Your business has a social media marketing strategy — but is it working?
Like most marketers, you see promising signs in your outreach — likes, follows, page views, and retweets. You get decent engagement, impressions, and reach.
However, how do you know how to convert that interest into actual revenue?
It might appear complicated, but one fact brings everything into perspective:
Nearly every marketer is struggling to answer the how-to-generate-revenue-from-social-media question. After all, social media is a new marketing tool. As with anything new, outstanding success goes side by side with surprising failure.
Not only are new social media emerging everywhere, but the blue-chip platforms – Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, and Instagram — are evolving right before our eyes.
For that reason, your marketing puzzle is a formidable one:
Adapt your marketing and advertising to quickly-evolving demographics through a channel that’ll probably look utterly different five years from now.
It’s intimidating.
However, understanding social marketing’s core gives your business a fighting chance to stand in a cut-throat competition.
The 5 Core Pillars of Effective Social Media Strategy
1). Start with Goals and Work Backward
Before you start publishing anything on social media, take a step back and look at the bigger picture.
What do you want to achieve with marketing on social media?
Do you want to generate more leads, make more sales, or establish yourself as an authority in your industry? What matters most to your business?
It might be:
- Increasing brand awareness
- Driving traffic to your website
- Generating new leads
- Growing revenue by increasing signup or sales
- Building a community around your business
- Offering effective social customer service
- Increasing mentions in the press
You need a goal to help you see the big picture and create the blueprint for your social media marketing. Your goals are the center of the map – they’re the destination.
The more specific you’re, the more your approach shifts from the point of view of here’s-our-social-media-platform-what-should-we-post to a what-sort-of-results-do-we-want perspective.
With a goal to point you in the right marketing strategy, it’s time to get to your target audience.
2). Invest Time and Resources on Social Platform(s) Where Your Prospects Hang Out Most
Typically, defining your social media target audience is similar to finding your brand’s buyer persona. It’ll help you determine social guidelines.
You’ll answer questions like:
“What content will my audience relate to most?” and “What tone should I use?”
While it’s critical to speak the language your target audience talks, you can’t undermine a channel’s potential.
In other words, find the social channel(s) where your prospects hang out most. Then, invest your time and resources only on those platforms.
After all, each platform presents unique results.
For instance, if you want to reach the business world on social media, building your LinkedIn presence is a no-brainer. Lots of professionals connect on LinkedIn to network and investigate leads. In fact, 80% of social media lead generation for B2B businesses on social media comes from LinkedIn.
On the flip side, if your focus is on consumers, building a strong Facebook presence will be handy. The platform is the second most used social media on the planet, with 69% of USA adults using it. Plus, Facebook is a low-cost marketing strategy. Thousands of dollars that you would use on other marketing channels can only cost a fraction of Facebook.
In the end, different social media platforms meet different goals.
However, a business can get traction on multiple platforms. However, it’s nearly impossible to be active on all outlets without a team running your social media campaigns.
You’ll have to narrow down your choice to a few platforms. Then, focus your efforts to get the best return on your investment.
Alternatively, you can hire a social media marketing agency to handle your business’s social channels.
Next, start feeding your prospect content to build relations.
3). Create and Share Superior Social Media Content
Content has the power to establish your brand as a thought leader in your industry.
However, it isn’t a magic bean that grows overnight into a business success. Building your brand’s presence is real work. It’s an art of knowing the best places to put in work to get results and not just annoy people
That means your first focus is creating audience engagement with your social media content. The more content, comments, likes, and shares you get, the more trust you earn from prospective and existing customers.
The best part?
Comprehensive content positions you as a thought leader in your industry. It shows the world that you know your business and and have a strong vision for your industry’s future. And this appeals to decision-makers.
No matter the type of content you go for – target to be a thought leader. It’s easier for people to buy from people they trust than a random company.
The easiest way to be a thought leader is to share superior content. Content that speaks straight to your prospect’s deepest pain + desires. In time, your content will establish trust with your audience, which will ease the sales process.
