Social media marketing is a necessary part of businesses because more than half of the world population, 4.62 billion people (58.4%), use social media and spend an average of 2 hours and 27 minutes daily. Those approximately 2.5 hours spent on social media offer an excellent opportunity for businesses to create brand awareness, build customer relationships and make sales within social media platforms.
Here are some of the most important tips to market your businesses:
- Create a social media marketing plan
Creating a social media marketing plan is the first step every business needs to take because a good business strategy is impossible without having a good plan. Firstly, you need to define your goals and objectives. You should write your goals using the SMART framework, which should be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely. Make sure to create your goal based on metrics that bring real impacts to your business. For example, you can start with the goal of reaching out to customers or increasing conversion rates rather than directly aiming to gain likes. After identifying your social media marketing goals, you need to explore and see how similar businesses use social media to create unique content. The competitive analysis also helps you understand which social media marketing strategies work well and which don’t work for similar businesses. Besides analyzing the use of social media of similar businesses, try to look at businesses in other industries and get inspired by their success stories.
The social media calendar is another great tool that helps you plan and post your content to the different social media platforms at the right time. Use the 80-20 rule to create content meaning 80% of your content should inform, entertain, or educate and only 20% for promoting your brand or selling your products.
- Choose the right social media platforms
In order to decide which social media platforms are right for your business, it is essential to research demographic information for all the major social media networks and learn where your target audience spends their time. Always do extra research to understand well the presence of your target audience on social media and then accordingly decide which social media channels are right for your business. Make sure you don’t make assumptions about which social media platforms your audience spends their time on. For example, you might assume that Gen Z is active mainly on Instagram and Tik Tok skipping Facebook. But the data in 2022 shows that 481.1 million Facebook users are aged 18 -24. Or you might think if your audience is baby boomers, you shouldn’t focus on social networks. But you should because boomers are active users of Facebook and Pinterest. Thus, your business can have a presence on different platforms to reach different audiences for various purposes.
- Learn about your target audience
One of the main ways of using social media effectively for your business is through micro-targeting your audience. But for this, you need to know who your audience is. Using data from your current customers is the initial and fastest way to learn about your audience. For more detailed information, you can use data provided by social media analytics to discover who purchases and interacts with you online. Hootsuite insights can help you to learn about the top-ranked hashtags, sites, and keywords related to your business that people search.
Once you receive a clear picture of your audience, you can use social media power to expand your audience, reaching out to more customers with similar characteristics.
- Establish relationships with your audience
One of the unique advantages of social media marketing for your business is that it allows you to talk with your customers/followers and establish relationships with them over time. Data shows that in 2021 more than 44% of internet users used social media to research brands discovering what they are about and their values. Engaging with your followers is recommended to increase your trust and reliability. As your followers like and share your content, your business ranks top in social algorithms. Moreover, engagement with followers is considered one of the main signals for Facebook to decide which post should go first on users’ newsfeeds. Therefore, establishing relationships with your audience makes them more likely to see your content. Building relationships creates an online community that leads to ongoing sales over time. There are different ways to build a relationship with your followers other than just responding to their comments:
- Create a group on Facebook or other social networks
- Connect with other entrepreneurs and influencers in your industry
- Tag your followers in your posts and stories (contests & branded hashtags)
- Use social media built-in interactive tools (Twitter polls & Instagram Stories)
- Keep up with trends
Paying attention to new trends on social media helps you understand what followers are looking for and create your content according to your audience’s needs. It is essential to be aware of your audience’s needs because they are changing daily. In 2022 social listening has become an excellent tool for businesses to gather information about their audience needs and understand what the audience wants to see in brands’ content.
- Change post formats
You must change your social media post format from time to time as it helps you understand which format works well for different content and social channels. For example, images to video, texts to posters, or from GIFs to GPG, etc. Try to use different tools and functions offered by social media platforms, such as Reels, Stories, Live Video, etc., to make diverse content. Other than switching up the format of the posts, your posts must be inclusive and accessible for your audience to make them relatable.
- Use social commerce to sell your products
Using social commerce offered by social media marketing, you can sell your products directly from social channels. According to a social sprout survey, 98% of customers plan to make their purchase on social media, which is an excellent chance for your businesses to increase sales using social commerce. You can use different social shopping tools, including Instagram Shopping, Instagram Live Shopping, Facebook Shops, etc., to sell your products on social platforms.
- Use the right tools to increase the effectiveness of social media marketing
There are a lot of tools that can help you to use social media marketing to boost your business without having a completed social media marketing team. Following are some of the primary and most effective tools used for social media marketing:
- Hootsuite is one of the main tools that can help you to control multiple social media platforms from one dashboard. Using Hootsuite, you can respond and interact with your audience on various platforms without logging into each separately, which consumes a lot of time and energy.
- Collecting all your analytics data in one place can also help you measure your social media marketing effectiveness. Hootsuite Insights powered by Brand watch helps you measure how well you interact with your followers. Using Hootsuite Analytics, you can measure your performance on social media platforms.
- VSCO and Color Story are some of the helpful tools to use for creating interacting and eye-catching images for your posts.
- BuzzSumo and Pocket are the content curation tools you can use to create interesting and unique content daily.
No matter how big or small your business is, social media tools can help you to raise awareness about your brand, interact with your audience, reach out to a new potential audience and boost your business.
If you want to boost your business, then social media marketing services offered by E – vision can help you develop your business.
