Tips for Maximizing Your Social Media Marketing Benefits

Description: Social media platforms were initially for socializing and sharing insights. Nowadays, businesses use Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other platforms to boost brand awareness and increase profits. Unfortunately, most businesses don’t get the most from their social media marketing efforts.

More than 4.2 billion people worldwide use different social media platforms, which nearly doubled the number of users in these platforms five years ago. That aside, users spend an average of almost 3 hours daily on their preferred channels. This is an incredible opportunity that businesses should use to build brand awareness, improve customer engagement, close sales, and take advantage of other benefits of social media marketing.

Unfortunately, this is easier said than done. Like other forms of marketing, you should have an effective social media marketing strategy. You can’t upload a photo or video to Facebook or Instagram and expect it to gain a lot of attention, like the Firefly Launch. You should have a detailed social media marketing plan that ascertains success.

So below we’ve decided to share with you a couple of social media marketing tips that will maximize the value of your social media marketing. So let’s take a look!

1. Have a Plan

Opening social media accounts for your business may be easy, especially if you use personal profiles frequently. Creating a Facebook page or posting your products on Instagram and Twitter is free. However, before taking this first leap, remember that a plan is important for any successful business strategy.

Without a proper plan, you won’t have clearly defined goals and objectives to work towards. And creating a social media marketing plan ensures that your marketing efforts target specific goals. Generally, your goals should follow the popular SMART principle. Meaning: your marketing goals should also be based on important metrics that affect your business. For instance, you should focus on attracting new customers or conversion rates, instead of focusing solely on likes.

 2. Understand Your Audience

The social media marketing for a small business strategy that you use will only be effective if you understand your audience. And most businesses think that gathering their audience’s age, location, gender, ethnicity, and other demographic information is enough. However, you should go beyond this superficial information.

Find out what your target audience likes, their interests, mindsets, behaviors, and needs. Understanding these pain points makes it easy to make connections. Fortunately, you have several avenues to discover your audience. Besides generic methods, such as brand surveys, you can build audience personas using social media data.

3. Work with Micro-influencers

Your target audience is people who yearn to connect with others who have the same interest and lifestyles. This is why working with micro-influencers are among the few long-lasting online marketing tips (even for B2Bs) that are still relevant. Micro-influencers provide a personalized marketing approach that most potential customers crave.

Interestingly, micro-influencer marketing can perform better than endorsements from influencers, who are typically widely known celebrities. This is because, unlike before, the modern customer is more informed. They know their needs, where to get specific products/services, and who they can trust.

Of late, celebrity-endorsed products and services receive a lot of negative press and distrust, with most fans noting that they endorse products that they don’t use or market brands just for the money. A recent survey found that 51% of social media users readily unfollow influencers and brands that post what they disagree with. This is why you should find a suitable influencer for your social media marketing campaign.

Such bad press has paved the way for micro-influencers. Their services are not only cheaper but also have an engaged following compared to influencers. Working with micro-influencers is an easy and affordable way to build a brand/business that customers trust.

4. Leverage Social Media Management Tools

Making regular posts on social media isn’t enough to improve your presence on these platforms. You should have a good understanding of optimal times to post, which might prove challenging if you don’t have a committed social media manager. Juggling between various accounts to post marketing content and handling other aspects of your business is impossible.

This is why you should invest in social media management tools. These tools provide substantial support that enables you to maximize your social media marketing without spending a lot of time on these platforms. Social platforms management tools coordinate various profiles, schedule weekly posts, post at specific times, and provide an analysis of how the posts are performing. This saves you a lot of time and gives you the freedom to work on other important business tasks.

Your social media marketing strategy should have the following:

• Listening tools – these tools provide insights into the discussions within your industry. They also make it easy to identify influential people on social platforms. You can use this information to find profitable partnerships and content creation opportunities.
• Scheduling tools – you can use them to schedule posts beforehand. You don’t have to stay awake, work through the weekend, or holiday to upload posts to your profile.
• Management tools also merge different profiles, allowing you to manage engagements and respond to customer inquiries, comments, mentions, etc.

5. Have an Editorial Calendar

Most successful brands create and stick to their editorial calendars. And the social media marketing calendar is essential if you want to succeed in your social media marketing strategy. Because if you use various social platforms to market your business, creating a posting schedule makes it easier to post pre-organize content consistently.

Posting frequently at specific times is key to broadening your social media presence. Your social media marketing calendar ensures that you post the right marketing content at the right time to the right platform. Your marketing calendar should also plan your content mix. Ideally, you should observe the 80-20 rule: 80% of your marketing content should educate, inform, and entertain your target audience, while 20% should promote or sell your business, products, and services.

 The Bottom Line

The importance of social media marketing cannot be overlooked in the current digital world. Unfortunately, there is no secret ingredient to succeeding in social media marketing. Therefore, it requires extensive experimentation, training with public relations career, carefully designed strategies, and hard work. Following the tips mentioned above will get you closer to succeeding with your social media marketing.

Novice digital marketers can benefit from various social media marketing courses. However, if you aren’t confident with your marketing strategies, you shouldn’t hesitate to seek social media marketing services from experts.