In today’s advanced social media landscape, the effectiveness of your marketing strategy is just as important as the quality of the services you offer. Imprint shares some strategy tips from our social media experts.
Social media has evolved from personal e-diary to a highly coveted and lucrative space for businesses.
In today’s interconnected world, creating a narrative and connecting with consumers on a personal level is expected of any business. A well-designed social media strategy creates a sense of community around a brand and propels any organization towards reaching their goals. Follow the steps below to ensure you’re headed in the right direction!
Goals, The Real Kind
Where do you start? Establish a goal, or ultimate aim, and break it down into SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and time limited) objectives.
Are you looking to grow your follower base? Increase your ROI? What about increasing quality of sales? All of these are actionable marketing goals that can be accomplished with a thorough social media presence and engagement strategy.
For increasing your follower base, make sure your social media page is engaging – appealing to your community through promotions, user-generated content and interactive activities like polls and quizzes.
Social media ROI can seem like a mystery to many marketers, but driving up the return on investment is a great and actionable goal. While 60% of marketers agree that measuring ROI on social media is one of their biggest challenges, options like installing cookies and having trackable links are easy ways to help you monitor engagement on your social media activity.
The gift of the internet is its ability to connect people to brands, all holds barred. This translates to social media too.
Know Your Audience (And Your Competition)
You think you know them, but do you really?
A huge mistake made by marketers is targeting who they assume their audience to be, resulting in failed campaigns, miscommunication and losses of potential profit.
Trying to reach Gen-Z and millennials with your product or service? They consume more ephemeral content, posts that are here today and gone tomorrow, than any other demographic. Make sure you have quick and fun 24-hour content for stories on Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat.
Are you going for a more intellectual and thought-provoking crowd? LinkedIn, the place for professionals, should be the place where you concentrate your efforts.
Aim for a robust Twitter presence when courting news and pop-culture-savvy audiences. Here, don’t be afraid to be funny, catchy, and even incendiary – a good thing for social media.
Doing high-level research into your competition couldn’t hurt.
Whether it’s surface-level analysis or using deeper third-party analysis tools, your main competition’s strategy should, at least in part, affect yours. Checking out the competition will help you develop an understanding of the effective ways they’re able to reach an audience – after all, their audience is yours too! Use the information you’ve discovered to adapt your campaigns accordingly.
Imprint’s Market Research division offers unparalleled insights guided by behavioral psychology which are integrated into all of Imprint’s social media campaigns – answering pivotal questions like who you want to reach, what messaging strategies will be the most effective and what platforms are best for your audience.
Curating Creative (and Incredible) Content
Curating good content is the secret to generating sizable impressions and interactions that appeal to your buyer persona. Do you know what slang they’re using? What trending topics are being discussed in your communities of interest?
Your social media presence gives your business a voice, quite literally.
Identifying and using these themes, while making them accessible via blog, video, infographic or social posts is the best way to get people talking about your brand, service or company.
The three types of content that need to be in your queue are:
Engaging – content that’s curated in order to start a conversation and encourage brand interaction with your audience
Evergreen – content based around keywords that doesn’t have an expiration date and can be revisited or updated so that it always stays fresh
Events – time-sensitive content that’s geared around an event (think sale) or industry update
A strong content team (including talented graphic designers) will drastically improve the effectiveness of your social media strategy.
Assess, Optimize, Assess Again
How do you know if your social media strategy is working?
After several social media posts are painstakingly curated, tailored to your audience, posted at the right time, using colorful and compelling language with beautiful and captivating graphics, its time to audit your hard work.
If a post with a video generated many more impressions than one with just text, you’ll know to invest more time in creating visual assets. When posting during peak scroll hours, your impressions will tell you if your community prefers social media during their morning commute or lunch time.
Social media is hard work. But it’s also fun. Let the experts at Imprint help guide the way for you.
After figuring out what works best, optimize your social media strategy to meet your goals. It’s most important to remember that social media is dynamic and ever-changing; the method to your madness should too.
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