Most Effective Social Media Marketing Tips to Grow Your Business

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Social media marketing is one of the most effective ways to connect with customers, prospects, and other stakeholders. You can use social media platforms to build relationships, share information, and promote your products and services.

Though a powerful tool to help you to reach new customers, build your brand, and increase sales, social media marketing is also incredibly time-consuming and can be costly. It would be best if you set a plan from the beginning, both on the strategies to adopt and the financial commitment to put into your campaign.

While this article guides you on the strategy, Mike Savage in New Canaan can help you formulate a comprehensive financial plan for your campaign, to optimally allocate and utilize your marketing budget. Here are some tips for businesses that want to maximize the effectiveness of their social media strategy.

Set Strategic Goals and Establish Metrics

When building your social media marketing strategy, you must consider the campaign’s objectives. That way, you can measure the effectiveness of the campaign and make changes where necessary when you don’t realize the set goals on time.

Some of the key objectives you can set for your campaign and metrics you can use to measure them include:

Increasing Your Brand Awareness

You can use branded search volume to measure the awareness level of your brand. Most SEO tools will show you how often people are searching for a brand name, and you can track when it’s increasing and tell that your campaign is gaining traction.

Increasing Website Traffic

You can see how much traffic a particular social media campaign has attracted to your website in your analytics. The best way to see how much traffic the campaign has brought in is to create unique landing pages for the campaign, or using a parameter like an Urchin Tracking Module, to monitor the audience.

Improving Customer Engagement

Engagements create buzz around your business and make the audience feel involved. You can track the level of engagement by looking at click-through rates on your social media pages, shares, or retweets, depending on the platform you’re targeting.

Generate New Customers

The number of new customers gained through a social media campaign can be hard to measure since social media marketing is usually just one touchpoint in the buyer’s journey. Your best chance at accurately tracking the customers is using multi touch attribution software to monitor the new customers generated by the campaign.

Identify and Research Your Target Audience

With well-specified objectives for the campaign, it’s time to define the persona of your target audience. Use current customer data to correctly refine your target customers’ persona. If you don’t have access to such data, seek a comprehensive Customer Data Platform based on real-time findings to help you build accurate personas.

People are always looking for genuine personal connections on social media, so your interaction with your audience needs to be personalized and targeted. Correctly defining your audience’s demographics, such as location, age, and interests, can be critical to your social media success.

You need to gather as much information as possible about your audience to create inclusive content. Such information may include the following:

Their specific age groups: Age is pivotal when defining your audience, as different generations have varied platform preferences and favor certain language styles.

Their job title: A chief executive would gladly accept a professional connection on a platform like LinkedIn but find a connection of Facebook or Instagram annoying.

The psychographics of the audience: To ensure you cover every relevant aspect of the audience’s persona, it would help to also include their physiological characteristics in the demographic’s description.

Choose the Social Media Platform That Aligns With Your Goals

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Social media platforms attract different audiences based on interests, preferences, and trends. The type of business you run and the content you intend to share will play a massive part in the platforms you go for, ensuring it is delivered to the right audience. For example, if you have a retail store or restaurant, it would be wise to focus on Instagram because it is well-known for being used by millennials and young adults who tend to make decisions based on visual images.

Here’s a breakdown of the various platforms and their most common audience:

Twitter: 2/3 of the users are male, and 63% are between 35 and 65 years old.

Instagram: An ideal business with a target audience below 40 years, primarily female. Lifestyle brands and eCommerce stores enjoy enormous success on the platform.

Facebook: Excellent for brands targeting audiences over 25 years.

Create Well-Targeted, Engaging, and Compelling Content

After refining your audience’s persona, it’s time to create compelling content targeted to your audience and likely to sprout engagements. As you create the content, you should remember to:

Balance the Image and Video Content

Aim to strike a healthy balance between image and video content as you create the content. While images are easier to make and they grab attention quicker; you can pack more value in videos that can easily convert users to customers, though they are time-consuming and expensive. For Facebook content, for instance, you should aim for about 60-70% images and 15-20% videos. Stories, live videos, links, and texts can occupy the remainder.

Be Human and Friendly

People often win through social media during their free time, mainly after a long day of work when tired. Keeping the content lighthearted and easy to consume can help keep them hooked without sounding overly “sales-y”. An empathetic, friendly tone is more likely to resonate with most users, irrespective of the industry you are in and the goals of the content.

Strike a Content Mix

Balancing between promotional and educative content is key to attracting followers and keeping them loyal to your brand. It’s challenging to follow a page that’s only about selling their products and services without offering any other value to the audience.

Aim for an 80/20 balance, with 80% of the content being educational and 20% promotional. Constantly posting how-to guides and answering your audience’s most bugging questions is more likely to lead to success in your efforts to gather and maintain a happy audience.

Establish and Stick to a Particular Aesthetic for Your Brand

To make your campaign more impactful, it helps to create a particular vibe that your audience can associate with your brand. Colors communicate different feelings, and you want your brand’s philosophy to align with the visuals you put out to your audience. Think of the perception you wish to the user to have towards your business, whether moody, coastal vibe, mid-century, or even breezy, and match it with the most appropriate colors for the visuals.

Setup a Social Media Calendar

Set up a social media calendar based on best practices and when the content will likely be more visible on the platform you post. For instance, Facebook users tend to be more active on weekdays in the morning, between 9:00-11:00 am.

You can schedule your posts to go live at this time to attract optimum views and engagements. Automate your posts to go to live at the set time to avoid keeping your audience engaged even when you’re not actively involved.

Audit Your Strategy

Constantly refer to the goals you created at the beginning of the campaign to gauge the progress of your marketing. Due to the ever-changing social media trends, you should use your analytics to measure the progress of a particular strategy and adjust it when necessary.

What worked a few months ago may not work now. Therefore, your campaign should be an ongoing project. You should also closely monitor your competitors, and industry leaders and how they are doing that’s bringing them better results, and use it as inspiration for your campaign.

Social Media Marketing Is Key to Realizing Your Business Goals

A well-organized social media marketing campaign can help keep existing and new customers engaged, build strong brand awareness, and increase website traffic and sales. Customizing your campaign to suit your customers’ needs can make all the difference. You should gather as much data about your target market as possible before launching and during the campaign.