Over the last few years, social media has changed the way people use the internet. Actually, it has influenced the whole world and also the world of marketing.
So what are the reasons for your business to start utilising these new forms of communications as soon as possible? These are probably the seven most important ones:
- Showcase your brand: social media is after all another marketing channel for creating brand awareness, relationship building or driving your sales. So why not use it? Especially when it’s free.
- Develop a loyal community: people enjoy being part of a business that is proactively growing a lively community. The social media community can help you establish an emotional connection between your company and your prospects which is the center for your long-term success.
- Improve customer service: social media is a great source of feedback. It allows your prospects to communicate with your company and in turn, it can greatly enhance your customer service and increase brand trustworthiness.
- Increase digital exposure: interacting via social networks can significantly increase your online presence.
- Boost traffic & SEO: social media is a huge lead generator. It continuously drives high-value traffic to your website. They can also help with website ranking since search engines significantly reflect your social media content.
- Expand sales & reach new audience: listening to your followers on social media networks can help you respond to their specific needs. This will most likely increase your sales and also expand your customer base.
- Cut marketing costs: compared to traditional channels like print advertising, social media marketing is inexpensive for any business.
Undoubtedly, social media marketing is one of the best ways to increase quality traffic, customer engagement and eventually improving sales & revenue. You can’t ignore the given seven reasons to begin on social media. Read on to explore the top social media marketing tips to get the best results from your campaigns.
15 Best Social Media Marketing Tips
If we talk about stats, social media has a 66% penetration rate on the UK population. This sits little above the global penetration rate of 45%. Simply put, we are living in 2020 and we can assume that most of the people who use the internet are aware of social media sites. This makes it ideal to think about marketing on social media platforms to grow followers, generate leads and increase sales.
1. Know your marketing goals
Social media offers some great opportunities for businesses. But, it can also be overwhelming. To help you formulate your social media plan, you need to start with your business goals. So, are you ready to figure out what you’re going to get out of social media?
There are a myriad of social media sites out there. And, a lot of ways to use them to achieve lots of different objectives. But, before you start signing up and posting all over the place, start with a simple question – what you’re hoping to accomplish with social media marketing?
Maybe, you’re looking for faster ways to respond to customer enquiries. Maybe, you’re trying to reach your existing customers and encourage them to buy from you more often. Or maybe, you’re looking to grow your sales by boosting traffic on your site and finding new leads.
These are some good examples of goals that social media can help you achieve. To define your exact goals, you must keep some key things in mind:
- Secure an appropriate budget for social media campaigns
- Set specific, realistic, and achievable goals
- Set a deadline
2. Research and find your target audience
How to find the right customers for your products and services? You should know who your market is, who your audience is and what their pains and problems are. And then you can have some ideas of how you’re going to market to those people.
Without knowing your ideal audience, your marketing strategy could go in vain.
Your social media strategy should be focused on your target market. Everything from social media platforms you’re going to use and content you’re going to publish should be aimed at influencing and persuading your specific business audience.
Finding out the right audience is one of the most challenging tasks but once you know them, you can effectively connect and attract them to your brand.
3. Choose the right social media platforms
With hundreds of social media outlets, it can sometimes be staggering to determine the right platforms that best suit your business needs. It’s not a good idea to use all of them as not all platforms are necessarily suitable for your brand reputation, it could actually turn up your audience and negatively impact your brand.
Try figuring out the platforms preferred by your targeted demographics. It can be Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or Snapchat. You should know which platform is the best for delivering your message and aligns with your marketing goals.
You have already distinguished your marketing objectives. Now if you intend to have a respectable customer service then Facebook and Twitter are ideal platforms. Instagram & Pinterest are excellent if your business has a lot of visual content to share.
If you want to connect with other businesses and generate B2B leads then LinkedIn can be a good source. You may use multiple platforms for attaining different marketing goals.
4. Create different strategy for each platform
Keep in mind; you can’t treat each social media platform equally. You need to have a specific strategy for each platform. You may ask a few questions to yourself to make this process easy.
- Who are you trying to reach?
- What platforms do they use?
- What types of posts work best to those specific platforms?
- Do I have valuable content to share?
Each platform has its own capabilities and features to engage audience. You don’t need to be on every platform. If you’re having confusions answering these questions, you must reconsider why you’re investing time there. Getting the answers of these questions will help you create strategy for each platform that works best for your marketing goals.
5. Build a connection with target audience
Building a perfect game plan to connect and engage with your target audience is essential. There many apt digital marketers who use different tactics to boost the impact of their social media strategy. For example, some of them use personality quizzes to get more comments and reactions on their social media posts.
Some of the popular brands like Airbnb and Old Spice frequently leverage Twitter Polls for driving audience engagement and boosting brand reach.
Social media contests are other good examples of how you can use it to increase online visibility, develop connections and achieve business goals without compromising with the brand reputation.
6. Create a winning content strategy
This is probably the most challenging task. Creating a compelling content strategy is the main task because the result of your campaign depends on the quality of content. It requires a good understanding your audience, the platforms you’re going to use and your business objectives to create high-converting social media content.
Every piece of content you share should be meaningful and give value to the users. There is no point in posting images and text on Facebook or Instagram if they are not accountable for measurable likes, comments or shares.
