Did you know? The number of people on social media globally is expected to reach 6 billion in 2027, with the average user spending about 95 minutes on different platforms daily. Social media marketing tactics are critical to any company’s digital marketing strategy’s success, but not all brands utilize these tools.
Although the number of “follows,” “likes,” and “shares” is still important, a brand’s credibility is defined by more. Social media today requires a distinct set of skills, as brands must fully understand the needs of their target audience.
Let’s explore how you can apply social media marketing tactics to your business and get great results.
Table of Contents
What is social media marketing, and how can it help your business?
Social media marketing uses social media apps as a marketing tool. These platforms help brands to connect with their target audience, increase sales, and create a community of followers who share and engage with content.
Brands gain exposure by creating relevant content that users share with their networks. When used as a recruitment tool, it also broadens its reach to fans, potential customers, and even potential employees. This is why 77% of marketers across companies say social media marketing has benefited their goals in 2022.
When done right, social media marketing helps brands get customer feedback in real time. It also has a way of humanizing brands, making them more approachable to the audience.
These platforms allow audiences to ask questions, express their complaints, and be heard. Some popular social media apps are Facebook, TikTok, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, Instagram, and Snapchat. Each platform has features that make it appealing to users. Customers can see it on their preferred channels when a company uses several in tandem to deliver a multichannel message.
What is a good social media plan?
It is not easy to plan for social media. It’s crummy for most organizations because many stakeholders still don’t know how to use social media for business.
A social media plan assists a company in determining its target audience, social networks to join, and the type of content to create and share. It is an essential component of your overall marketing strategy. Once you’ve developed a plan, you can begin working on improving your content and cadence, analyzing follower engagement, and developing deeper relationships with your audience.
Almost every company has a social media presence. However, success on social media needs more than just posting daily updates. This is where social media marketing tactics come in. Do you know what your objectives are and whom you want to reach? Do you know what kind of content your audience is interested in and why they would like to interact with you? Answering those questions and progressing beyond haphazard social presence necessitates a strategic plan.
Do you need a social media plan?
One major hurdle 27% of social media marketers face is creating engaging content. A social media plan will ensure that your efforts are more fruitful and aligned with your overall business goals.
Outlining your business goals so that you can work to create content that reinforces them is part of developing a strategy. If this seems like a too complicated task for you, you can always consider reaching out to top social media marketing agencies and getting some valuable advice. You should also set unique social media goals (and track them), so you have something to work towards and can see if your efforts are paying off. Some of these goals can be;
- Increasing traffic
- boosting sales
- Increasing brand awareness
- Improving customer support
- Building an influencer network
Once your goal is set, you can start tracking the progress with relevant metrics like Click-through-rate (CTR), reach, engagement rate, conversion rate, Audience growth rate, cost-per-click (CPC), etc., and many others.
5 Content Creation Tips For Successful Social Media Marketing
New and reputable brands use social media marketing tactics to generate leads and boost sales. Social media marketing can be daunting due to all the platforms you need to understand. However, it is now easier than ever to use social media to connect with people and organically grow your brand.
Whether you’re just starting or have been using social media for years, there’s always room for improvement. Each platform serves a distinct purpose. Here are five content tips for successful social media marketing.
1. Make a unique strategy.
Each social media platform requires its strategy. Every platform is unique, and it is critical to understand what works best for creating targeted content and driving engagement. This means you cannot use Facebook marketing strategies on TikTok as they are completely different platforms with different user behaviors. For example, the best time to post on TikTok is 1 pm to 3 pm daily, while the best time to post on Facebook is around 3 am on Mondays-Fridays, and 10 am on Tuesdays.
The more relevant and targeted your posts are, the more successful you will be. You should also spend quality time getting to know your audience. Begin with general demographic data and work your way.
Consider the following questions:
- What am I doing on this platform?
- Who is my intended audience?
- What brand message am I attempting to convey?
- What type of content performs best on this platform?
- How can I make my content stand out?
2. Be consistent
Several social media marketers say they post 4 to 6 times weekly on different platforms. Posting content regularly is always a good rule of thumb to follow. Creating a content calendar using visual project management software for each platform linked to a social media strategy is another way to stay on track. This calendar will outline the type of content posted over a long period. You can also schedule posts weeks in advance so you don’t miss a beat.
Regardless of the size of your company or the platform you use, keep the following aspects in mind:
- Brand identity
- Brand message
- Hashtags and posting frequency
And, if your company is starting on social media, quality can be more important than quantity. Don’t overextend yourself. Instead of being inconsistent across six platforms, focus on posting good content on 1-2 platforms.