4). Target Your Leads and Improve Your Reach
Most businesses don’t sell anything because they haven’t thought about their social strategy from the bottom up. They don’t understand that people follow businesses on social media only if they can find some value. They want to benefit from connecting with your business.
No one follows accounts to see ads. You need to bring value to the table.
To get the best return on your time and resources investment, you need to understand one thing:
Provide value.
However, that’s only the first part of the two-part rule. The deliver-to-an audience-who’ll-find-your-content-valuable part is far much critical.
Even after creating superior content, you’ll need interactions. You need to reach out to prospects. You need to follow people, make useful comments, and like other people’s social media stuff.
With such an understanding, you’ll find it easier to generate leads and grow organically.
How to Generate More Leads on Social Media
After developing a decent audience size and posting appealing content, encourage people in your network to share. That way, your network will help place your brand in hundreds of new eyes.
Alternatively, you can improve your reach on social media through advertisement. Paid social ads are cheaper. If you use them strategically, you can boost your reach beyond the scope of what you could imagine.
When using the paid social ads, use the built-in analytic tool to automatically track your traction. Assess consumer response, what post results in high conversions, and produce more content on the same channel.
That calls for consistency, which leads us to the next strategy to maintain and reach more prospects.
Create a Posting Schedule
Many businesses take it upon themselves to run their own social media channel to realize the intense posting routine. Then they quickly lose interest and eventually abandon their profiles.
This is a sure recipe for a disaster.
It’s critical to have a posting schedule or let a social media marketing agency to take much of the legwork.
Better yet, you can automate your schedule and post using tools like Buffer, Hootsuite, Social Pilot, or even Sendible. These tools let you feed content into their system for posting at a later date and time.
After that creating a schedule, you’ll want to watch your posting frequency.
Adopt The Right Posting Frequency
Finding the right posting frequency is crucial in building a social media brand. People say that posting at least once a day is a gold standard.
However, the truth is:
There is no hard-and-fast rule to optimize your posting frequency. All that is important is to lean toward a sustainable posting frequency.
If you have a team running your social media, it’s possible to create original content for publication every day. Suppose you lack a team, you can commit to a less-frequent posting schedule.
What matters most is sticking to a schedule week in and week out.
5). Track and Analyze Results
Beyond the obvious sales and lead generation, it pays to measure your marketing effort. A non-stop monitoring of significant performance metrics offers a profound insight into customer preferences and trends.
Track your reach, engagement level, lead generation, and conversion rates. If you’re running paid ads, use the platform’s analytic to assess performance. Asses what type of content works best, the best time to post, and how frequently you should post.
Is Social Media Marketing a Force Enough?
Social media marketing as a marketing strategy is pivotal to many companies. Yes, social media has redefined how consumers engage with a business. Yes, it isn’t as hard as it might appear.
However, it takes hard work and time to establish traction on social platforms.
You’ll have to start, build an authentic and engaging audience, and provide value through posts. Then wait before you can start making sales.
If you don’t have enough time to execute the right strategy, it’s nearly impossible to crash social media marketing.
That’s why successful brands have a separate team to run social media marketing. And ones without a team lean on a digital marketing agency to differentiate their brands online.
At Get Knowticed, we correctly understand that the world will continue to give your business bigger and bigger challenges. Instead of wishing for them to go away, you should lean on skills to tackle each one of them.
That’s why we deploy social media marketing services around social marketing, community management, and even paid social advertising. If you’re:
- An overwhelmed brand owners who have no time to create killer social media copy
- A burned marketer who is tired of wasting money after spending thousands of dollar and embarrassed with the results
- A wordless business owner who struggles to tell the world about the great product or service
We’ll help give your business a competitive edge on social media. We’ll maximizing your brand’s exposure, give it a greater marketing mileage, and help you strategize your social media campaign. Contact us today to get started.
