One of the powers that social media advertising allows is that it could explode your online presence and reach millions of customers, where they spend their time online.
Social media marketing is one of the greatest ways to increase your brand awareness, bring in new customers, and build ongoing relationships with your existing ones.
The downside? Social media management, goes beyond just boosting posts on Facebook, overall it isn't easy or straightforward as we would like it to be. It surely doesn’t mean that you’re guaranteed high return on investment, especially if you are getting started.
So how can we acheive social media marketing success in 2024?
It begins and ends with an evidence-based approach — and that’s exactly what we’re going to explore here in this step-by-step guide. If you want to level up your social media marketing strategy in 2024 and see results that you see them working for you and your business, read on.
What is social media marketing?
If you are new to the idea of social media marketing, it involves using a social media platform (like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok) to connect with your target audience online. Brands can use social media to build brand awareness, drive traffic to their website, generate sales, and increase engagement with new customer and reengagement with current customers.
Put simply, there are two forms of social media marketing: organic and paid marketing.
Organic social media marketing involves reaching your audience through the free means available on the social network. This could include adding an image gallery to your Facebook page, adding a video to your Stories, sharing a blog post on LinkedIn (with a link to your full blog on your website), or adding products to your posts through Shopping.
Paid social media marketing is when you pay to promote your brand on social media and operate on a bidding system. Some of the most popular types of paid social media ads include branded content, sponsored posts, sponsored stories and sponsored InMails (on LinkedIn).
Both are needed in a robust social media marketing strategy. Both types aim to drive new customers into every step of your ideal customer journey and marketing funnel.
How to create a social media marketing strategy.
First, we need to set the right goals
One of the biggest reasons some business owners can feel lost creating a social media marketing strategy isn’t targeting, content, or even ad spending. It’s because some objectives don’t match the ideal end result. Coming up with a well-performing social media marketing strategy means having your goals in place before you make the game plan — and ensuring they tie into your broader business goals. If you don't have a game plan or are not sure where to begin, consider engaging a marketing agency or consultant to help you.
Let’s use an example...
You're a local cafe that’s looking to grow in 2024. To grow your business, you need to find new customers and bring them in to consume your awesome food. However, if you’re constantly posting content on social media to the same followers, chances are you’re not reaching new people.. Next steps would be to review your business goals, and consider where your social media strategy fits into the bigger picture.
It could be:
Improving loyalty with your existing customers through engagement and repeat purchases
Driving more qualified web traffic to your website
Increasing brand awareness and reach to new followers
Delivering a first-class customer experience with news and updates
Secondly, pick the right social media platforms
The right social media channel makes a big difference. There’s no point investing your time and resources into advertising on Instagram if you’re trying to get white-collar workers to download an eBook. The same goes for posting mouth-watering snaps from your cafe on LinkedIn.
So how do you select the right social networks for your business?
Each social media platform has a specific user demographic and a specific set of benefits it offers as a marketing channel. It all comes down to looking at what the platform offers and who its audience is, then matching this up with yours.
If in doubt, we can help you focus on a single social media platform first. It’s far better to do one platform well than to be on every channel and do none well.
Number 3 - Establish your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
KPIs are important for social media marketing success. An evidence-based social media marketing strategy will help your brand tackle its goals while providing a benchmark to measure your success. One of the biggest mistakes brands make is not tracking social media metrics, or tracking only vanity numbers, such as followers or likes.
Dig deeper to uncover the metrics that matter to your business
For example:
How many users are coming through to your website from social media
Engagement (the total number of social interactions divided by the number of impressions your post received)
Reach and impressions for your posts
Mentions of your brand on social media
Four, keep an eye on the competition
Social media is a busy space and there are many brands out there advertising to the same users, which means you need to know what your competitors are posting, in order to stand out.
Luckily, there are plenty of ways you can monitor the activity of other brands:
Follow them on social media
Set up social listening for competitors on your social media management platform
Browse Ad Library to see which ads they’re running
Run a search for their brand name and hashtag
Five, post and engage with your audience regularly
If you don't have enough time to post content regularly, you’ll lose your reach and your followers will be less likely to see your content in the future — not to mention your brand will slowly but surely slip to the back of peoples’ minds.
On top of keeping to a schedule as part of your social strategy, interaction with your followers helps drive the algorithm and shows people on the fence that you care and are a personable brand. Responding to comments promptly shows that you are highly active on the platform (why we mentioned previously to start with one platform and build it well).
Lastly, review and optimise
Like any digital marketing channel, there’s no one-size-fits-all approach. You need to regularly review your performance to understand who your target audience is, which posts work well, when to post, and so on.
Monitoring your performance metrics allows you to be reactive and get the most out of your campaigns in the short term while ensuring your social media outcomes are lining up with your broader business objectives in the long term.
What are the best social platforms for marketing?
