How to Market on Social Media

Most business owners I know 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?
These days, brands are under tremendous pressure when it comes to marketing on social media. Many brands are facing an increasing decline in organic post reach and engagement.

Adjustments made to Facebook algorithms have reduced the size of the audience for non-paying business pages (that have at least 500,000 “Likes”) from 16% in 2012 down to 2% in February 2014.

In 2014, over 80% of business executives identified social media as an integral part of their business.

Brands that cannot afford to pay to boost their posts to reach their target audience are being forced to abandon the communities they have worked so hard in growing over the years.

Moreover, users unfollow brands that they deem to be overly promotional. Besides, users unfollow brands that share too much irrelevant content. Many marketers are struggling to create quality content with consistency.

But, it’s not all doom and gloom for brands.

Business retailers have seen 133% increases 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 MarketingSherpa, 95% of online adults ages 18 to 34 are likely to follow a brand on social media.

What is Social Media Marketing?

Social media marketing consists of activities like posting text, photos and video updates and other forms of content that drives audience engagement. It also involves a kind of paid advertisements.

As I always mention to my existing and prospective clients and on this blog before you start any marketing campaign, consider your business goals.

Social Media Marketing Goals and Strategy

These 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?
• 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 these goals mentioned above.

Rather than tracking all these goals from the same channel, you can try monitoring different objectives for different channels.

A successful social media marketing campaign rests on a solid 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 effort is paying off.

When creating a social media marketing campaign strategy, you need to determine who your buyer personas and audience are. So you can target their needs and interests.

The data you collect and analyse on your target audience can then be used to make changes to your campaign.

To do this, think about the people you’re trying to reach and why. And how you would classify them as a group.

The insights you collect from your analytics tool can also provide a ton of valuable information about:

• who your followers are
• where they live
• what languages they speak
• And how they interact with your brand on social.

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

Social Media Advertising

These days, no successful social media campaign that will not include paid advertising. Even if you decide to make paid ads on social media a significant part of your strategy, you will still find that it is cost-effective.

Depending on your goals and the scope of your campaign, it is inexpensive to run paid ads on  Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

No matter how small your budget is, you can still make an impact on these channels to reach 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 members of your audience – it can provide you with valuable information. When you look to your audience, you open the door to other opportunities as well. It is what influencer marketing is all about.

Influencer marketing is not only about getting celebrities to mention your brand to their followers. Within your existing community of followers, there are key influencers that can get you better results. You need to identify them and build a good rapport with them. It will help you in avoiding scams by so-called influencers.

When it comes to marketing on social media, according to this FastCompany article the general rule of thumb is 90/10: Ninety per cent of your content should be sharing other people’s content, and 10 per cent should be promotional.

I usually tell my existing and potential clients to go with the 80-20 rule: where 80 per cent of your content is meant to inform, educate or entertain your target audience while the rest 20 per cent is used to promote your brand.

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

Guide on How to Use Social Media for Marketing

According to this article, with 78 per cent of companies planning to integrate further or begin integrating social media data into marketing campaigns, more and more companies are recognising the value of social media.

How Can You Use Social Media to Market Your Business?

Audit Your Current Social Presence

Get access to all your accounts on the various social media platforms. If there are rouge accounts out there created by enthusiastic staff without authorisation, shut them down. Take note of the profiles that are active or dormant.

Create Your Ideal Social Media Customer Persona

Document who your perfect customer is and what social networks they hang out. 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 and income. Use data from your Facebook Insights, Twitter Analytics, Instagram Analytics and LinkedIn analytics.

Get to know your ideal customer’s pain points and how your product or service provides a solution to their pain points.

Define Your Benchmarks

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

Choose the Right Tools

Build your social media marketing stack. You can do remarkable things on social media if you use the right tools.

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

But, it would help if you were careful when selecting and using a tool. These days a lot of social networks are clamping down on apps that could fringe on their user’s privacy or that could be used to spread fake news.

Create or Curate Content

Now that you’ve known your ideal customer’s pain points create or curate content that will help your customers and at the same time, promote your product or service. Decide the type of content you will use, such as blog post, infographic, video and audio.

Be Personable and Relatable

It is all about building relationships. Your brand has a personality of its own, which you should display it.

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

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 when it comes to social marketing.

But, if you don’t have any team member who is comfortable on social media, yet you discover that your target audience is on Twitter or Instagram, then 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-percent of people with Internet access utilise social media.

So, as a business owner, what you need to understand is that using it in your business is not for ‘play’. Instead, it is essential for market research.

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

According to this article, social media is a source of honest consumer opinion: 80% of social media posts are about ourselves, and those opinions and beliefs-expressed individually and within a community-are not interrupted or biased by participation in a formal study or company-run focus group.

Conclusion

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

These days you have to be thinking of integrated marketing campaigns whereby you consider integrating social marketing, content marketing, influencer marketing and search marketing.

Would you like to discuss this further? Schedule a meeting with me.

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