Businesses can use social media marketing to increase brand awareness, build relationships, and drive traffic to their websites. It entails producing high-quality content for specific audiences, engaging with followers, measuring results, and running paid campaigns.
Your brand can connect with new audiences, form long-lasting relationships, and accelerate its growth if it has a well-designed social media strategy in place.
Why Is Social Media Important?
How Can Social Media Help You Achieve Your Marketing Objectives?
How Does Social Media Affect the Buyer’s Journey?
The Most Popular Social Media Platforms
New Social Media Platforms Marketers Should Understand
Increasing Engagement and Following on Social Media
Trends in Social Media
Social Media Obstacles
How to Maximize Your Social Media Strategy
Why Is Social Media Important?
According to Hootsuite, there are over 4.2 billion active social media users worldwide, so social media marketing is critical when it comes to growing your business. People nowadays not only have social media accounts, but they are also constantly checking their timelines and news feeds. According to Pew Research Center, 70% of social media users log in daily, and 49% check in multiple times throughout the day.
Aside from the sheer number of people who use social media, there are several other advantages it provides to businesses.
Despite a Global Health Crisis, Continue Engagement
When the COVID-19 pandemic shut down the physical world, it increased the importance of digital communications. Social media has become an essential tool for marketers to continue engaging with their customer base and promoting their offerings without having direct contact with consumers. Because of these advantages, Harvard Business Review discovered that social media spending increased by 74% between February 2020 and June 2020 — roughly four months into the COVID-19 pandemic.
Increase your brand’s visibility by reaching out to new customers.
People follow brands they admire, such as Nike, which has 216 million Instagram followers, but they also use social media to learn about new businesses. According to Instagram, 83% of its users use the platform to discover new products. As a result, a strong social media presence can help your brand gain more followers and raise awareness of its mission, values, and offerings.
Make Your Brand More Personable
Businesses can build trust in their brand by creating engaging, high-quality social media content. You can connect with users in a casual setting by using various social media tools such as live streams, stories, and interactive polls. Brands can use social media platforms to highlight the people who work behind the scenes at their company or to tell the story of what differentiates them from competitors. Social media, by utilizing immersive, visually appealing content, provides businesses with a humanistic element that encourages engagement, trust, and loyalty among followers.
Shutterstock, for example, created its Shutterstock Presents YouTube channel — which currently has over 26,000 subscribers — to highlight the artists who create the photos, illustrations, and music available on the platform.
Engage
There’s a reason it’s called social media. However, brands should not only use social media to promote themselves; they should also start interesting conversations. Brands can accomplish this by:
Use LinkedIn or Twitter to create polls.
Creating user-generated content (UGC) by holding contests or using branded hashtags.
TikTok’s Stitch and Duet features are being used.
Starbucks is a prime example of this concept in action. The brand is extremely active on social media, but its content is not limited to coffee. Starbucks takes it a step further by using pop culture trends to entertain its customers. Check out this Starbucks Instagram post comparing Bridgerton characters to their caffeinated beverages.
Address Customer Concerns
Social media is a two-way street: consumers can use it to stay up to date on their favorite brands, while businesses can use it to monitor their reputation.
Brands can address negative feedback in real-time by monitoring online conversations. Social media platforms enable brands to interact directly with customers, solve problems, and build a loyal following.
How Can Social Media Help You Achieve Your Marketing Objectives?
You can move customers from the consideration stage of the marketing funnel to the conversion or purchasing stages by using social media content to generate new sources of traffic and leveraging various social media platforms to increase brand awareness.
There are four primary ways in which social media drives customers down the marketing funnel.
- Brand Awareness
2. Engagement
3. Website Traffic
4. Conversions
How Does Social Media Affect the Buyer’s Journey?
The buyer’s journey describes the process by which a prospect becomes a customer. The buyer’s journey can be divided into three stages
Awareness
The buyer is interested in a particular product or service. This interest can be motivated by a need, such as solving a problem, or by external influences such as advertising, influencers, or friends.
