When you market yourself on social media, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or LinkedIn, you are inserting yourself and your business into an ongoing conversation with your audience, building awareness, and utilizing this conversation to drive traffic, leads, and sales. In this guide, we will discuss how some questions you should think about to help your social media marketing go the furthest.
What is Social Media Marketing?
Social Media Marketing is the practice of using different social media platforms, like Facebook & Instagram, to raise awareness, drive traffic, and keep your audience up to date with the latest news and events.
5 Keys to Successful Social Media Marketing
- Develop a Social Media Marketing Strategy
The key to successful social media marketing is to develop a solid, long-term social media strategy. Posting randomly is great, but if you would like to drive traffic and generate leads, it is in your best interest to develop a strategy.
Build your social media marketing plan by asking yourself the questions below:
- What are we trying to achieve with social media?
- What platforms is my target market on?
- What kind of content does my target customer want to see?
- How often should I post?
- How will I manage responding to customer messages, comments, and questions?
- How much do I want to invest in social media marketing and advertising?
Research where your target audience spends the majority of their time, focus on that platform and consider purchasing a post scheduler or using Creator Studio to schedule your posts and respond to engagement.
- Create, Plan, and Post High Quality Content
Quality content goes a long way when it comes to social media marketing. Think about what kind of content your audience would like to see and what they are most likely to interact with whether you are planning posts, advertising on social media, or making videos, keep your target audience and their wants at top of mind.
Ask yourself:
- What kind of content would my target audience like to see on social media?
- What kind of content can my company create?
- How often do I want to share content?
- How often am I able to create content?
- Who will create the content for my social media?
- Who will publish the content for my social media?
- When is the best time to share my content?
- Who will monitor my contents likes, comments, shares, and engagement?
Creating a plan can help you work on these questions. We recommend using a content calendar, post scheduler, or even a printed outline to decide when to post, what to post, and how often to post.
Before you post, do some research to see when your audience is most active so when you post, they are more likely to see it!
- Engage with Users – Respond to Their Questions & Needs
Developing a social media strategy is more than just throwing stuff at the wall and hoping it sticks. It is not a one-way conversation. You must engage with your audience and interact with them.
You can interact with your audience in a variety of ways on social media including comments on your posts, reviews, private messages and chats, and more. Social media offers a completely different channel for your customers to communicate with your business.
Before you decide to engage with your audience, ask yourself:
- Who will monitor my social media’s comments, reviews, messages, and more?
- Who will respond to my social media’s comments, reviews, messages, and more?
- How will my business respond to and engage with my target audience?
- What kind of message do I want to send to customers when I respond to my target audience?
- What tools are available to help manage incoming comments, chats, messages, posts, reviews, and more?
- How often will we respond to and engage with our target audience?
Of all of the keys, this one is the most important. People do not want a one-sided conversation. Keep in mind, social media platforms analyze average response times and rank your social media pages according to your audience engagement, so do not fall behind on it!
- Strategize Social Media Advertising Campaigns
A good social media strategy is often paired with social advertising campaigns. They are optional, but if done correctly, can yield a very good return on investment.
- What message am I trying to get across to my customers?
- What is my goal with my social media ads?
- How much do I want to invest in social media ads?
- What kind of content do I need for my ads?
- What kind of content will attract people to become customers of my business?
- How many campaigns do I want to run?
- What kind of ads do I want to run? (Photos, videos, carousels, product, text, interactive, ect)
- Where do I want my ads to run?
- Who is going to manage my campaigns?
Social media advertising is less expensive than traditional advertising and allows you to laser-target your audience. You only pay for when people engage with or click on, your ad and you are able to select specifics on who you would like to target.
- Analyze & Revise
Social media marketing allows you to view vast amounts of data. Through your data, you can gain a better understanding of who your audience is. This allows you to make informed decisions about who you would like to target, creating an even better, more powerful return on your investment.
- What platforms will I use to review and analyze my data?
- What metrics do I want to use to measure my success in social media marketing?
- How often will I review my data?
There are free tools, such as Google Analytics, to help you get started. Google Analytics is useful because it helps you see where the traffic on your website is coming from.
The majority of social media platforms, like Facebook and Instagram, also provide reporting.
Social media marketing can be a bit overwhelming at first, but once you invest some time into it, you will start to see a return on your investment. Rome was not built in a day, so be patient when building out your social media! It takes time and effort, but know it will pay off.
If you don’t know where to start, or you don’t have the time to invest in your social media strategy, contact us today for a free consultation.
