Conventional search engines are losing the battle regarding consumers looking for new brands and products. Consequently, businesses are investing in social media strategy to get the maximum potential of digital marketing.
Social media marketing should be at the top of your priorities regardless of what you do or what you sell. It’s no longer an option or a prospective marketing channel; social media marketing is the present and future of digital marketing.
Social media is a dominant force in the overall marketing world, let alone the pixel realm of digital marketing. 60.6% of the world’s population and 92.7% of all internet users are on social media platforms.
Businesses are spending millions on social media marketing because collectively, users spend 11.5 billion— Yes! Billion with a B— hours on social media daily. Let that sink in for a moment. What’s astonishing is that there are still a lot of businesses that are not doing justice with their social media strategy.
If you are a business lacking to meet the social media targets or a marketer unable to make a mark, this blog will help you. Disclaimer: Social media is a volatile market, so this is not an ultimate guide, as things can change anytime.
What is social media marketing, and why is it important for your business?
Social media marketing is a set of practices and efforts businesses put in motion to promote their brand and products through social media channels like Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and Twitter.
Marketers invest in content planning, social media management tools like Adublisher, posting calendars, and analytical data, and implement several other strategies to achieve their social media targets. Social media is the best marketing channel for brand awareness, promotions, customer retention, and numerous other benefits.
Why is social media important for your business?
Let’s dive into some primary reasons businesses should fuss more about social media marketing.
(Data Source WordStream)
Introduce your brand to the world.
Since social media is most internet users’ go-to source of brand information, it is only logical to invest in social media strategy to create brand awareness. Social media is a must-have for reaching your current and prospective customers if you are a startup or an entrepreneur.
According to Forbes, 90% of social media users follow at least one brand on their accounts. In addition, Instagram and Pinterest are the go-to platforms for their users to find new products and research brands.
Show the human side of your brand.
Social media is a bridge between consumers and brands to commission a trusting relationship by showing their human side. Consumers feel confident buying from brands where they can connect without the corporate wall.
Posting regularly, going live, answering their questions on the go, and offering educational content consistently fosters a lasting relationship. Large corporations are making strides by adopting this strategy.
Direct users to your blog.
Blogs and a strong social media presence are very important for businesses. The main problem with blogs is the lack of traffic. Social media is a potent source to direct new readers to blog sites.
The combination of SEO-optimized blogs and social media marketing is a star duo guaranteed to bring maximum organic reach to both virtual presences.
Lead people to make conversions.
Social media is the second most successful tool for getting maximum conversion and nurturing leads after email marketing. Marketers use social media to attract viewers to their products by posting eye-candy posts and engaging content.
Moreover, shop features, DMs, link posts, bold call-to-action, and interactive content bring in many business leads that can be converted easily if you play your cards right.
Innovative social media strategies for modern marketers.
This blog will share ten innovative strategies with our readers to help them create a successful social media marketing strategy.
Find out your ideal consumer.
A well-known word of advice in business is never to compromise quality for quantity. In the world of social media, a common misconception is that the river runs opposite for social media followers. A 1000 fake followers are nothing compared to 10 loyal customers always returning to you for insights and problem-solving.
Businesses buy fake followers and end up doing more damage to their brand image than good. The best practice in this case is to develop a follower base of loyal, retainable consumers. In order to do that, brands need to analyze their audience precisely.
Analyze your past performances to find your ideal consumer. Creating an ideal consumer persona helps brands create content and develop a game plan that clicks. A targeted marketing campaign gets 77% more return on investment(ROI). So, have a clear persona of your ideal consumer in mind when curating content for social media posts.
Know what you want from social media strategy.
What is the difference between a teenager sharing a picture on social media and a business profile sharing a product post? Goals. Goals separate branded posts from ordinary posts published randomly.
Setting goals early helps businesses steer their efforts in the right direction and pace the progress accordingly. Keeping in mind the consumer persona, set clear SMART goals for your social media marketing strategy.
Suppose you want more engagements, better leads, more conversions, maximum organic reach, or just interacting with your audience. All of these goals have different approaches, and depending on these goals, assign different KPIs to different social media channels.
The most important thing to consider when setting goals is authenticity and realization. Don’t make bold claims and set targets so high that you can’t reach them. Keep things simple, clear, and believable.
Choose the right mix of social media platforms.
Finding the right social media platforms for your strategy is as important as finding the right audience. Each network is unique, and although most users are the same, they behave unambiguously on each social media channel.
Choose the right mix of social media platforms for your strategy based on your audience and set of goals. For better understanding, suppose you want to sell more beauty products. Instagram, Pinterest, and Facebook should be the center of your attention.
