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There was a time when doing social media marketing was easy. You could create a Facebook page post some of your content and bam! Just like that, your social media marketing strategy would get you noticed in a short while.
Well, things are not that easy anymore and instead of reminiscing about the “good old days”, we will give you actionable tips that will gain you followers on whatever social media platform your brand maintains a presence and hopefully someday you can become an influencer of Kylie Jenner proportions. A guy is allowed to dream, right?
Well, even if you do not become that big of a force at least you can still leave a mark in your niche and that is what this article will teach you how to do.
Map Out Your Social Media Marketing Goals
The first thing you will need to have is a clear objective of what your marketing strategy should achieve. Like all good things, a strong strategy will take time to implement. We all have lofty goals but when creating your strategy, you should remain grounded and formulate a plan whose goals are achievable. For instance, you can’t expect to win over 1 million followers on Twitter or Instagram – unless you’re willing to bare it all like a Kardashian I know but even then that would be a stretch.
Experience remains the best teacher and if you do not have any experience of your own to learn from perhaps you should emulate another person’s success story and draw from their inspiration. You will also need to document your objectives and use them as benchmarks to motivate you to keep going even when it’s tough.
In case you are having a hard time coming up with goals that you need to achieve in your marketing, here is a short list you can look at:
- Improve ROI
After putting in all the hard work it’s only fair that you get a healthy return on your investment whether it’s the time you or others have spent coming up with creatives or the amount of money you’ve spent advertising your brand.
- Create or Enhance Brand Awareness
Most people make the mistake of bombarding their audience with promotional messages that have proven to turn people off. That should not be you. Instead you need to focus on creating content that will provide the people you know with useful information that will improve their experiences. For instance, you could demonstrate a DIY project that your audience would find helpful.
If you make your audience the focus of your information, your followers will come to appreciate you and your brand will grow.
Research Your Audience
Even though you might have thousands of fans on Facebook, they might not be engaging with you on that particular platform. Even if you are just starting out and do not yet have followers, you can do a little bit of research and discover where there is more audience engagement. For instance, an audience interested in modeling might be on Facebook but mostly interacts on Instagram. By understanding your demographics, you will only focus your energy on reaching them on their platform of choice hence your strategy will be more efficient.
Demographics, in general, vary from one social media platform to another. See the stats below:
| Social Media Channel | Most Popular Gender | Most Popular Age Bracket |
| Snapchat | Men | 18 -29 |
| Men | 18 -29 | |
| Women | 18 – 29 | |
| Women | 18 -29 | |
| Women | 18 -29 |
Determine What Your Most Important Metrics Are
Social media channels offer various metrics that you can use to measure your goals. For instance, Facebook has likes, shares etc. You need to figure out which metric is most important for your social media marketing strategy.
If you want to measure how popular your brand is, the number of likes you have on your Facebook page can give you a good idea.
Thankfully, you can rely on other metrics to paint a true picture of where your brand stands with the masses.
I’m talking about engagement metrics such as clicks, your post’s reach, hashtag performance, paid and organic likes, sentiment, and engagement. Engagement is calculated as the sum number of social interactions divided by the number of impressions.
Sentiment is a measure of how your audience reacted to your content. Did they like it or was it too offensive for their tastes?
Competitive Analysis
Content is king, but to create great content you need to have the right ideas. I always advocate for a comprehensive competitive research. Look at what your competition is doing. What kind of content are they creating? What sets the content apart?
You need to understand that the reason why your competitors keep doing the same thing repeatedly is that they have proven that it works.
Therefore, there is no need for you to reinvent the wheel. While I do not recommend that you copy and paste their methodology, I suggest that you thoroughly analyze it and customize their strategy to fit the message of your brand.
Not all of your competition is active on social media so you will need to filter those ones out. Use a tool like Sprout’s social media tool to track your competitor’s activity on specific social media channels.
After going through your competitor’s activity on social media, you will be in a much better position to understand what your audience is interested in.
Create Engaging Content
The creation of content is a process that cannot be rushed. You have to carefully plan what kind of content you’ll create as well as how you’ll present it, that is, blog post, video, infographic etc.
The most effective way to do it is by making content that resonates with your blog identity. The best kind of content is the one that finds a balance between usefulness and the right amount of promotion.
Studies by Sprout Social show that 46% of people are likely to unfollow a brand if there is excessive promotion while 41% would unfollow a brand if irrelevant information was shared.
According to data published on Forbes, nearly 90% of shoppers believe that video influences their buying decision. While 37% of people are estimated to watch a video from beginning to end according to Hubspot.
Interact With Your Audience
Social media is called so because its primary purpose is to facilitate conversations between people. It would be strange if you never interacted with your audience. You need to ensure that engagement and conversation opportunities are not left unattended to.
Chances are your audience will like you more if you are usually available to talk with them. Facebook encourages this, and has a little icon on Facebook fan pages that indicates how long it takes before a business responds.
According to a study conducted by Sprout Social, brands take an average of 10 hours to respond, however consumers expect the average response time to be within 4 hours
These kinds of metrics are an indicator to your audience of how responsive you are and gives your brand credibility.
To encourage interaction between you and your audience, you should post your content during times of the day when your audience is available to engage.
Do you need help with your social media marketing? Get in touch with us.