Social Media Marketing

Maximize your social media marketing

The number of total social media users across all platforms is 3.96 billion and continues to increase making social media an essential part of modern business.

Incorporating social media into your marketing strategy is crucial for any business. It has become increasingly popular in recent years due to its many benefits:

• Increase in social media usage: The number of people using social media has grown rapidly over the past decade, providing businesses with a large potential audience to reach.The amount of time people spend on social media across all platforms is at an all time high at 95 minutes per day. As more and more people spend time on social media, it has become an increasingly important channel for businesses to connect with their customers.
• Greater targeting capabilities: Social media platforms have become increasingly sophisticated in their targeting capabilities, allowing businesses to reach their desired audience more effectively. Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn offer a wide range of demographic and interest-based targeting options.
• Cost-effectiveness: Social media advertising is generally more cost-effective than traditional forms of advertising like television and print. With social media advertising, businesses can reach a large audience at a fraction of the cost of traditional media.
• Increased engagement: Social media platforms allow for two-way communication between businesses and their customers, which leads to increased engagement and relationship building. This allows businesses to better understand their audience and tailor their marketing strategies to better meet their needs.
• Greater ROI: As social media marketing has become more sophisticated, businesses are able to track and measure their return on investment more effectively. This has led to an increased understanding of the value that social media marketing can bring to a business.
• Innovation: Social media platforms are constantly evolving and launching new features. For example, TikTok has been the real winner for social media innovation with its short form interactive video content and is the fastest-growing social network with a 105% user growth ratein the US over the past two years. This has forced social media staples like Instagram to innovate which resulted in Reels and IGTV.

Although social media is widely used, blindly throwing your marketing dollars to each one available isn’t advised. To maximize your social media marketing you need to understand your customers, know your brand voice and stay organized with a content calendar.

Who are your customers?

First, it's important to have a clear understanding of who your target audience is.

Who are your customers?

What are their interests?

What platforms do they use?

Having a clear understanding of your target audience is crucial for creating effective marketing campaigns on social media. By knowing who your target audience is, you can tailor your content to their specific interests, needs, and pain points. This makes it more likely that they will engage with your content and ultimately become customers.

Not all social media platforms are created equally. Different platforms have different user demographics and behaviors, and it's important to choose the platforms where your audience is most active. For example, if your target audience is mainly composed of young people, platforms like TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat might be more effective than Facebook or LinkedIn.

Determining which platforms to invest in for your business starts with a thorough understanding of your target audience. Here are some strategies for gaining more valuable insight into your audience:

• Conduct market research: Use surveys, interviews, and focus groups to gather information about your target audience, including their demographics, interests, pain points, and social media habits.
• Analyze your website data: Use tools like Google Analytics to track your website traffic and understand where your audience is coming from, what pages they visit, and how long they stay on your site.
• Look at your competitors: Analyze your competitors' social media profiles and see what type of content and strategies they use to engage their audience.
• Utilize social media analytics: Use the built-in analytics tools on different platforms to see the demographics of your followers and audience, as well as their behavior patterns and engagement levels.
• Monitor online conversations: Use tools like Hootsuite or Sprout Social to track mentions of your brand and industry keywords on social media and other online platforms. This can help you understand what people are saying about your brand and industry and identify key topics and trends.
• Listen to customer feedback: Use feedback channels like email, surveys, and social media to gather customer feedback and understand their needs, wants, and pain points.

By utilizing these methods, you can gain a deeper understanding of your target audience and make informed decisions about which platforms to invest in and help guide you when creating content.

What is your brand voice?

“A brand voice represents the personality of a company, business, and product. In addition to the logo, colors, slogan, and tagline that make up a brand story, the brand voice is what binds it all together. What you say and how you say it will set the brand tone and is essential in forming your brand identity. A brand voice helps consumers identify your brand from others. Just like your voice is distinguishable from other people, so is your company brand voice and tone.”

Your brand voice is your businesses’ personality. Whether it's your logo, fonts, images, or the tone you use in your blogs, everything you create online reflects your business’ personality. Keeping things consistent across different social platforms is the tricky part. along with consistency to establish a consistent brand voice and image across all of your social media platforms. This will help to build brand recognition and trust with your audience. For example: Use the same profile picture and cover photo across all platforms, and make sure that your bio includes all the important information about your business.

Establishing a consistent brand voice when developing a social media marketing strategy can be tricky can be done in the following ways:

• Develop a brand voice and tone guide: Create a document that outlines the key elements of your brand voice and tone, including personality, language, and tone. This guide should be used to ensure consistency across all of your social media channels.
• Use the same profile picture and cover photo: Use the same profile picture and cover photo across all platforms to ensure consistency and build recognition.
• Use the same bio: Use the same bio across all platforms and ensure that it includes all the important information about your business.
• Use a consistent writing style: Use a consistent writing style across all platforms and ensure that all text and copy aligns with your brand's voice and tone.
• Use consistent visuals: Use consistent visuals and color schemes across all platforms to further reinforce your brand identity.
• Train your team: Ensure that your team is trained on the key elements of your brand voice and tone, and that they understand how to use it effectively on social media.
• Monitoring and adjust: Regularly monitor your social media channels to ensure that your brand voice and tone are being consistently applied, and make adjustments as necessary.

These steps can help you establish a consistent brand voice across your social media channels. A consistent brand voice not only helps to build trust and recognition, but it also helps to create a sense of familiarity and belonging to customers and followers.

Create a social content calendar

Having a well planned social media content calendar will help you to stay organized, consistent, and efficient in your social media marketing efforts. You can use the calendar to plan and schedule content for each social media platform you choose to participate in. One of the most fundamental parts to any marketing plan is having a clear plan of action to help achieve your business goals. Besides the type of content you'll post, the platform, the date and time, your content calendar should include:

Staying on top of current events and trends: Social media is constantly evolving and it can be challenging to stay up to date with the latest news, events, and trends to ensure your content is timely and relevant. Follow your competitors and look at their reviews.

Balancing evergreen and timely content: Your calendar should include a mix of evergreen content (content that is always relevant) and timely content (content that is relevant to current events or trends), which can be challenging to balance.

Creating a consistent brand voice: Like mentioned earlier, find your brand voice and stay consistent. It can be difficult to ensure all content posted on social media aligns with your brand's voice and message.

Coordinating with other teams: With remote work becoming more and more common, making sure your team receives the latest updates on the brand guidelines is important. Make sure you are coordinating with your team as well as others such as product teams, events teams, or PR teams.

Measuring performance: It's important to measure the performance of your social media content and adjust your strategy accordingly. Determine what metrics to track, how to track them and how to act on the insights you gain. This makes your social media content calendar less concrete and always changing.

Keeping up with algorithm changes: Social media algorithms on sites like Facebook are constantly changing, which can affect the visibility and reach of your content. Similar to making adjustments based on ad performance, keep up with the latest updates and trends for each platform. Luckily most of them will inform you what the changes are so you aren’t always searching for them.