Marketing Strategy On Social Media

Social media is one of the most powerful marketing tools in your marketing tool box. But like all tools you should know how to handle them and when to use the right tool for the right job to maximise its effectiveness in doing the job for you.

Today, about 90% of young adults use social networks to communicate with brands, and that’s only likely to increase. Soon, social networking will become the most important marketing strategy for all target markets. When you start your first social media campaign or have been active for years, you can always learn how to improve your marketing strategy and approach to social media networking activity.

The heart of effective social media marketing is about talking to a specific audience with your social publications. Having a good idea of your audience will help you choose social media platforms in the future.

Research shows that the most important social networks for teens and young adults are:

Instagram (32%)
Twitter (24%)
Facebook (14%)
Snapchat (13 %)
Tumblr (4%)

Once you have a good idea of your audience, you need to identify main goals of your social media marketing efforts. What do you really hope for from your strategy?

The main goals of most SME social media marketing programs are:

Create a brand reputation (74%)
Bring traffic to the website (53%)
Lead generation for sales (41%)

Whatever your goals you choose they must be matched with several indicators that you can use to measure your success later. Without the goals and associated indicator metrics, you will not be able to measure the ROI, and analyse if your efforts are really effective.

With your declared goals, you then need to determine how much money you can spend on your social media marketing strategy. It is expected that the proportion of the total marketing budget to social networks will increase from an average of 10% to nearly 25% over the next five years.

Your decision now is to decide if your internal staff will run your marketing strategy on social networks or outsource the work. You could use a combination of both – it’s easy to find freelancers that manage your social accounts. But finding someone to develop social campaigns for your audience is a harder task. Some of your social networking marketing tasks are made easier with the marketing tools.

Once you know who will lead your campaign and what tools they use to create them, consider the content of your campaign (What’s the match with your audience?) and your publishing strategy to deliver this content. It’s likely that your social media campaigns involve sharing your own native content and sharing other content.

You should also take the time to identify the types of content that will generate the best response from your target audience.

Then study your publishing strategy: how often should I publish and on what platforms?

Hubspot found out that the best times to post on Facebook are:

3:00 pm on Wednesdays

12:00 pm -1:00 pm on Saturdays and Sundays

1:00 pm -4:00 pm on Thursdays and Fridays

The frequency with which you should publish your content also depends on your platform:

Did you know the average social media user maintains five accounts?

If you are to target them effectively, you need to communicate through multiple networks, but that does not mean that you have to cover all these platforms. You are limited by time and your resources, so you do not want to overstretch. Having a social profile that hasn’t been updated in six months looks less professional than having no social profile at all, so select your platforms carefully and ensure you are comfortable using the platforms right for you

There are a number of factors you should consider when choosing the right social platforms for your business:

Your social media strategy will require a combination of content to succeed. so you you should have a process to create this mix of content, and optimise its value to you to help you grow your business.

If you want to optimise ensure you leverage the service of your content and make sure that it is:

Visual – Did you know visual content is 40 time more likely to be shared on social networks than other types of content? The inclusion of images in social publishing as part of your social posts is one of the best practices you should follow and is sure fire way to get more response for your effort.

Consider the purpose of each platform, and its connection with your business goals: for example, Facebook is awarded for developing brand loyalty, while LinkedIn is best for B2B business development. You should also remember the demographics of your target audience so you can choose the most useful platforms.

Marketing in social networks is not just about brand awareness. More than half of social media marketers say it helps improve sales. So it’s important to integrate social media marketing into your biggest digital marketing strategy to make the most of it. It is also important to align your offline and online sales marketing strategy and to consider how local, regional or national advertising campaigns can be supported through the use of effective social media marketing to emphasise the specifics of the campaign. Companies such as Focussed Publications do this extremely well and offer attractive priced packages to suit all budgets.

Tracking tools such as Google Analytics allow you to map web traffic and site behavior to different marketing channels. With this data, you can see how these different strategies can help you achieve your marketing goals.

Some of the marketing strategies you want to integrate are:

Content marketing

PPC and graphic advertising.

Email campaigns

Search engine marketing

Offline marketing

All of these strategies can be combined to engage with your potential customers and introduce them to your business sales funnel.

Analytics monitoring is one of the most important things you can do to improve your social media marketing strategy over time. Tracking analysis gives you a detailed picture of the type of content and advertising strategies that work and do not work, so you can adapt and improve.

Keep in mind that an effective social media marketing strategy needs to be ongoing, you need to pay close attention to your goals and analysis, and then adjust them as you need to. This will ensure that you will continue to improve the engagement of your target audience and help you grow your sales over time.