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Social media marketing has become standard across all businesses, which makes sense considering the 4 billion+ social media users worldwide. Regardless of niche, businesses are utilising social media to engage with their customers and drive sales upwards. Naturally, engaging with social media isn’t enough on its own to boost conversions, but there’s no denying its importance. Throughout this article, we’ll tell you how to boost your social media efforts.
10 Ways to Elevate Your Social Media Strategy
1. Have Clear Set Goals
If you open a social media account without a target achievement, you’ll fail miserably. Having a clear goal in place will help you to keep your content focused. Remember, when you’re setting goals, you need to make sure they’re attainable, specific, and measurable. For example, there’s no point in having a goal like, ‘to grow my business.’ Although this is part of your goal, there’s no way to measure this accomplishment because one extra follower counts as growth. You need to write down exactly what achievement looks like in relation to your goal.
2. Carry Out Market Research
After working out your social media goals, it’s time to research your audience. After all, they’re the ones you need to please with your social media content. If you can find your target audience, your entire social media strategy will fall into place.
There are many ways to find out where your target audience “hangs out” online. For example, you can send surveys to existing customers or use native audience insight tools on social media platforms. After highlighting your audience’s demographic, you need to figure out what questions they have and how you can fulfil their needs.
3. Choose Platforms Carefully
Your business doesn’t need to be active on all social media channels, but it needs to make an impact on the ones it is. The best way to do this is by posting quality content that serves a purpose to your readers. If there’s zero reader value in your content, don’t post it. Your content should complement your goals and demographic research. The easiest way to choose a social media platform is through market research, which you should have completed already.
4. Have a Plan
With your goal set, the target audience understood, and platforms decided on, it’s time to put a plan in place. Having a penned plan will help you to keep on track by turning your vision into something real. While creating your plan, it’s important to document how you will go about keeping followers engaged.
Here are some tips to get you started with your strategy:
- Research hashtags and create a list to use across all platforms
- Put together a list of notable days and events
- Cover business events, launches, and days
- Ensure content is married across platforms
Part of your planning phase needs to include designing a content calendar, which you can achieve by using a program like SocialPilot. Having a social media calendar helps to put your entire team on the same page, regardless of when days off. After making the calendar, there’s nothing to stop you from going back and changing elements upon reflection. As a benchmark, we recommend editing your calendar once a week and using the time to assign tasks to your team.
5. Launch Paid Ad Campaign
The best way to drive traffic to your page or mobile app is organically, but sometimes your campaign needs a little push. Fortunately, you can do this through paid ads, which help to launch posts further into the public eye. However, you need to put careful consideration into the posts you decide to use as paid ads. For example, if you’ve launched a “like, follow, and share” campaign, there’s no point setting it as an ad because it will have greater reach anyway.
If you keep getting it wrong, paid ad campaigns can be expensive. Therefore, we recommend turning to a paid digital marketing agency, which will take your social media goals and create a winning campaign. When choosing a company to outsource your social strategy to, it’s important to make sure they’ve got a proven track record. For example, paid social media agency Repeat Digital has an extensive page dedicated to previous case studies demonstrating their ability to succeed.
6. Storytelling Sells
The aim of marketing is to sell your product, and the best way to do that is through the power of storytelling. By building an emotional attachment with your audience, you’ll be much more successful. For example, Airbnb put together an emotional animation which will easily tug on your heartstrings.
Your story doesn’t have to be an animation. There are plenty of ways to weave your audience through a story. For example, you can split a message across a series of posts and release them at timed intervals. Your readers will keep on coming back in anticipation of the next part, and your audience may grow.
7. Humanising the Brand
The world is digital now, but you can’t let that take away the human element from your campaign. Humanising your brand means breaking the digital ceiling and showing them what lies beyond. For example, if you’re creating a social campaign for a restaurant, you should consider taking your audience behind the scenes and into the kitchen. Allowing your audience a glimpse behind the scenes lets them build an emotional attachment to your company, which is what social media is all about.
8. Own Your Mistakes
You need to establish your brand as an authority, but that doesn’t mean the humans behind the computer screen don’t make errors. Whether you make an error on social media or not, the best action to take is to put out an apology and work alongside your audience to change. Never ignore errors or delete posts with mistakes on them – you risk making yourself look foolish to people who have already liked the post.
9. Post Frequency Optimisation
Audiences use social media at different times, which is why it’s important to carry out market research. You will find plenty of information online telling you about the best times to post on each social media platform – they’re correct to an extent. The only way to find out when your audience is most active is by posting at different times and seeing which posts get the most attention. However, you will usually find that the busier times are Mon-Fri outside of working hours – when people have time to aimlessly scroll social media.
10. Explore Analytics Page
You won’t always post successful content, but that’s okay because it allows you to grow. To gauge the success of your content and work out whether you’re tapping into the correct audience, you should explore native analytic pages. For example, both Instagram and Facebook have dedicated analytical tools for finding out how well posts performed and who interacts with your page. Alternatively, you can use a social media tool, which brings together all channels into one platform.
A fleshed-out social media strategy is an important part of your overarching marketing plan. When you tap into your audience by using storytelling and unconventional tactics, you’re more likely to boost post reach and grow your following. Remember, if you make mistakes of any size, accept them, apologise, and demonstrate a willingness to grow – your audience will care much more.
