A core marketing practice has always been to advertise where your customers are, which is why it’s so important for modern companies to establish a substantial social media footprint. Let’s look over some statics which highlights the power of social media marketing:
- The average American adults spends 2.25 hours on social media every day.
- 93.33% of internet users have social media accounts.
It’s clear to see the marketing potential that businesses have when it comes to social media, and why it’s wise to invest both time and money into your brands social media presence. Many businesses make the mistake of creating business profiles and posting content whenever they want, this strategy has proved to be historically ineffective. In truth, your social media marketing strategy should require a multifaceted and thoughtful approach, let’s explore this topic a bit more.
1) Set Measurable & Obtainable Goals
One of the greatest aspects about social media is, if done correctly, it’s possibility to scale your presence at an incredibly affordable cost. Although everyone has to start somewhere, and it’s essential in the beginning to set realistic goals that’s both reasonable and affordable. When growing a social media presence, each company will have their own areas of focus depending on the unique model of that company, these can include:
- Generating Sales: This should be a top priority for most businesses.
- Increasing Brand Awareness: This includes growing your followers and brand audience.
- Boosting Social Engagement: Promoting users to interact with your brand through conversations, likes, shares, hashtags, and a variety of other methods.
- Driving Website Traffic: Keep an eye on your website conversations from social media, click here for more information on increasing website traffic.
There’s no way to truly measure success without first setting measurable goals. So before mindlessly uploading social media content, it’s important to make sure your goals are specific, trackable, relevant, and attainable.
2) Finding Your Target Audience
Getting to know your customers as real people with real necessities will help your company when it comes to targeting and engaging your social media audience. Establishing the age, location, income, interests, and much more about your target customer is essential to navigating a successful social media strategy. Once you know your audience, it’s important to keep in mind that you don’t need to dominate every social media channel out there, just the channels where your customers are. Here are some of the most popular social media platforms and their user demographic information:
- Facebook: The largest social media platform in the world with 1.9 billion daily users. This audience is generally made of Gen-X and Millennials. Facebook is usually used as a Business-to-Customer marketing platform that is best utilized for brand awareness and advertising.
- TikTok: One of the most recent and fastest growing platforms, TikTok now has 1 billion monthly active users. This audience is generally made of Gen-Z and Millenials. TikTok is usually used as a Business-to-Business or Business-to-Customer marketing platform that is best utilized for brand awareness and user-generated content.
- Instagram: Taking the world by storm, Instagram has 1 billion monthly active users. This audience is generally made of Millennials. Instagram is usually used as a Business-to-Customer marketing platform that is best utilized for advertising and user-generated content.
- Twitter: A platform focusing specifically on words, Twitter has 211 million daily active users worldwide. This audience is generally made of Millennials. Twitter is usually used as a Business-to-Business and a Business-to-Customer marketing platform that is best utilized for public relations, community building, and customer service.
- Other popular social media platforms, including LinkedIn, YouTube, Snapchat, Pinterest, and many more.
3) Create Quality Social Media Content
Now that you’ve set measurable goals and have established where your audience is, it’s finally time to begin making content and growing your social media presence. To effectively run a successful social media campaign, it’s vital to create a content calendar to better help organize your future posts. Publishing content 1-3 times a week is generally the frequency sweet spot, although different businesses may benefit from a different posting frequency. While a great strategy to gain content-inspiration is by researching competitor’s social media posts, don’t forget to highlight what makes your brand unique.
When creating compelling content, it’s important to know what type of content best communicates with your target audience. There’s a wide range of contents types, such as images, videos, blogs, memes, podcasts, user-generated content, and much more. For example, mobile video consumption is growing by 100% each year, and 64% of customers say they are more likely to buy a product after watching a video first. Additionally, visual content is more than 40 times more likely to be shared on social media compared to any other type of content. Determining your businesses unique goals and deciding which content-type best suits your audience will go a long way when assessing your social media success.
Seeing how there’s billions of people across several social media channels, it’s clear to understand why so many businesses are marketing on social media nowadays. Developing a social media plan requires marketers to take a step back and asses their brands entire online presence. By establishing measurable goals, finding your target audience, and consistently posting compelling content across your channels, these three essential social media strategies will set your campaign up for success. For more information on how our Destination Marketing team can help your businesses social media performance, contact us here.