If you want to improve your marketing activity, you will need to have a social presence on either Facebook, Instagram or LinkedIn — or a combination of the three. These are the best social media channels for marketing and are great for engagement, traffic, leads and sales.
Benefits of Facebook
Diverse content formats. Facebook has a list of different post and ad formats, which makes it the most versatile platform out there for social media marketing. On top of the basic image, video and link posts, you can make carousels (multi-image posts), instant experiences, and product collections — which means there are lots of ways to increase engagement, traffic and sales from your content.
2.7 billion users actively use Facebook. If you want to reach as many people as possible with your brand, this platform is undeniably the best way to do so.
Its user base is broad. Facebook’s demographics cover the widest ground of any social media network out there.
Which brands should use Facebook?
If you’re not sure which platform to use, this is probably your safest bet as you’re likely to find a large percentage of your target audience on this platform. As a bonus, you can kill two birds with one stone with Facebook Ads, and advertise your business on Facebook and Instagram.
Benefits of Instagram
It’s incredibly visual. If you’re selling beautiful products or services, then this is the perfect place to show off your goods. People come to Instagram to browse through engaging videos and images, so you have the best chance of converting them to customers if your products look amazing.
The audience is mostly younger and female. While the people on here aren’t as young as TikTok or Snapchat, Instagram’s users are pretty heavily concentrated in the 18-35-year-old bracket. More women are also on Instagram compared to men, which makes it ideal if this is your target demographic.
Instagram Shopping. Instagram Shopping is definitely the best shopping tool of all the mainstream social media platforms. If you have this feature enabled, you can add a link to your products on every social media post.
Which brands should use Instagram?
If you have a product or service that looks great, like a cafe, restaurant, gym, pilates studio, retail store or eCommerce store, you’d be doing yourself a disservice not to use Instagram.
Benefits of LinkedIn
It’s a niche platform. LinkedIn was designed with a specific goal in mind: to help professionals network, learn, and find jobs. With over 675 million users, this is single-handedly the world’s largest and most effective platform to reach this audience.
LinkedIn users are influential. 4 in 5 LinkedIn users drive business choices in their organisation, making it the perfect place to go if you want to increase brand awareness among decision-makers.
Laser-focused advertising. LinkedIn Advertising gives brands access to a ton of powerful advertising features. You can target an audience by job title or industry, upload your existing contacts, or send a message directly to a user’s LinkedIn inbox with Sponsored InMail.
Which brands should use LinkedIn?
If you’re a B2B business looking for leads, LinkedIn was made for you. However, LinkedIn advertising is typically more expensive than other platforms, so you must have a sharp strategy in place to get solid returns.
How to create a social media content strategy
High-quality content. High-quality content. High-quality content. This is the foundation of a well-performing social media marketing strategy. It doesn’t matter which social media platforms you’re using, or who your target audience is high-quality content is king.
So how do you create and share the right social content for your followers?
First, get to know the platform
The most effective content on LinkedIn isn’t the same as Facebook. Likewise, what works on Facebook will probably fall flat on Instagram. Get to know the platform before a social media page is created for your business. Time is needed to observe your target audience, see how they’re posting, what hashtags they’re using, and the types of content they engage with and share (such as videos, images, blog posts etc.) This will help you get started on the right path with your social media marketing plan.
Two, stick to social media content themes
The best brands on social media all have this thing in common: they’re consistent with the type of content they post. Focus on key content pillars and types of content for your social media marketing strategy: for example, share user-generated content, product videos, customer reviews, and a ‘how to’ guide once a week.
If all this is a bit overwhelming, try engaging with a marketing agency to schedule your posts in advance. This ensures your business hits all the different themes in your content calendar (if you don't have a consistent content calendar, we can help)
Thirdly, share user-generated content (UGC)
It’s great to have beautiful branded content, but it’s even better when your existing customers do the selling for you. UGC is a fantastic way to add social proof to your brand while engaging with your current customers by sharing their images.
Tip: comment on posts that your users share, even if you don’t share them on your official account. A simple “Thanks for sharing” can make a huge difference in terms of brand sentiment and engagement.
Lastly, make use of short-form Stories
Try to use Stories whenever possible in your content strategy. If you’re stuck for ideas, here are a few to help get you started:
Behind-the-scenes content
Teaser for new product launches
Share user-generated content from real people
Interviews or live streams of events
Recipes or ‘how to guides'
Time-sensitive offers
All of the above take time and resources to create on a consistent basis but the icing on the cake is that Stories also appear first on the newsfeed, which can help keep your business top-of-mind amongst your social media followers.
Are you ready to unleash the power of social media marketing in 2024?
Social media marketing, done well, is a powerful tool to have for your business. Unfortunately, it's by no means an easy task and needs a lot of time to do it well over long periods.
When you're ready to create a steady stream of leads and revenue from social media marketing, while also building up brand awareness, let us know we will help you build a social media strategy that reaches your target audience and delivers results.
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