If you own a business and you’re not on social media, you’re missing out on a lot.
Today, there are nearly 5 billion active social media users spread out across various platforms, like Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok, among many others. Unlike traditional marketing and advertising channels, social media platforms are a great way to not only widen your brand’s visibility but also reach previously untapped audiences in a more personal way.
However, while the market on social media is definitely a massive one, it would be a mistake to simply create a social media account, publish a few posts, and hope something catches anyone’s attention. Efforts can just as easily go to waste without a solid social media advertising plan.
It takes strategic use of social media management tools to get people to notice you and, beyond that, to get your audience to act.
Tips for Creating Effective Social Media Campaigns
With an effective social media campaign, one compelling post that gets shared can make your following–and consequently your visibility and engagement–explode. Traffic is already quite heavy on social media, so bringing your brand to where the people are can make a huge impact on your business.
But there’s a catch: Digital marketing services like social media marketing are not a walk in the park. It may look like it when you scroll through fun and entertaining posts on, say, Facebook. But in reality, a social media marketer needs to be strategic and creative to achieve meaningful results.
When you’re marketing for a startup or small business, you need to be doubly creative to make an impact.
If you want to utilize social media to grow your business, here are some tips to bear in mind:
Understand Your Target Market
Before launching a campaign, first things first: Understanding your audience. You have to understand your market deeply in order to develop a strategic campaign guaranteed to catch their attention.
This means knowing the following details about your audience:
- Demographic. Are you targeting boomers, millennials, Gen Z? Are they women, men, or both? Where are they located? These details will help you shape your strategy into one that fits your target to a tee.
- Platforms of choice. Knowing which platforms your target market uses will help you make strategic choices, instead of shooting in the dark when it comes to choosing which platforms to use and how.
- Trends they follow. This involves which celebrities they follow, what hashtags they use, what online and physical events or activities they participate in, and more. You can learn this by analyzing your market’s behavior on your own website or conducting research on your competition.
Choose the Right Platform
You don’t have to be on every social media platform in order to maximize your reach. In fact, that may be be a waste of time and money.
Instead, once you have built a persona that represents your target market, you can now decide on which platform/s to use based on where your audience spends most of their time.
Another consideration for choosing a platform are the strengths of the platforms themselves. For example, Facebook is great for gathering traffic from varying demographics, hosting events, and posting updates through Facebook pages.
Instagram is often the choice for featuring attention-grabbing photos of products and influencer marketing. While Twitter is often used for customer service and, most recently, even for podcast marketing.
Be Updated on Online Trends
The online world is incredibly fast-paced. Trends come and go at the snap of a finger. Every day, new hashtags trend on Twitter. Videos go viral on YouTube and Tiktok.
Keep your campaign relevant by being updated on everything that’s happening within your niche and using those trends to get take part in conversations happening online.
Feature Guest Posts
A fun way to draw attention to your brand and increase engagement is featuring content from customers and followers. It may be just one live video, art work, or post every few weeks, but chosen strategically, it can reel in more followers that drive warmer leads to your website.
It works because it makes customers perceive your brands as more authentic, trustworthy, and even personal, which encourages them to support your business if they’re not already.
The Importance of Social Media for Brand Awareness
Knowing how to leverage social media to grow your business is a huge advantage, especially for small business owners who want to take up space in the online market without having to spend a fortune on advertising campaigns.
Social media boosts brand awareness because of factors including
- Establishes brand identity. Social media posts and interactions are a powerful tool for communicating your brand’s personality, values, and causes.
- Helps build a good reputation. On social media, customers are able to see customer reviews, as well as interactions like comments and likes. It allows brands to showcase positive customer experiences, which in turn encourage people to convert from being followers to customers themselves.
- Widens reach. Through social media analytics, brands are able to get to know their followers at a much deeper level, helping them understand what they respond to, as well as what leads them to make a purchase. This allows brands to create strategic and persoanlized content to maximize audience reach.
How to Measure Social Media ROI
According to Neal Schaffer, the general rule in advertising is it has to follow a 3:1 ratio, where for every dollar you spend on a paid ad, you should be able to generate 3 dollars of profit. However, social media ROI does not only refer to monetary gains. It also involves indirect gains generated by your campaigns.
Here are tips on how to measure social media ROI:
- Define your goals. Set definite goals that you want your campaign to achieve, and how quickly you want those results to happen.
- Set specific and realistic KPIs. Key performance indicators are necessary if you want to be able accurately measure the success of your campaign. These metrics have to be measurable and quantifiable so it’s easy to gain a clear picture of your results and their impact.
- Use social media analytics for published content. This technology will help you gain an in-depth and accurate look at how each post is doing with regard to the overall campaign.
Get Social
Ready to connect, interact, and take space on social media? The best time to start is now!
By working with a trusted marketing agency, you can build a compelling campaign that’s uniquely you, expand your reach to untapped audiences, and establish your credibility among potential customers.
With 25 years of bringing brands closer to their customers, NGP-IMC can make it happen. Contact us today to know more of our work, and let’s get your brand noticed!
Jossaine Nunez is a freelance article writer, blogger, and SEO-driven maven. While her true passion lies in writing fiction, her love for storytelling extends to helping brands convey their message in ways that are both engaging and helpful for attaining their business goals.
Jossaine’s interests in writing particularly about people, for people – which translates to brand audience engagement – stems from her experience as the Editor-In-Chief of Siliman University’s The Weekly Silimanian, which published slices of life and educational pieces surrounding university life. Her piece, A Review of Leoncio Deriada’s People on Guerrero Street, published in the Silliman Journal on discussions and investigations in the humanities and sciences, earmarks her foray into the world of writing about, and writing for, humans that make the world go round.
