A successful social media marketing is exactly what you need for your business to grow.
Social media marketing can be a dynamic powerhouse that solidifies branding, creates quality leads, and drives sales. Or, it can be a big time-wasting, task-oriented dud. The key is to know how to strategically create, carry out, and measure the overall plan.
Businesses trying to achieve successful social media marketing must overcome several common challenges. Carving out enough time, creating high-performing content, and properly measuring the resulting metrics are all aspects that, if handled incorrectly, can tank the plan and leave them with a big goose egg as the outcome.
Don’t do that!
With some planning, companies are more likely to reach and exceed the payoff that got them excited about social media marketing in the first place.
Lucky for you, we have the step-by-step plan laid out.
Follow these 10 easy tips to rock your social media marketing strategy and enjoy 10X return on investment.
1. Identify Your Goals
It’s a smart business practice to start with goal setting before all new plans, and social media marketing’s no different. After all, you can be the best bicycle salesperson in the state, but still fail if you are supposed to be selling ice cream.
Use the SMART goal setting strategy to create the foundation for successful social media marketing.
Once companies set the goal, which is basically the “why”, they need to decide on the “who”.
2. Identify Your Audience
Your message won’t be effective unless its specifically designed for who you are trying to target. Developing a relevant buyer persona is essential for successful social media marketing. Three pieces of information offer insight into pinpointing your audience.
Now let’s answer “where”.
3. Select the Best Platforms
It’s usually a mistake to try to cultivate followers on half a dozen or more social media channels. The person managing the social media efforts gets overwhelmed, off track, and the results end up being puny.
Facebook is the social media giant, of course. LinkedIn is also great for businesses to have a presence. But neither may be the one companies should focus on.
Successful social media marketing takes chunks of time to manage. It’s far better to choose one or two channels and really invest in them than five or six channels and spread the message to thin.
4. Employ a Qualified Manager
It takes unique qualities to be a savvy social media manager. One of the mistakes companies frequently make is to choose the person who has the lightest schedule or the cheapest per hour rate with no regard for whether or not they are “built” for the job.
5. Deliver Consistently
An outstanding social media initiative is one that is nurtured constantly. Throwing up a blog here and a picture there won’t build a prosperous marketing strategy.
6. Woo Influencers
Did you know that almost 50% of buyers seek influencer reviews when looking out for a product to buy? That’s how big the influencers’ recommendations are. Why? Well, probably because they trust these influencers. These people have already established their credibility thus their recommendations matter to most users.
So find out who the experts are about the product or service you sell. The ones with a large following on social media are influencers.
Additional tip: For Instagram, if you want to increase your reach when collaborating with influencers, use Instagram Stories. This has been voted as the 2nd most popular format when it comes to influencer Instagram marketing. It actually reaches 500 million users every day and is proven to be 15 times faster compared to other kinds of feed.
7. Grow Your Audience
The more eyes that see your message, the more results you enjoy. The social media manager needs to work on increasing followers across all the social media channels deemed relevant for the product or service.
8. Engage Your Audience
For social media marketing to be successful, companies need to find ways to increase engagement in the followers they have and the ones they want.
9. Measure Your Results
Close the loop by holding the results up to the goals you set and see how they compare. Otherwise, you won’t have any idea which strategies are paying off and which ones crashed.
10. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
Metrics show you where you have been, and they also map out where you need to go. Companies need to take the metrics they gather and use them to massage their message. Does one type of content create more engagement? Is there a pattern of posts gaining more attention on certain days, or particular times of day? Does the content do better across one platform over another? Use this data to edit and hone the strategy. You will see even greater results from social media marketing efforts.
Successful social media marketing poses a variety of challenges to businesses, and it’s easy to take the wrong turn and end up with less-than-thrilling results. It’s also common to start out excited, and get burned out and lose commitment in the middle of your efforts.
Stay with it! Stay focused on these 10 tips and your company will be stunned at the amount of followers you will garner, the website traffic you will boost, and the new leads you will enjoy. 10X the ROI for your efforts is just the beginning of the results companies can reap when they do social media marketing right.
