How to Market on Social Media - Marketing Strategy

Most business owners struggle to keep up to date with the latest tips on how to market on social media. Are you guilty of this?

If so, I’m sure you will want to get the best results from your social media marketing – right?

In 2014, over 80% of business executives identified social media as an integral part of their business. Recent adjustments to Facebook algorithms have reduced the audience size for non-paying business pages (with at least 500,000 “Likes”) from 16% in 2012. Facebook algorithms have reduced the audience size for non-paying business pages (with at least 500,000 “Likes”) from 16% in 2012 to 2% in February 2014.

Brands are under tremendous pressure with marketing on social media. Many brands face an increasing decline in organic post reach and engagement on various social media sites.

Brands that cannot afford to pay a social media platform to boost their posts or social media profiles to reach their target audience on the social web are being forced to abandon the communities they have worked so hard to grow over the years.

The proper use of social media can help you discover the best ways to reach the right people in your target audience. Click To Tweet

Also, users readily unfollow a brand’s social media account they deem overly promotional. They also unfollow brands that share too much irrelevant content. So marketers struggle to consistently create quality content wherever they have a social media presence.

But it’s not all doom and gloom for brands with social media marketing.

Through their social media analytics, business retailers have seen a 133% increase in their revenues from social media marketing.

Events that sell tickets directly on Facebook drive 2X more free registrations and 20% more purchased ticket sales on average than events that redirect to a ticketing page.

In fact, according to these social media metrics from MarketingSherpa, 95% of online adults aged 18 to 34 are likely to follow a brand on social networking websites.

Table of Contents

What is Social Media Marketing?

Social media marketing comprises activities like posting text, photos and video updates and other forms of content that drive audience engagement. It also involves a paid advertisement to reach their target social media user.

As a marketing consultant, I always advise clients to consider their business goals before starting any marketing campaign.

Social Media Marketing Goals

For your social media efforts on a social media platform to yield positive results, you need to have a social media strategy. The following are the key questions you need to answer to identify your goals, engage audiences, and optimise your results:

Is it your goal to increase your website traffic?
Are you trying to build conversations with your target market?
Do you want to raise your brand awareness?
Are you trying to create a brand identity and positive brand association?
Is it your goal to improve communication and interaction with your key target audiences?

Social media marketing can help with any of the things mentioned above.

Rather than tracking all these goals from the same social channel.

A successful social media marketing campaign that rests on a solid marketing strategy will help your brand tackle its goals with a sense of purpose.

Identify clear goals with benchmarks that allow you to determine whether your social content effort is paying off.

How to Create a Social Media Marketing Strategy

Use the goals you’ve identified above in crafting your social media mission statement and social strategy.

When creating a social media strategy, you must determine your buyer personas, loyal customers and audience. So you can target their needs and interests.

You can then use the data you collect and analyse on your target audience to create relevant content or adjust your campaign to suit your customer base.

To do this, think about the average active user on social media, i.e. the people you’re trying to reach, why you are trying to reach them and how you would classify them as a group.

The insights you collect from your marketing tools or social media management tools, and blogging platforms can also provide a ton of valuable information about:

who your followers are on the social media network
where they live
what languages do they speak
And how they interact with your brand on social.

These insights allow you to refine your social posts and strategy and better target your social ads.

Social Media Advertising

As a business owner, you already know marketing costs, whether traditional marketing or digital marketing.

These days, there is no successful social media campaign that will not include paid advertising or social advertising.

A successful marketing campaign must include user-generated content, paid advertising, search advertising, search engine optimization or social advertising.

But even if you make paid ads on social media a significant part of your strategy, you still find it cost-effective compared with other traditional forms of marketing.

Depending on your goals and your campaign, it is inexpensive to run paid ads on Facebook, Instagram and other social accounts.

Therefore, you need to consider all these when creating your marketing budget. No matter how small your budget for internet marketing is, you can still impact your marketing efforts on these social channels to reach your current or potential customers and convert new leads.

Influencer Marketing

When planning a campaign strategy for your brand, you need to audit your social media followers to identify your key influencers. These are essential members of your online community.

Learn to listen to these key audience members because they can provide valuable information about your target audience.

Influencer marketing is not only about getting celebrities to mention your brand to their followers. Vital social influencers can get you better results within your existing community of followers.

