Social media marketing is still a beast that not everybody knows how to handle, however, here at Outsource2Us we are working hard to show you how to be effective and efficient with your social media marketing strategy.
Social media is a great place to advertise your business effectively and efficiently as it reaches millions of people at all times and fosters strong communications and customer rapport. Below are our 7 Tips for Social Media Marketing Success.
1. Set your Goals
The first step in creating an engaging and effective social media marketing strategy is to plan, despite the casual nature of social media, the importance of forward-planning is underplayed by many. One key factor of this plan is setting business goals, each individual business will have different goals, from audience engagement to increasing your views on all platforms. After these goals are set in stone, the next step is to create this strategy.
2. Strategy and Communication
After having set your goals for the foreseeable future, the next step is to understand how these goals can be met and what the most effective way to reach them is. For goals that involve user engagement, one avenue to investigate would be the rate in which you and your business interact with these clients; do you engage in online communication with your customers? How often do you check your business Facebook/Instagram messages? How quickly are you responded to e-mails? Ensuring your communication with your clients and customers are always at the foreground will be positive towards your engagement with the online world.
Another aspect of that communication is the engagement with your content. On social media, you can create content that prompts your customers to engage with you. Creating truly engaging content that includes the customers is seen as one of the most difficult aspects of social media marketing, yet also one of the most lucrative.
3. Actively Listening
Most advice on social media marketing strategies advises to start by listening to your conversations. We prefer the term coined by Brian Solis in his book Engage of “Active Social Listening” since this shows the need for a feedback cycle within social media marketing. This listening will give you and your business an understanding of what people are saying about your business, good or bad.
It may seem odd at first but, look for the negative reviews and complaints. The areas in which you can improve can only be found in the areas in which you are lacking or falling short if your clients are posting on Facebook about your business’s slow response time, then one goal should be for increasing these times.
4. Streamline Content
We’ve noticed in our research online that encouraging engagement and participation are one of the biggest challenges to social media marketing. Simply posting more often or with a schedule will not always be an instant fix and engage audiences. Ensuring the right content is being shown the to right people is a must in any business, online or off.
Streamlining your content to fit each demographic may take more time but targeting the correct target market and target audience will always bring more sales than attempting to target everyone. For example, if your business specialises in selling tiles, timber and carpet, you would not be targeting younger audiences, instead, you would focus your social media plan to incorporate middle-aged people who are renting or own their home.
5. Continuous Communications
In the social media era, a continuous communications strategy is necessary to engage your audience through the many channels available. Key issues here are defining the types of content value you offer through different social channels and the frequency. Integrating different digital channels including email marketing through a social media marketing hub is also a key issue here.
Your plan should also include a posting/e-mailing schedule. This timetable will both act as a way for you to keep track of what you are posting and where, and as a way to ensure you are not over-saturating your audience with constant posting.
6. Technical Affordances
Each social media platform such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have unique characteristics and audience needs that can differ from platform to platform. Differing these strategies will ensure that each platform has a fresh feeling whenever someone clicks that link.
Your Facebook followers could be very different to your Instagram followers which could also differ to your e-mail subscribers giving you a wide range of options to alter your social media pans to match the audience. Each webpage offers a new and unique technical affordance and features similar to Facebook’s Call to Action.
Furthermore, a constant, regulated stream of posts and updates will ensure that your business is always in the foreground of your follower’s minds and will guarantee you aren’t forgotten (that’s a bad thing!).
7. Social Media Optimisation
As we said above, it is important to post accordingly to your Social Media Sites and to your target demographics, but when planning your social media marketing strategy, it is very important to consider that there are many ways for you to post your content, be it a photo, video or just plain text. It is worth considering when using social media to not just show off your products but to engage in some casual content to gain more attention and draw more potential clients to your business. Posting content often and during peak times for social media, usage is a very important aspect of this, as this will maximise the likelihood of your marketing reaching the right people.
If you’re interested in more ways to improve your social media marketing and digital marketing consider checking out our blog Digital Marketing: What’s Involved And How To Stop Wasted Spend!
