Did you know social media is one of the most powerful tools that businesses can use to expand their digital presence and effectively sell products? Different social media sites can serve different purposes, and help businesses effectively reach a target audience.
Global users are on social media sites for an average of 2 hours and 27 minutes each day. The good news is that through educated social media marketing tactics, companies can harness the power of the different platforms to their advantage.
1. Understand Current Performance as a Baseline
The best way to start building your social media success is to understand the current performance of the business on digital marketing platforms. We recommend asking yourself some questions as a guide.
Which strategies are working well for social media performance, and which are not? What does your brand’s personality look like across social media platforms? How do you feel your social media performance compares with other similar brands?
Make a detailed list of your starting benchmarks for your different social media platforms. This will help you to track the progress as you build your marketing strategy.
2. Do Your Research on Costs and Create a Budget
One mistake that new business owners or people beginning with social media marketing make is that they do not anticipate how much a successful digital marketing campaign will cost. Many either spend way more than they had budgeted for or fail to make a budget and spend money on a whim with no strategy.
We recommend that before you implement a complex plan, research the type of marketing that you want to do in order to help create a realistic budget for your digital marketing strategy.
3. Create a List of Goals
Before implementing a plan, it is crucial to get a list of your goals and KPIs written down for each of the social media platforms you will utilize. It is also crucial to ensure these goals align with your organization’s overall goals.
Some examples of goals your company can set are generating more leads and sales each year, increasing traffic to certain areas of your website, or increasing followers across social media platforms. The greatest digital marketers set clear, realistic goals and stick to them.
4. Define Your Target Audience
For social media efforts to work well, digital marketers must have a keen sense of who the company’s target audience is. This helps to design all marketing campaigns around the typical groups of people who may be interested in the company’s products or services.
While there is seldom one type of customer for a company, there are often trends in demographics. Look at the company data and consider factors like customer ages, where they live, job title or industry, and interests.
Different types of campaigns can be used to target various demographic groups. For example, if your data shows people 65 and older tend to be the largest group of Facebook followers for your business, perhaps use that information to build Facebook campaigns. Marketing efforts work well when they are dialled into the individual customer’s needs.
5. Create a Style Guide and Plan Content Around Guidelines
A mistake that many early digital marketers make is not sticking to a certain style for their social media marketing. Instead, social media posts and ads are inconsistent and do not demonstrate a unified voice.
Creating a style guide ensures that everyone is on the same page when creating content. Things like filters used on the photos, font, and theme should be discussed when creating this guide.
All content for social media should then be planned around this agreed-upon style. Keeping the style somewhat consistent through platforms like Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, TikTok, and Pinterest helps the company to have one unified voice.
6. Measure Results and Adjust Tactics Accordingly
Data can be the key to a lot of success when executing a successful digital marketing campaign. It is beneficial to bring someone on the team that can analyze the data from social media efforts in order to know when it is worthwhile to continue a specific tactic or pivot to something that may work better.
Benchmarking is a great tool, which allows you to analyze your business’ social media progress with other similar companies in the industry. It gives social media marketing experts a sense of how the strategy is being executed. A quality social media marketing strategy will establish well-thought-out key performance indicators (KPIs) that a company may use to measure success.
There are many easy-to-use tools to understand the data around your social media platforms. A few of these include Sprout Social, HubSpot, and Google Analytics. The more that you understand what is going on on your social media pages, the better you can strategize how to improve the overall performance of your customers.
7. Create a Blog to Drive Traffic to Your Site
Have you noticed that when you ask a question on search engines like Google or Bing, links to relevant blogs often come up? Blogging is wildly popular in the content creation world. Not only is it a way to educate potential customers on topics they may be interested in, but it also drives traffic to a company’s website.
Fresh blog content is a marketing strategy that will keep new customers viewing your business online. As you begin implementing a blogging initiative, aim to produce one blog per week. Content will build, and your company can create material on topics that are important to the target audience.
These blogs can be then be utilized for organic social media posts to provide more engagement on all channels and gain more website visitors. For example, a blog about how to create fresh pasta sauce can easily be posted to a company’s Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter pages.
If you are wondering what a successful company blog looks like, check out this Digital Marketing Blog by our team at Elite Digital Agency. This will discuss things like the pros and cons of Instagram marketing, how to create a digital marketing strategy, and important Google ranking factors. Read our blogs to get a sense of how you may put yours together.
8. Work With Other Brands to Drive Business
Brand collaboration is a great social media marketing strategy because it allows fans of one brand to be introduced to another. This is a win for both groups because each will gain new audience members and potential customers.
Now how can brand collaboration work? A great example lies within the Airstream camper company and Tommy Bahama. Airstream released a Tommy Bahama line which was wildly popular. Airstream then features Tommy Bahama chairs, dishes, and other décor to create a tropical feel.
In this example, both companies can use social media to push the product. In this case, Tommy Bahama’s organic social media posts can benefit Airstream, and Airstream’s overall social media efforts benefit Tommy Bahama.
9. Create Unique Social Media Content
Though this sounds obvious, some businesses struggle to create truly engaging and exciting content in their social media marketing efforts. Posts may get stale, and customers may scroll by without taking a moment to view content.
How do we avoid this? One great way is to view industry trends of what other companies are doing for social media. Recently, companies have been embracing the TikTok platform to produce video content for viewers.
Another method is sitting down each month to create a social media calendar. Based on current events and holidays, content planners can create an engaging monthly lineup to post.
Enlist Professional Help
Sometimes it is also best to hire experts. If you have a small business and are unconfident in your digital marketing skills or simply don’t have the appropriate time, consider hiring a pro to take on your social media marketing efforts.
Looking for some assistance on your marketing? The team at Elite Digital Agency would love to help. Our services include digital strategy, branding, and social media. Check out how we can help your business today.
Ready to get started?
Thank you for reading and learning all about our tips for quality social media marketing. We believe that by taking the time to develop a well-planned strategy, a business can drastically increase its performance through platforms like Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, TikTok, and Pinterest.
Are you interested in building up your company’s digital marketing presence but not sure where to begin? The team at Elite Digital Agency is here to help you develop your goals and social media presence. Contact us today to learn about how to implement a successful social media strategy.