(Data source SproutSocial)
In the same vein, if you want more traffic, Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter are suitable options. For corporate leads and connections, businesses tend to lean towards LinkedIn. It’s clear that what you want will define where your content will be posted. You can’t share your link on Instagram, so posting your blog in the bio of your account and expecting traffic is like looking for a unicorn.
Maintain regular appearances at the right time.
Posting content at the right time is the key to staying in touch with your audience. If you are not posting regularly, you will get buried in the quintillion bits of data posted daily. According to a SproutSocial survey, 81% of marketers say that posting regularly positively affects their goals.
When it comes to posting consistency, the one-size-fits-all policy doesn’t hold any strength in social media marketing. Posting a couple of posts might be enough for a platform, but it’s not even close to the ideal posts of a more active social media platform like Twitter— 5-15 posts daily.
What is more important than consistency in posting at the right time? If you post 10 posts at the wrong time and your competitors only post a few at the right time. You will see only a marginal engagement as compared to them.
Take your customer care to the next step.
Customer satisfaction is the ultimate holy grail of success in every business, regardless of who and what they are. Customers consider customer support’s response time a crucial factor when grading a brand.
Studies show that 75% of customers expect brands to respond to their inquiries in the first 24 hours. Thus, upgrading your response time is important because tech-savvy consumers can easily go to social media and test your customer care efforts.
In recent years, social media has become the most popular customer service channel for users, as 67% of users prefer contacting brands through social channels. It is pivotal for businesses to share their burden with social media management tools like Adublisher and spend time answering consumer requests.
Create informative content.
There is nothing more frustrating for consumers than seeing branded posts from businesses and being shoved by ads every second. As a result, organic searches have a 53% more conversion rate than paid content.
The same trend can be observed in social media, where organic posts have a higher reach and conversion rate than content creators and paid posts. However, getting organic reach is not an easy task. Engaging and informative social media posts are one of the best ways to get organic reach.
Create posts that educate the audience and help them overcome certain problems in their daily life. Edutainment is rising to fame from kid’s channels to social media platforms for adults. Invest in offering meaningful solutions to your audience.
Don’t blow your own trumpet.
When curating useful content, focus on benefits instead of features. Instead of telling them what your product does, highlight their pain points and help them relate to your content. Once you have established that, offer them a solution in the form of your product.
Publishing informative content focused on users’ issues and offering them solutions will do wonders for your brand’s reputation. It will create your status as the industry expert, allowing you to influence their buying decisions.
Share your burden with Adublisher.
Social media marketing is a very tiring job. Instead of doing everything yourself and falling short, share your burden with Adublisher. Adublisher is a marketer-friendly social media scheduling tool helping businesses and marketing teams.
Marketers can get ahead of the competition by creating content and scheduling it with Adublisher uninterrupted posting. Adublisher helps marketers utilize the combined power of social media and blogs with RSS Feed Scheduling. Moreover, you can schedule hundreds of images and posts for the entire month in a single sitting.
Invest in short videos.
Video content is the most popular and widely used content type among marketers, and rightly so, as 82.5% of all web traffic comes from videos. Successful brands are using videos to educate consumers about the detailed features of their products and services.
During the pandemic, we saw a staggering increase in short-form videos across all social media platforms after the booming success of TikTok. Instagram soon followed the trend with Reels, and now both TikTok and Instagram are the top social media platforms regarding the most popular content type— short videos.
Businesses can convey their message better with short videos because 68% of the viewers will cheerfully watch a branded video if it’s under 60 seconds. Thus, investing in short-form video marketing is the best and most effective way to reach your audience.
Uplift your sales with social commerce.
Social commerce is the solution all ecommerce businesses and entrepreneurs have been looking for years. The main problem with ecommerce is cart abandonment. The 70.19% cart abandonment rate is alarming for the ecommerce industry.
Contrary to that, social commerce makes the checkout process— the largest contributor to cart abandonment— frictionless, boosting sales. Furthermore, 50% of GenZ and millennials make purchases on social media. The cherry on the top is that 70% of customers use social media to recommend the brands they made a purchase from.
Conclusion.
Social media is in a state of constant change and improvement. With the advancement of AI and the integration of AI-powered tools like chatbots, who knows where social media will be in a few months?
Businesses need to keep a keen eye out for new trends and adjust accordingly. Be flexible and scalable in your social media strategy. Leverage social commerce, video marketing, creative content, and social media management tools like Adublisher for better results.
Statistical Data Sources.