Social Media Marketing, or SMM, has become an indispensable part of business or brand promotion these days. Social media marketers are always looking for better and effectual ways to boost SMM campaigns.
Tip#01 – Know your targeted audience
There is a galore of social media channels available for placing your social media marketing strategy into play. Choosing the opportune social media platform for your business requirements is important.
And how do you do that? Simply, by understanding and identifying your targeted audience. Though there are several ways to understanding your target audience, you can start doing it by:
- Creating a marketing persona of customers you are targeting, it will be the ideal customer for your brand or business
- Start searching for clients on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and other social medial channels
- Use various tools to better understand engagement activity and levels of your prospects
Remember that having presence over a social media channel and running a social media marketing strategy upon a social media platform are two different things.
While your brand needs to be on all major social media channels, your strategy might be placed in position over only a few of them. Know better about your targeted audience by using tools and services for analyzing:
- How much time an average user spends on social media
- What time or times the user is active?
- How the user interact with other businesses and people on social media i.e. interaction behavior and patterns?
The better you will know about your targeted audience, the better social media marketing strategy you can brew.
Social Media Management is a fun thing to do. There are all sorts of tools available for allowing you to manage all your interactions and engagements with various social media channels from one single place. There are several different tools available for accomplishing various tasks. Saving a lot amount of time, together with making tasks easier to do makes social media management tools lucrative.
So, while choosing the right Social Media management tools, you need to answer some questions:
- For what purpose you need a social media tool?
- Which social media channels you should target using the tool?
- Should you run paid social media campaigns?
- Should you do social listening?
Several social media marketing tools are available for a free trial. Therefore, you can have a test run before adding one or many social media management tools for your SMM endeavor.
Tip#03 – Set goals
Marketing, especially social media marketing is a very diverse field. One can direct the efforts and time in a variety of ways to churn out answers to several queries. Therefore, you need to set proper goals to set up the approach and direction of your social media marketing strategy. You need to have answers about:
- Do you wish to increase awareness about your business or a specific cause, or both?
- Do you want to sell products, services and other offerings?
- Do you wish to enhance interaction and connection with followers?
Why you should have clear goals? Because, without goals you can’t measure your performance as there is nothing to be measured against your set business performance metrics. So, how to define goals? By having SMART goals:
Specific – Goals should be clear and defined
Measureable – Goals must allow for progress measurement
Achievable – Goals must be practical, feasible and achievable
Realistic – Goals must be based on time, resource and marketing budget
Time Sensitive – Goals must follow specific time limit for completion or objectives completion. They needs to be measurable and trackable
Your set goals should resonance with your business vision and approach. Most business starts building goals with these as the starters:
- Enhanced brand awareness
- Build, maintain and increase a follower base
- Promote products and services
- Create a buzz in the market about some technology or product
- Increase conversion rate
- Improve ROI (Return On Investment)
- Boost incoming traffic
Based on the needs of your brand or business, you need to set 2 to 3 goals per social media network.
Tip#04 – Analyze and optimize
Analyzing data for optimizing social media strategies is essential for the success of social media marketing campaigns. Analyzing and optimization should be continuous for consistently improving the efficiency of a SMM strategy as well as maintaining its relevance throughout the social media marketing campaign.
And if you worry too much about making mistakes, here’s the fact that even the veteran social media marketers come up with effectual marketing ideas after a certain investment in trial and error. Also, there’s first time for everything. By successful tracking and analyzing key elements underlined by your SMM plan, you can improve your ROI.
So, how exactly do you analyze and optimize your social media marketing strategy? By measuring the performance of your strategies and comparing them with success metrics that you underlined during the beginning of your SMM campaign.
Upon finding the effective ways, you need to change and tweak your strategy to work in its full effectiveness. There are several tools, like Buffer and Sprout Social, for tracking and analyzing social media marketing activities.
You need to compare them against your KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). In the world of continuously developing and changing social media, there is nothing permanent. So, go with the flow.
Social media has become the recommended way for businesses to rank higher on SERPs via customer feedback, or social signals. Interactions like likes, shares, votes, pins, views, and others on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and other social media channels are social signals. They assist businesses to gain attention of new customers while retain existing clientele.
With all the recent changes in Google Search and other search engine algorithms, social signals play an important role in determining the attention received by businesses via the search engine algorithm. The basic principle is that search engines view social signals as genuine recommendations.