the right platform.
Facebook owns Instagram, so advertising on both platforms can be done using Facebook Advertising. About 65% of Facebook users are 35 or older, so if that’s your target audience then Facebook is an easy way to reach them. Facebook content includes photographic, video and written content. While video is becoming more popular, it’s a great way to share blog posts and other written content and drive traffic to your website that way.
Facebook Analytics is a powerful self-service tool that you can use to monitor your campaigns.
YouTube
YouTube is an online video platform, which makes your decision about engaging with it fairly easy. If you’re not keen on/don’t have the skills or resources to create video content then YouTube may not be suited to your business.
However, it has an ever-growing global reach, the stats are staggering. Currently 1.8 billion people use YouTube with 300+ hours of video content being uploaded to YouTube every minute. Almost 5 billion videos are watched on YouTube every day, and 8 out of 10 people who are 18-49 years old watch YouTube every month.
With 1 billion monthly active users globally, Instagram is a rapidly growing platform; more than 500 million Instagram users visit the platform daily.
Instagram is a visual social media platform where video content is dominating.
More than 70% of Instagram’s users are millennials, so if this is your audience’s demographic then engaging in Instagram is a no brainer. Nearly 80% of users say that they act on content they view on the platform, including searching, visiting websites or telling a friend about what they’ve seen.
LinkedIn is an ideal platform for B2B marketing. It has 380+ million business professionals that generally have up to date title and employment details.
Creating a wide network on LinkedIn can be extremely beneficial for B2B businesses; B2C businesses do engage on LinkedIn but other platforms are probably better suited to that buying model.
With 300 million+ users, and 79% of Twitter accounts being based outside the United States, Twitter is another way of reaching a global audience. The top three countries by user count outside of the U.S. are Brazil (nearly 30 million users), Japan (around 26 million) and Mexico (nearly 24 million).
Approximately 37% of Twitter users are between the ages of 18 and 29 with 25% of users being aged between 30 and 49 years of age. 500 million Tweets are sent per day!
Depending on your demographic, Twitter may be the way to go with Twitter Ads making advertising easy for you.
4. Create Engaging Content
Reposting others content or using stock images is one thing, creating engaging, unique content that is audience specific is another.
Social media is saturated with content; in order to stand out to the right people, you need to put the effort into creating your content, whether it be visual or written.
Creating audience specific content that is engaging will attract a following, bland content won’t. It’s as simple as that.
That’s where knowing your audience is invaluable; if you know what type of content will appeal to them then that’s hugely valuable. Also knowing what they don’t like will ensure that you don’t make major errors along the way, preventing you from tarnishing your brand image.
Time is precious, so why should your audience spend their limited time on your content if you don’t value their time? If you do value their time then you’ll create content that’s going to benefit them.
If you show your customers that they’re important to you, then they’re more likely to value your brand. If you don’t, then they’ll just find another brand that does.
Creating original, interesting content is key to social media success.
5. Schedule Your Content
Creating a calendar will assist you in executing your social media campaign as planned. Having a detailed schedule of every aspect of your campaign will ensure that you’re not scrambling at the last minute; posting random, thoughtless content may actually have a negative effect on your brand.
You need to schedule things like: when specific content is going to be posted, major holidays/events, as well additional things like specials etc.; basically, your content needs to be thoughtfully executed and linked to your business’s operations, rather than arbitrarily posted.
For example, if you’re posting content that is country specific, you need to ensure that it’s scheduled according to that country’s time zone.
There are several apps out there, like Hootsuite and Buffer, that make scheduling easy.
Your schedule doesn’t have to be set in stone, rather it should act as a guide. Once your campaign is up and running, you may need to adjust your schedule according to the engagement/feedback you’re getting.
That’s where monitoring your campaign comes into play.
6. Metrics
Many businesses make the mistake of putting all their efforts into planning and executing their social media campaign. However, they forget about monitoring and evaluating it once it’s been launched.
Unfortunately, social media isn’t a set and forget outlet. Once a campaign has been launched, you need to ensure that you have the resources to monitor it on an ongoing basis.
Getting real time feedback is one of its major benefits, if used well. You can monitor the performance of your campaign and make adjustments quickly and easily.
Most platforms have amazing analytics tools that allow you to monitor the finer details of your campaigns. From impressions to clicks, and everything in between; these tools will give you in depth information about the performance of your campaign.
Conclusion
Social media marketing has revolutionised the marketing landscape, it’s giving all types of businesses a way to reach a global audience. Whatever your marketing budget, social media has a solution for you.
Put some planning and effort into your social media campaigns, and you’ll start seeing the results. Don’t get impatient; social media success takes time but can be extremely valuable to your business.
If you’re feeling unsure, or you don’t have the resources in invest in a proper social media marketing plan, then turn to the experts. However, make sure that you select a Social Media Management Agency that you think is going to have your best interests at heart.