A great way to achieve growth in your business is to market it using social media so as to increase visibility and digital presence. And while this approach to marketing does not generate results overnight, it is greatly useful to any kind of business as long as you exert enough effort, provide valuable and needed content, and at the same time access the right social media platforms for your trade.
Marketers, in general, run campaigns for product awareness to generate sales. And, to an extent, social media marketing campaigns also serve this purpose. But more importantly, social campaigns are for generating organic engagement that’s more cost-efficient in helping brands build strong relationships with their customers. To achieve that level of interest from and interaction with consumers, as marketers, you will have to be guided by certain practices that are best for running your social media marketing plans.
Be clear about your campaign goals
Before the start of any campaign, you must first identify your objectives and the needed key performance indicators to check if you have reached your goals. The KPIs are the metrics to measure your campaign and overall performance in marketing. And so it is crucial to determine which ones to use right from the beginning since accurate analysis primarily depends on what you want consumers to do. In any case, you would want to have metrics that can give you accurate measure of your total campaign reach as well as engagement.
Solidify presence on the right social networks
Social marketing is also about being active on the right platforms to engage the right audience. Depending on your business, you’ll have to operate on one or more social media platforms with demographics that align with your niche market. Not every platform has the same statistics pertaining to the interaction of different users. Younger generations might be using platforms like Instagram and Snapchat, Millennials compose the majority of active users on Twitter, while Facebook comprises of more stratified groups of people.
Once you get a look at the demographics of these platforms and you have analyzed it side by side with your target market, you will now have to do the bulk of the work for social media marketing.
Engage your audience
After setting up and launching your marketing campaign on social media, the next step is building your campaign up by working on having a consistent engagement with your customers and prospect consumers. You will want to keep the momentum going to ensure a successful campaign. To do so, monitor online conversations you can derive from comments on your posts, shares, retweets, or regrams that concern your brand or business.
Aside from monitoring, it is best when you join in on the conversation too for your brand to be more relatable and accessible. Try responding to comments and feedbacks of your customers. Being conversational works since it gives personality to your business, which many consumers nowadays prefer than dealing with a disconnected brand. It also highly advantageous when you come up with timely, appropriate, and identifiable hashtags for your business to possibly create better engagement. Hashtags will also help you track your brand mentions for the whole campaign period. And using an analytics tool, you can assess whether you have generated the kind of buzz you need.
To further engage prospective customers on each platform, here are a few tips.
Facebook
This has consistently been the most popular social media platform worldwide, and so it makes sense when you create and maintain an active marketing strategy. With Facebook, it is best to create a fan page for your business and link it to your website for an increase in traffic. Visual communication is also essential to a successful campaign on Facebook. With this in mind, a key part of your campaign should focus on images and videos for your posts. Recently, Facebook also launched live and silent video features, which marketers can capitalize on for stronger engagement with target audiences.
Twitter
Twitter is basically about sharing quick updates on any topic with a more global audience, unlike Facebook that focuses on connecting with your network of friends. With Twitter, you can automatically post tweets on other social media platforms, and this is a great option for you to increase the flow of traffic to your website. By tweeting links to your site and syncing your account with your Facebook page then you get to communicate to a wider audience with a single post. Tweet about the latest business deals you can offer customers and constantly give them information on anything related to your trade. You may even tweet using hashtags that are trending locally or worldwide to assure continued interaction with clients.
Instagram and Pinterest
Both of these social media platforms give users the power to connect with people through videos and images that give customers a closer look at the business and what it is all about. If you opt to reach your target market through these platforms, use the right images that deliver your message to everyone. High quality videos and images will work just fine. However, plenty of people also know Instagram for its filter options, and you can likewise use these to create a certain mood depending on the idea you want to share. Filter or none, whatever the case is, people will have an idea about your brand’s personality based on the photos and clips you are sharing on both platforms.
What can also work for your marketing campaign is both platforms have advanced content filtering tools for posts. So you can tag your posts to group it with countless others that belong to the same niche. And doing this will automatically identify people who are, more or less, interested in what your business can offer. As a result, the content filters will generate traffic and drive the right people to your posts.
Google+
Here is a platform that is popular mainly to male software engineers and web developers. That’s a clue right there – if your target audience are engineers and developers, then Google+ is a great platform for your marketing campaign. Google+ has a similar atmosphere with Facebook, and both exude a casual and fun vibe. Using Google+, you can use its hangouts feature to host a video conference, allowing you to have a direct interaction or dialogue with your clients.
Whatever business you have, be it a part of the food or fashion industry or a company that provides financial services or outsource contact support, designing and implementing social media marketing campaigns will help you attract your target market. Use the above reminders as your guide, and you just might receive the level of interaction you need to achieve your business goals.
Author Bio:Â
Vincent G. Spivey is a writer, researcher and editor for almost a decade. He writes news and currents events. He is also an expert at social media marketing and law blogging. Currently, he is connected with Livingston Loeffler.
