Social media marketing is hugely popular.
The reason?
Social media has unbeatable reach and penetration. Its global penetration rate is 49% which means you can reach nearly half of the world’s population if you are active on social media.
To be exact, you can put your brand in front of 3.48 billion users who are social for almost 2 hours 24 minutes daily.
If social media marketing is so effective, why do 28% of marketers find it hard to get buy-in from their CEOs to invest in it?
Because marketing on social media is not a cakewalk. Even seasoned marketers find it challenging to drive the desired results, especially if their marketing strategy is faulty.
If you’re not satisfied with your social media marketing return on investment (ROI), this post is for you.
You may be committing one or more of the six mistakes that I’ve covered in this post. If that’s the case, follow the tips I’ve mentioned and watch your ROI soar.
Let’s get started…
6 Tips to Create a Super-Effective Social Media Marketing Strategy
I’m assuming that you have a basic social media marketing strategy in place. So, you must have decided on the social sites best suited for your brand and prepared engaging content
Do you think that’s enough to give you the desired returns?
Obviously not.
Those are just the basics. There are several aspects that you might have missed in your social media marketing strategy. And they can drastically affect your social ROI.
Take a close look at your social media marketing strategy. If you find it lacking in any of the following areas, check out my expert tips and fine-tune your strategy.
Tip #1: Define Your Marketing Goals
Successful #marketing starts with clearly-defined goals. Click To Tweet ^^^That’s a given, right?You’d be surprised how many social media marketers get this wrong. If you don’t have clarity about what you hope to achieve through social media marketing, you need to back-track a bit.
Go back to the drawing board and identify which of the following goal(s) matter to you:
- Boost brand awareness
- Manage your brand’s reputation
- Build an engaged social community
- Drive traffic to your website or store
- Increase sales
- Draw customer/market insights
Knowing your marketing goals is not enough. You also need to make them binding and measurable.
I suggest you create SMART goals which means they need to be specific, measurable, attainable, real-time, and timely.
Keep your goals in view all the time and measure your campaign performance against them.
Tip #2: Leverage Influencer Marketing
Do you have a spot reserved for influencers in your social media marketing? If not, you need to rethink your strategy.
Collaborating with influencers on social media has multiple benefits. They can increase your brand awareness, customer trust and engagement, and sales. That’s why two-thirds of marketers increased their influencer marketing budgets in 2019.
Are you behind the curve?
Don’t worry. Now is a good time to start working with influencers. Select influencers that match your niche, audience demographics, and brand values.
It can be a tough task to manually go through hundreds of influencer profiles to check the brand affiliations and content quality of each influencer. You will also need to verify their engagement rates and other credentials.
That’s where tools for influencer marketing come into play. They can help you with influencer discovery, relationship and campaign management, and measurement of influencer ROI.
So, team up with the right influencers and spread the word about your brand on social media.
Tip #3: Prioritise Visual Content
Humans are hard-wired for visuals. 65% of us retain and recall images, GIFs, infographics, videos better than textual posts. Add more visual elements to your social media content to garner more engagement.
There’s one more benefit of adding visuals to your content mix. It is an effective customer experience (CX) strategy. If you replace a part of your text-heavy content with concise and informative visuals, your audience will be more likely to engage with it.
Why, you ask?
A Walker study revealed that 90% of customers want their interactions with brands to be pleasant and glitch-free.
Still not convinced?
Buffer surveyed 1,500 marketers to find what they prioritised when posting to social media channels. Here’s what they found:
Image via Buffer
Clearly, visuals make a difference. But what kind of visuals can make people sit up and notice your feed?
A lot depends on the platform you are targeting. Long-form videos are the clear winner on YouTube while static images work well on Instagram.
Videos, in general, have a high success rate on social media. They provide a multi-dimensional experience that creates a long-lasting impression on viewers.
Add a dose of videos to your social content to grab eyeballs and keep viewers engaged.
Tip #4: Don’t Stress Over Algorithm Shifts
Don’t go into a frenzy and reshuffle your strategy every time a platform updates its algorithms. If your content is useful and high-quality, chances are that you won’t be massively impacted by the change.
However, if you’re using black hat techniques to catch attention, you have reason to worry.
For instance, YouTube used to rank videos based on their views (before 2012). People tried to crack the algorithm by creating clickbait headlines, which led to YouTube changing its algorithm.
The bottom line?
Cater to the tastes of your audiences and stay on the right side of the platform’s guidelines.
Tip #5: Be Consistent
Social media audiences expect brands to maintain consistency across channels. They trust brands with a reliable posting schedule and consistent messaging.
Identify your #brand personality and create #content that matches it. Create a branding style guide that dictates every element of your visual #branding.Click To Tweet You can create a content calendar for each platform to avoid a content crisis. Then, decide on a reasonable frequency and posting schedule.Bear in mind that posting regularly can create a top of mind effect on viewers that can help you beat the competition. But scheduling and posting on multiple platforms can be a pain.
Social media management platforms can really help with this. They line up your content in advance and post it automatically to the target platforms so that you never miss a deadline.
Tip #6: Invest in Paid Campaigns
There are many reasons to invest in social advertising. Ads give you targeted reach and measurable returns.
If you’re new to social advertising, start modestly and cap your bid in time.
Use the built-in ad-makers available on each target platform. Also, optimise your ads for mobile since mobile ad revenue will constitute 93% of the total digital ad revenue in 2020.
Wrapping Up
Social media is a fast-evolving space. Your social media marketing strategy also needs to be on-trend and dynamic.
The tips mentioned in this post can help you improve your social game now and prepare you for the future.
Do you need any more help with social media marketing? Write your questions in the comments. I’m always happy to help.
Want more marketing strategies, tips and advise? Check out one of our most popular ever digital marketing guides:
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