3. Develop your voice
Social posts should be written in the vocabulary of your target audience; the overall message should be written in your brand voice. Your distinct brand voice should be clear in your marketing. You create that voice through your language and tone when writing content or interacting with your audience.
This voice should be consistent throughout the content you create, the posts you share on social media, and your engagement on those platforms. This consistency will help your audience emotionally connect with you, build trust, and identify your social media posts as yours.
4. Measures Success Analytics
You cannot determine the success of your social media marketing strategies without tracking data. You can use several excellent social media analytics tools to track which marketing strategies are successful and which should be abandoned. In addition, tracking tags should be added to your social media marketing campaigns. This will help you monitor them and use the analytics within each social platform to gain more insight into which content is performing with your audience.
5. Advertising
Besides resource time and specialized tools, much of social media marketing is free. Building an audience and publishing content on free social media sites is an excellent way to meet marketing objectives, but as the program grows, so does the budget. Paid marketing features can be extremely beneficial to businesses because they can target their advertisements to specific audiences based on various factors such as demographic information, retargeting, and behaviors. For context, Facebook claims its ads reach a whopping 2.11 billion people.
There are several tools to help manage social media marketing at scale, but for now, using the functionality of native ads is sufficient to promote posts, capture leads, and ensure messages reach the right audience.
Innovative Strategies in Social Media Marketing
What value do your social media platforms add to your company? Are they raising brand awareness or increasing sales? Any of the two is fine, but remember that you must constantly improve your social media strategy.
Regardless of your brand’s purpose, social media marketing should never be overlooked by any marketer or business owner today. Social media marketing is no longer a discretionary strategy because it has been shown to help a company’s brand image and financial gains.
We’ll look at your startup’s best innovative marketing strategies, ranging from acquisition tactics to get new customers and fans to the retention and nurturing strategies to keep them loyal for years to come.
- Provide solutions to customers’ problems.
Customers will undoubtedly have concerns and questions about how your startup meets increased hygiene, safety, and convenience demands; this would be an excellent time to communicate the solutions you offer in these difficult times.
A new organization must use Social Media as a marketing strategy to create new content rather than simply spinning content articles found on the web. However, if you’ve managed your social media channels and blog sites for at least three years, it’s probably time to repurpose old content across different platforms. 82% of marketers say they always do this, and so should you.
Refreshing old content is critical not only for improving other social media marketing tactics but also for improving your SEO. When editing old copy, try to retain or replace keywords that are still relevant today. You can also include additional links and interlink your content to other pages. Furthermore, update all information and provide up-to-date statistics to appropriate sources.
How to make innovative strategies work in your favor
To give your strategy the best chance of success, you must follow some key steps, which we will outline in this section. But, before we get into the meat of the matter, consider the following:
- What stage are you in?
- What do you want to do?
- How are you going to get there?
Remember that your strategy needs to try and answer all these questions as we progress through the process stages.
To begin, you will conduct an innovation assessment to understand your organization’s current level, also referred to as an innovation audit. Use a presentation template to outline all the information, and this will show you what innovative efforts have already started, what works well, and where you can improve.
If you’re unfamiliar with the stages of an innovation assessment, here’s a rundown:
First Phase: Quantitative research
Begin by looking within and conducting an innovation survey; this should be distributed to everyone in all departments to learn how innovation works in the business and what innovative efforts are already underway.
Spend some time analyzing the survey results once you’ve received them. Throughout this process, you should be able to see where your innovation capabilities are and how they may be limited in the future. It will also identify disconnects between how management perceives the innovation process and how it operates in the business.
Phase two: High-quality research
- Focus groups and interviews
Face-to-face interviews and focus groups are conducted to gain a more in-depth understanding from management-level personnel from various departments. In addition, it allows you to delve deeper into their perceptions of current innovation efforts and capabilities.
By the end of the interviews, you should have a clear picture of how management views the development of innovation development and an understanding of the overall innovation process.
- Cluster and analyze results
It would be best if you now analyzed the feedback as you did in phase one. However, you can now begin to cluster your results, recognizing patterns and categorizing concepts. Using an online whiteboard for this process can be beneficial because it allows you to identify any commonalities easily. It will be harder to identify trends if all interviews are recorded separately.
Conclusion
Developing targeted and effective social media marketing tactics will boost your online performance. In addition, using novel ways to interact with your audience will broaden your reach. Most importantly, analyzing your metrics will assist you in determining whether you are on the right track. With seemingly new trends appearing on social media daily, these tips will assist you in crafting your strategy and growing your audience.
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