Consideration
The buyer conducts research in order to learn more about their options.
Decision
The buyer chooses the product or service that best meets their needs.
So, what role does social media play in the buyer’s journey? Brands can reach consumers at all three stages of their journey through social media marketing.
Businesses use social media during the awareness stage to reach a large number of people, increasing brand awareness. They can then connect and engage with users throughout the consideration stage by delivering consistent, strategic, and helpful messaging. As users progress through the decision-making process, brands can use paid social media ads, such as retargeting, to further influence their decision-making process and encourage more conversions.
Bottom line: Social media offers opportunities, or touch points for brands to nurture a sale.
The Most Popular Social Media Platforms
Here’s a brief summary of the most popular social media platforms and the demographics that use them
New Social Media Platforms Marketers Should Understand
Because social media is constantly changing, marketers must keep an eye out for new platforms and decide whether they should establish a presence there. Among the notable new social media platforms are
TikTok
Discord
Twitch
Snapchat
The Metaverse
Increasing Engagement and Following on Social Media
According to Forbes, more than 70% of businesses rely on social media for customer engagement. To cut through the noise and connect with audiences on social platforms, you must elicit emotion through compelling content. To accomplish this, incorporate the following tactics into your social media strategy
Use eye-catching imagery and videos.
When it comes to social media marketing, eye-catching imagery is essential, whether branded or user-generated. According to Buzzsumo research, adding images to Facebook posts can result in 2.3 times more engagement, 150% more Twitter retweets, and double LinkedIn engagement.
Similar increases in engagement are seen in social media posts containing videos. According to SocialMediaToday research:
Every week, 78% of people watch videos online.
72% of customers would rather watch a video than read about a product or service.
Tweets with videos receive ten times the amount of engagement as those without.
When compared to other types of posts, people on LinkedIn are 20 times more likely to share videos.
On Instagram, video content generates more engagement than any other type of post.
Pinterest users are 2.6 times more likely to make a purchase after watching a brand video.
While video provides marketers with numerous opportunities, a single video is insufficient to elicit responses. To achieve the desired result, marketers must employ best video practices such as capturing viewers’ attention within the first 10 seconds, ensuring that videos are mobile-friendly, and keeping videos to the appropriate length.
Engage in Social Activities
Make certain that your team is actively engaging audiences on the platforms. You can accomplish this by responding to mentions, direct messages, and comments in a timely and personable manner — no canned responses allowed. Monitoring social media accounts and responding to engagement is a full-time job, which is why many brands hire social media managers or outsource engagement to third-party agencies.
Make New Content Using Relevant Hashtags
Prioritize quality over quantity when developing a social media strategy. With so much content available, it’s critical to create fresh, interesting, and impactful posts that resonate with target audiences and align with your business goals on a consistent basis. Creating a consistent stream of high-quality, timely content positions your brand as a thought leader, industry expert, and trusted advisor. When creating new content, make sure to include relevant hashtags in your posts to help more users see it and engage with it.
Encourage More Followers
Gaining followers organically can take time, but implementing a follower push can significantly increase your social media reach. This procedure varies depending on the social media platform you’re using.
To increase engagement, invite users who have reacted to your post to follow your page or boost posts.
Instagram
Find your ideal user base by searching competitor followers, industry-related hashtags, or specific locations. Follow those accounts in the hopes that they will follow you back.
LinkedIn
Invite first-degree connections or industry leaders to like and follow your page.
Twitter
Seek out industry thought leaders and competitors, browse their follower lists, and follow key accounts — many of them should follow you back.
Consider Paid Social Advertising.
While regular, high-quality social media posts can generate a lot of engagement, paid advertising can help your brand reach new audiences and grow its following. You can do the following by investing in paid social media advertising:
Run follower campaigns on LinkedIn or Facebook to quickly increase page following rates.
Implement a paid brand awareness video campaign to increase brand recognition and communicate key messages.
Boost your Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn posts to reach a larger audience, drive traffic to your website, or increase post engagement.