When you network with your social influencers, you open the door to other opportunities. It is what influencer marketing is all about. You need to identify them and build a good rapport with them. It will help you avoid scams by so-called influencers.

Ninety per cent of your content should be sharing other people's content, and 10 per cent should be promotional. Click To Tweet

Getting social shares or mentions from influencers on your preferred marketing channel or at a social event will help to boost your brand image and attract potential customers.

Guide on How to Use Social Media for Marketing

With many companies planning to integrate further or begin integrating social media data into marketing campaigns, more and more companies recognise the value of social media.

So if you’ve got someone on your team as your blogger or social media manager, you can ask them to produce video content, live video or post content to your company page.

Regarding marketing on social media, according to FastCompany, the general rule of thumb is 90/10: 90% of your content should be sharing other people’s content, and 10% should be promotional.

As a marketing consultant, I tell my clients to go with the 80-20 rule: where 80% of your content informs, educates or entertains your target audience while the rest 20% is used to promote your brand.

Whichever strategy you choose, the most important thing is to not go overboard with self-promotion.

How Can You Use Social Media to Market Your Business?

Below are some critical things you need to do to use social media for marketing your business.

Audit Your Current Social Presence

Get access to all your accounts on various social media platforms. If an enthusiastic staff creates rouge accounts without authorisation, shut them down. Note the profiles that are active or dormant.

Create Your Ideal Social Media Customer Persona

Document who your perfect customer is and what social networking site they hang out on. Let your customer persona be as detailed as possible.

Don’t skimp on the demographics data. Let it be as detailed as possible. Include their:

age,
location,
job titles,
income levels
type of mobile device they use, etc.

Use your Facebook Insights, Twitter Analytics, Instagram Analytics and LinkedIn analytics data.

Please get to know your ideal customer’s pain points and how your product or service provides a solution to their pain points. Get to know if they prefer short-form content over long-form content.

Define Your Benchmarks

Target goals that tell you how to reach your desired destination with your campaigns. Define any interim steps needed to reach your planned goals.

Choose the Right Tools

To succeed in online marketing, you must use the right marketing tool to grow and manage your social following. Build your social media marketing stack. You can do remarkable things on social media using the right marketing tool.

You also need to realise that the marketing tool by itself is just a tool. It can’t do anything on its own. It is the skill of the person using it that matters. So get to know your tools inside out.

But, please be careful when selecting and using a marketing tool. These days a lot of social networks are clamping down on apps that could fringe on their user’s privacy or that could spread fake news.

Create or Curate Content

Now that you’ve known your ideal customer’s pain points, create or curate social media content that will help your customers and promote your product or service on the social platform. Decide the content you will use, such as blog posts, visual content (infographic, video content) and audio content based on the social platform.

Be Personable and Relatable

It is all about building relationships. Your brand has a personality you should display through your business profile.

According to an App Institute article, when you have to tweet about the business proper, keep the spotlight on customers and topical subjects. For instance, advertising 10% off everything for a day won’t be as effective as 10% off a specific item that only Twitter followers have access to.

If someone on your team is comfortable in front of a camera, get the person to create videos for YouTube. That person can be the face of your brand for social marketing. Or, if the person is more comfortable with writing, you can get them to guest post on other relevant blogs in your industry.

Get as many members of your team as possible to create a piece of content for each or several posts in advance. Having a wide variety of content might help in improving your conversion rate.

But, if you don’t have any team members comfortable on social media yet discover that your target audience is on Twitter or Instagram, you must outsource your social media marketing.

How to Use Social Media as a Market Research Tool

According to this article in SocialMediaToday, a 2011 report by Nielson on the state of social media claims that approximately 80% of people with Internet access utilise social media.

So, as a business owner, you need to understand that using it in your business is not for ‘play’. Instead, it is an essential tool for lead generation, market research, data mining, and news source.

The proper use of social media can help you discover the best ways to reach the right people in your target audience.

Conclusion

As you have seen from the above, your marketing is not complete without social marketing. Gone are the days of treating different aspects of marketing in silos.

Nowadays, you have to think of digital marketing as integrated marketing campaigns, integrating social marketing, content marketing, influencer marketing and search marketing.

Would you like to discuss this further? Schedule a meeting with me. I will be glad to help.

Do You Have Any Questions?

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