Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing can create leads, drive sales and assist in your branding or, it can be a complete waste of time. 

Creating a strategy that is right for your company starts by knowing your customer and creating a strong company identity. 

Let’s explore 5 important tips for a successful social media campaign.

1.  Understand Your Audience 

Getting to know your target market is critical.  A little market research will provide insights into the tone, graphics, and messages that you’ll need for an effective campaign. This research naturally helps create a high-touch element between your business and the target audience. Much like meeting a new person, seek first to understand, then be understood. 

Here are a few of our favorite go-to sources for understanding the pains and needs of our audiences. 

• Google Analytics – Need a better understanding of the demographics, age, gender, location, and the social channels of your audience, turn to Google analytics to answer help these questions.  
• Quora – Quora is a place where your audience is asking the questions they want answered and writing about their attitudes and opinions. 
• Reddit – With Reddit you can better understand what your target market really thinks about your industry and products, reveal their frustrations, and assist you in creating content and services that alleviates those challenges and pains.
• Keyword Research – This indispensable activity will help you understand which questions are being asked and how they are being asked.  Understanding this gives insight into which questions that you can answer with your content and social media campaigns.
• Surveys – Simple, engage with your existing customers. Ask them about their challenges, interests, questions and concerns. 

2.  Have a Unique Identity

We’ve all heard of “unique value propositions” (UVP’s) or “unique selling propositions” (USP’s). Both describe the benefit of your offer, how you solve your customer’s needs and what distinguishes you from the competition.  Creating this unique identity separates you from the competition.  Knowing what your competitors USP is an important first step?  

Do you know what your unique product, service, or selling point is within your unique niche? If not, start there before you start a social media campaign.  Use the tools listed above to understand your customer, then create a unique identity.  Entrepreneur Magazine has a great article that can get you started. 

3.  Develop Editorial Guidelines

If you completed the steps above your content is something your potential clients are interested in, it resonates, educates, inspires, and they respond with shares and engagement.  Once you’ve discovered the formula that works for you, be consistent by creating editorial and image guidelines for each social channel that you utilize.  These standards can be applied to both frequent and infrequent postings and will create consistency throughout your messages. Guidelines should cover things like:

• Messaging: What is your UVP and how does it relate to your audience?
• Language: Will you speak in the first, second or the third person? Will your messages be conversational or formal?  
• Tone: Reassuring, funny, informative and/or understanding? Tone will change to reflect the emotion that your message is trying to convey.
• Images / Video: Determine the types of images and videos that should be shared on social media.

4.  Determine Frequency

In the real world of small businesses, social media posting frequency depends on the amount of time you have and the ROI you get from posting.  From the standpoint of your customers, daily, weekly, or monthly postings may be appropriate. Understanding what is right for your customers then temper that information with the time you have and the ROI data on each social channel. This tempering can help you determine the optimal frequency that is the best fit for your company.    Will you post multiple time per week, or will you post less often, with higher quality?  It’s hard to do both. 

In advertising, the term “effective frequency” describes the number of times a consumer must be exposed to a message before the marketer gets the desired response. Keeping this in mind, decide on the frequency of your social media posts. Then, put it on your calendar and stick to it.  

For a more in-depth look at frequency, here’s an article on Hubspot that details their own study about social media posting frequency, and timing. 

5.  Increase Your Exposure

Not everyone uses the same social media. Facebook, LinkedIn, Reddit, YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter all appeal to different personalities. Most people use multiple social media platforms. In marketing terms,  “The Rule of Seven” states that people need to be exposed to your messages seven times before they take action.  

A smart way to increase your exposure is to use multiple social channels for your postings. Recycling and re-purposing your content into different formats (video, info-graphics, guides, and webinars), can save you time and appeal to different personas, giving you more exposure with less investment.  

Understanding your buyer persona through market research, creating a unique company identity, then developing a winning formula for each channel and utilize multiple channels to increase your exposure is a winning combination for social media marketing.  Execute this strategy with various time-saving online tools like Buffer and Feedly. 

Depending on your budget, consider outsourced digital consultants to get you started with a strategy.  We can help you formulate a strategy. Start by filling out the form below for a no-obligation conversation.