Remember, every social media platform vary in terms of content type. Here are some examples:
Facebook: Facebook has around 1.73 billion daily active users in 2020. You can create a business page and group on Facebook and share different formats of content to connect with your ideal audience.
Instagram: A perfect platform if your audience is interested in seeing more visually appealing content in their feeds. You can share engaging short videos, multi-image posts and moving images to improve engagement with your brand.
LinkedIn: A popular business-to-business social network where you can publish blog posts, industrial news and how-to posts to engage professional audience and drive high-quality traffic to your parent website.
To devise a perfect content strategy for social media, you must have some copywriting prowess. Make sure your content directly addresses your target audience and it is clear & precise.
7. Social media content calendar
Before you begin to publish your content randomly on any day and time, it’s better to understand the importance of the right timing for the right post. Using a content calendar can give you a huge advantage. You should make a list of upcoming events, festivals and special days.
It’s better to use digital content scheduling tools like Buffer or Hootsuite to organise and publish content timely. There are many benefits of using these tools such as they enable you to stay consistent by scheduling posts for the upcoming week or month and uploading posts on weekends and outside of business hours.
8. Save time using social media tools
Regular content sharing is imperative to stay on top of mind of your potential customers. Many businesses hardly manage to spare some time out of their regular business operations to focus on social media posts.
While using multiple platforms, it becomes even difficult to keep up with the commitment. When you try to manually schedule your posts for different social media sites, it takes a lot of your valuable time.
However, when you use social media management tools or software, they enable you to eliminate all the tedious work. They automate most of the activities like scheduling posts for multiple social media channels, keeping track of all conversations and scheduling posts ahead of time.
While pre-scheduling posts can save time, you also need to supplement that with on-the-fly posts about where you are, who you are meeting with, big insights, and breaking news.
9. Avoid salesy approach, build trust
“Sales is not about selling anymore, but building trust and educating.” – Siva Devaki
Even if you’re really good at sales pitching, it’s better to avoid doing it on social media. Posting too many promotions can detriment your social media reputation and people will start ignoring even if you post something really valuable.
Establishing emotional connections and building trust is more important. Use social media platforms to demonstrate to your audience that your brand is beneficial and meaningful to their lives.
You may employ your storytelling skills to work to build an emotional attachment with your audience. Identify your competitors, what they’re sharing, and what lacks in their content. Be proactive in adopting new ideas to inspire consumer trust.
10. Keep an eye on trending topics
All in all, social media is a dynamic marketing platform. The future of your business can be dramatically changed in a matter of hours if you take advantage of a highly trending topic positively and effectively.
Trends can differ on each platform. You need to keep eye on each emerging topic to optimise your strategy and messaging accordingly.
However, you need to be cautious while using any trending topic on the internet. Avoid making posts on topics that are irrelevant to your brand’s values as it may easily alienate your followers. You never need to create a particular type of content just because others did so because it may extensively impact your brand’s reputation.
You may subscribe or follow some popular websites that consistently publish valuable content relevant to your industry. This will help grasp some new ideas and inspiration for the original content you will be producing for your brand.
11. Humanise your brand
We have immersed so much in technology and innovations that sometimes we underrate the importance of human connection. Humanising your brand means to go beyond the digital screens and demonstrate your company’s culture, values and people who are behind your brand.
It is about being transparent and real to your audience. Your social media followers don’t want to see ads and promotions very frequently. You may make weekly or monthly plan where your employees and team squeeze in to share fun activities with your audience.
12. Use more video content
Social media marketing is probably impossible without incorporating videos and visual content. Remember, you’re a stranger to your audience unless they know something about your brand. Taking advantage of video content is no more a need but necessity.
You should involve a good amount of video content in your social media strategy – Facebook Lives, Instagram Stories, Explainer Videos, Animated GIFs and others.
13. Interact with your audience
Social media users seek genuine interactions with the brands they follow. So along with mind-blowing graphics, images, and high-quality video content, make sure you’re engaging audience on each platform you’re using.
Respond to each query you receive in comments or inside the inbox. Tag potential customers in your posts but make sure you’re complimenting them instead of interfering.
If other users tag you in their posts or appreciate your services or products, make sure you’re prompt in replying to all of them. This will add more value to your brand and drive happy customer experience.
14. Optimise your strategy
What everyone else is doing isn’t always ideal to turn to and embrace. To get the best results out of your social media marketing efforts, it’s important that you optimise your content and strategy frequently to keep it intriguing to your audience. When you do so, you
- Strengthen your brand
- Generate quality leads
- Get more visibility online
- Get higher ROI
- Connect with your audience effectively.
To keep your social media campaigns profitable, it’s important that your content is attracting new leads and appointments.
15. Keep an eye on all metrics & analytics
Social media marketing might seem like a fancy game but it sometimes tests your analytical and critical thinking.
Monitoring what posts are working and what isn’t is crucial for your social media success. You should interpret all the analytics to understand what your audience actually demands. Here are five key social media metrics you should keep an eye on:
- Audience reach (number of people who come across your content)
- Engagement (number of likes, comments, shares, clicks, etc.)
- Acquisition
- Conversions
- Click-through rate
As suggested earlier, you may utilise social media tools to consistently track your social media analytics. This will help you evaluate your marketing strategy and plan for better outcomes.