Social medias are one of the best ways to market your business. If you were trying to make a social media marketing campaign a few years ago, it would be pretty easy. The only necessary condition was to have a social media marketing account up and running.
In today's marketing world, things have changed drastically. The competition has become huge, and in order to get noticed, a great social media marketing campaign is an absolute must. Recent studies have shown that 40% of millennials say that they engage with a particular brand on social networks, at least once a month.
If you are looking to improve your business, your strategy can't simply be to only exist on social media marketing platforms. Your brand needs to be completely invested on the social medias, you need to inform your potential customers and engage with them. Your goal should be showing your audience why your brand is the perfect choice for them. That's why social media marketing is a powerful tool that is a necessity in developing and improving your business.
Social media marketing might sound like a complex term, but don't be afraid. With the help of our professional team, we will try to provide your business with all of the right steps that you need to take in order to make a successful social media marketing strategy.
Here are some of the crucial steps that your business needs, when it comes to social media marketing. We will try to explain how each of these steps influences your business and give you enough information to act on it. If you are a total beginner on marketing and SEO, we recommended checking out this article.
Social Media Marketing Goals
You have taken a huge step forward and decided to start a social media marketing campaign. The next thing that we need to do, is to set our goals. This step shouldn't be overlooked, in order to get the right results, you need to clearly define what are your goals and expectations.
Social media marketing isn't a magic wand that will solve all of your problems with a simple swing. You should start with setting realistic goals that can be achieved with hard work and dedication. Expecting to gain 1 million new followers on Instagram isn't really a realistic goal. If you start with a goal that can never be attained, you are setting your business for a defeating blow.
The approach that you should take is to set a list of smaller and simpler goals. This way, you are more likely to stick to the correct plan and continue developing your social media marketing strategy without getting discouraged. Start by choosing a few of the social media channels on which your business is currently doing best. Simplicity can bring amazing results - don't try to focus on too many things or to try to be on every single social media platform.
Studies have shown that people who document their social media goals have a higher chance of success. Try to define your current social media marketing goals as clear as possible, and document them. This way, you can carefully monitor your progress and see realistic results, caused by your actions. The best kind of motivation is when you have the definitive information that your business is moving in the right direction, because you made a solid social media strategy.
Researching Your Audience
Information is power, and when it comes to social media marketing, this couldn't be more true. In today's time of technology and innovation, almost everyone has a social media account. That's the main reason why you need to understand your audience better.
Who buys your products? What are the age groups of your customers? What groups of customers are the toughest ones to sell your products to? Which of your customers are the most engaging? This critical information will make all the difference in your social marketing campaign.
If you know what your main strengths and problems are, the plan of actions writes itself. In order to acquire this information, you need a specific demographics analysis of your best social channels. This will pin-point the exact areas of your social media accounts that you need to work on.
Interpreting the information
While we are able to acquire all of the information about your current social media success, does it really tell us the whole story? General metrics, like number of followers and like count are always a valuable measure, but is that all you need?
These are not the only metrics that matter, when it comes to social media marketing campaign. A lot of people often get lost in tracking likes and followers, and they forget to focus on other important things.
Engagement metrics are a great way to analyze your social media marketing success, but your business needs more. Having a large audience and an amazing content is crucial, but you need to focus on other metrics that you should pursue further.
Important Metrics
- Post Reach: Post reach tells us the exact number of unique users who saw your post. How are users seeing your content on social medias? Are you reaching enough of your potential customers? Do they have the ability to actually see your posts and content?
- Content Clicks: This is the total amount of clicks on any of your content. This will give us a valuable information on how your users navigate through your business's marketing funnel. It will also help us to better understand why are users clicking on your content, and what are their motives in engaging and buying your products.
- User Engagement: This represents the ratio between the number of social interactions and the number of impressions that your particular content has. This gives us a further insight on how many people are interacting, compared to all of the people that saw your content. Understanding what motivates your customers to interact is crucial in our future campaigns.
- Hashtag performance: What are the hashtags that you are using the most? Which hashtags are the most successful ones? Which of them aren't doing so good? These are all of the questions that will be answered in the hashtag performance metric.
- Sentiment: This section shows us how users react to your particular content. Are your users liking your recent campaign? Did they find it offensive, for some reason? What exact sentiment are your customers associating with the social media marketing campaign that you are currently running? It's always a good thing to know your followers better, and to hear their opinions and suggestions.
Researching Your Social Competitors
Before you start making an amazing content that suits your customers, you should investigate your competitors. It's a good thing to do this step before creating your own content - it will give you a better insight on what approach to take.
This doesn't mean that you should blindly copy your competitors marketing campaign, you should just research it. This will give you the necessary information on how to grow and learn from their successful campaigns, as well as failed ones.
Finding out who is your biggest competitor shouldn't be too hard - you can find that easily with few simple Google searches. After you've done that, focus on researching their social media marketing campaigns. Don't try to only research their campaigns that are successful - the best way to learn something is through mistakes. Those mistakes don't have to be yours, you are still able to learn a lot from them and avoid bad marketing tactics.
Build Amazing Content and Engage With Your Audience
Your social media marketing campaign won't have much success if you don't have a great content. That's the simple truth, your customers are there because of your brand - they want to see some amazing content.
It's necessary for your brand to find that perfect balance between promotional content and targeted content. Most of the people will unfollow a brand if they see that they are spamming promotional content. We understand that promotional content is a necessity in order to grow your business, just don't force it.
Having a proper content theme for your business can have a crucial effect. You don't want your social media marketing campaign to look like it was done by a small child with crayons. You need to have an exact theme that your campaigns will follow, and your new content needs to fit in that theme perfectly. This will leave a colorful and consistent impression on your customers - they will be amazed to see each one of your new articles.
Can Anyone Do This?
The answer to this questions is yes, anyone can do their own social marketing campaign. There is one small trick though, it will take a lot of planning, effort and hard work. If you are ready to invest yourself completely in research, content creation and even more research, this is an achievable goal. You will have to learn a lot of valuable things and tricks, you will have to adapt and solve any problems that you might stumble upon.
If you are not ready to start this challenge, you should contact us and get this job done in a timely manner. Our team of professionals would be happy to work with you and release you of the burden of starting your social media marketing campaign from scratch. We are certain that we can achieve great results with your guidance in every step of the way.