Trends in Social Media
Important trends for social media marketers to be aware of as they develop, execute, and refine their social strategies include:
Video’s Increasing Importance
The Emergence of Audio Features on Social Media
More user-generated content.
Increasing Brand Trust.
Providing Customer Service
Social Media Obstacles
Aside from trends, marketers may face the following challenges when implementing a social media strategy:
Putting Corporate Social Responsibility First
Brands should, indeed, use social media to promote themselves. However, they should also use the platforms to highlight their corporate social responsibility (CSR), such as by discussing environmental or social justice issues. Customers care about a brand’s social stance, according to data from the Association of Corporate Citizenship Professionals (ACCP). According to the ACCP, 84% of global consumers value sustainability when selecting a brand. As a result, incorporating CSR into social media strategies can help brands build stronger relationships with their audiences and turn them into loyal brand ambassadors.
Creating Genuine Communities
Mega-influencers are giving way to tight-knit, authentic communities where consumers can feel heard. As a result, brands must collaborate not with the most popular influencers, but with creators who can help them connect with niche audiences, earn their trust, and gain more cultural capital.
Increasing Ad Creativity in Paid Ads
Users understand the distinction between paid advertisements and organic posts, and social advertising is nothing new. That being said, marketers must be creative when designing paid advertisements to ensure they stand out and mirror or enhance the experience provided by the social media platform on which they are advertising.
How to Maximize Your Social Media Strategy
Building a solid social media strategy isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach because many different factors contribute to the success of your strategy. However, there are a few key components you can incorporate into your campaign to maximize the effectiveness of your social media strategy.
Determine your target audience.
Are you speaking to other businesses (B2B) or to consumers (B2C) through your social media content? Identifying your target audience can assist you in deciding which social media platforms your company should use. It can also assist you in determining the tone, imagery, and frequency with which you post social media content.
To help you narrow down your target social media audience, try answering the following questions:
Is your primary goal B2B or B2C?
What is the intended age group?
Where is your intended destination?
Is there a minimum income level that must be met?
What does your target audience care about? What do they do with their free time?
Define Specific Objectives
While businesses may have similar overarching social media goals, such as increasing brand awareness or follower counts, it’s critical to set specific goals for your business and the social media platform you’re using.
Boost Posts to Increase Your Reach
Set aside a portion of your social media marketing budget for boosting Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn posts. Your budget should be between $15 and $200 per post, and we recommend boosting at least once a week to see results. However, the more posts you can promote, the faster your social media presence will grow.
Social campaigns should be integrated into a cohesive strategy.
Avoid one-time campaigns and instead concentrate on nurturing your audience and growing your following over time. A winning social media strategy, rather than a siloed approach, keep the target audience and user intent at the center of every campaign.
Content should be tailored to specific platforms.
Each social media platform is distinct and should be treated as such. As a result, when developing a social advertising strategy, take into account the type of content — such as text vs. video vs. images — that will perform best on each specific social site, as well as the demographics of those who use that platform.
Before attempting something new, conduct research.
Social media marketers must stay up to date on new tools available on existing social platforms. However, before you try out the latest filter or feature, make sure you fully understand its implications. Also, be wary of becoming swept up in a new trend simply because it is available. Make sure that whatever new feature you’re experimenting with is in line with what your target audience wants to see and will help you achieve your marketing objectives.
Use the Influencers and Creators’ Power.
Word-of-mouth advertising is still one of the most effective forms of marketing, and according to Semrush, 88% of people have more trust in a brand when a friend or family member recommends it. If you can get people talking about or recommending your brand on social media, you will not only increase brand awareness but also credibility, paving the way for more sales and growth.
Be adaptable.
Your social media strategy should evolve in tandem with the social media landscape. Continue to track your progress and look into new trends and platforms. In a rapidly changing landscape, brands that are agile and willing to re-evaluate their strategies can capitalize on new opportunities to connect with consumers, maintain robust followings, and outperform competitors.
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