While social media marketing is one of the most effective ways to attract customers and generate sales, a lot of businesses continue to approach it the wrong way. While you may be seeing some traction, there is always room for growth. Sometimes subtle changes can result in massive gains, simply by implementing strategies that you never thought of.
The key is to go after the right audience, and with social media being a platform that includes every demographic, you need to really know who you are trying to target. If not, it will result in a lot of wasted time and money. To help improve your social media marketing, here are five tips to make sure you are following.
- Track all of your results and efforts using analytics.
Budget is irrelevant. Whether you are running $50 a day campaigns or spending $10,000 daily, you need to know your numbers and stats. All of the social media platforms that offer paid promotion — LinkedIn, Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, etc. — all offer its advertisers access to analytics.
Take full advantage, and constantly monitor and track your results. This will quickly show you what is working and what isn’t. Remove underperforming campaigns and optimize and scale the top performers.
- Focus on just a few social platforms to start.
A lot of businesses spread themselves too thin when they start marketing on social media. It doesn’t matter if you are running paid ads or using an organic approach. You need to narrow down your efforts to two or three platforms and master them before you consider adding more. Your overall results will be much better using this approach.
You need to first figure out where you stand the best chance of finding your ideal customer. Older people aren’t going to be on Snapchat and you won’t find much success marketing health and beauty products on LinkedIn. Use common sense when starting out, then use data and numbers.
- Constantly engage with your followers.
A lot of businesses spend a tremendous amount of time and money building a large social media following only to clog up the feed with ads and promotions. This will quickly turn off your following and cause them to disconnect. Instead, post fun content that sparks engagement and then jump right in and participate.
When you do this, you become a brand with a personality and consumers are not only likely to continue following you, but they will be more inclined to share your posts, engage with your questions and comments, and then eventually purchase when the time comes. Engagement is the key to longevity and success on social media, especially for B2C brands.
- Automate as much as possible.
When I say automation I’m not suggesting you use the spam tools to auto comment and like random content. That is a bad look and will never help you grow. But, there are some tools that can be used to make your job easier and ensure you always have content posted for your followers to engage with.
Tools like Hootsuite let you plan out your content for all of your social media accounts from one single dashboard, pre-load it and schedule it in advance. Then, it automatically posts it. This can save you a lot of time, then your focus will only be on engagement with those that like, comment and share the posts.
- Listen to what your followers are telling you.
Social media has become the new customer server channel. Consumers will no longer pick up the phone, send an email, or submit a contact form. They tweet, send a DM on Instagram or a message on Facebook.
They do this if they have a question or comment, and there is a lot to be gained by paying attention to them and listening to what they have to say. You can get feedback on your products or service, as well as learn what content they love and what content they aren’t into on social media. Nobody can help you grow your business better than your customer’s feedback. Leverage your social media followers to learn as much about them as possible.
