10 Practical Tips for a Successful Social Media Marketing Campaign
Want it or not, social media marketing is obviously a part of our lives nowadays and successful social media marketing is exactly what you need for your business to grow. Never before in the history of entrepreneurship has there been an easier way to be able to instantly access hundreds of million customers around the world. The popularity of social media has discovered a new entirely industry that is social media marketing. For the businesses that realized the potential of digital marketing and have invested in the beginning stage in the early days of the 2010s, they have the big advantage of the knowledge and also their brand in the digital world. But what happened for new businesses, a new start-up.. these companies just departure on the journey of building up the business. And you can easily see the knowledge and also experience these companies easy to go the uncertain paths.
Do you know according to Pew Research, 7 in 10 Americans use social media in 2020, compared with only 5% in 2005? It turns out social media marketing is an absolutely essential strategy of advertising these time rounds.
There are always many obstacles the business owners have to face to be able to achieve a successful social media marketing campaign such as: the time, quality content, handling the limited budget, ad spending. if handled incorrectly can lead you to lose all your spending money, team effort, and ultimately the customers won’t know about your brand and your service.
How can we run successful social media marketing?
Super easy, check our 10 easy tips as below to execute your social media marketing strategy and see the rapid increase in your ROIs.
1. Set your benchmarks
The first thing before starting anything in terms of doing business is that you need to have a plan and goals in mind first, and social media marketing’s no different.
It’s like you come to the bus station but don’t have the destination you can’t measure or evolve your strategies over time if you don’t have strong goals, to begin with.
Furthermore, your social media goals should align with your overall marketing efforts and strategies.
The SMART goal is the best to practice. To make sure your goals are clear and reachable, each one should be:
– Specific (simple, sensible, significant), write down a clear plan of what you want.
– Measurable (meaningful, motivating), estimate the budget, manpower. Make sure your goals relate to your ultimate plan.
– Attainable (agreed, attainable). Working hard to hit a goal is productive, but don’t go overboard with expectations.
– Relevant (reasonable, realistic, and resourced, results-based).
– Time-bound (time-based, time-limited) Stay on track with your time.
2. Know your audience
Let me get it straight, your message won’t be effective unless it’s specifically designed for who you are trying to target. One of the best ways to successful market research is identifying the buyer personas of your target audience is a critical part of any market research.
By developing a relevant buyer persona, you know how to attract the attention of your target audience.
There is a couple of essential parts of information that can help you to understand your audience:
– Research your happy clients. The one that has been pleased by a company’s product or service are the best example when developing a buyer persona. Study their feedback, collect their information on social media, and their goals to understand who you should be targeting.
– Analyze this data for trends (behaviors, age groups, occupational industry groups)
3. Choose your channels
Well, if you think you can manage well all types of social media platforms out there, good luck. It’s usually a mistake to try to organize your content and followers on plenty of different types of social media channels. It is common to see that the person managing the social media ended up with overload, off track and you left behind your competitor.
Remember, not every social media platform is suitable for your business or the set goals. For instance, if you are selling the shoes you should put the effort into the platforms such as Instagram or Facebook instead of LinkedIn which is for careers or business networking. The following list gives you the overlook of some of the most popular social media platforms nowadays:
Facebook: The world’s most popular social media network with more than 2 billion users and also has the most regular users.
Instagram: With 1 billion monthly active users, Instagram is one of the hottest social media platforms at the moment.
LinkedIn: With more than 500 million users and 250 million active users, it is the world’s largest careers network at the moment.
Twitter: With a limit of 280 characters per tweet, Twitter is known for being unique and effective. In 2019, the social network’s users are projected to reach 275 million monthly active users worldwide. Despite audience growth woes and revenue struggles, Twitter is still one of the leading social networks worldwide and a popular marketing channel.
Snapchat: With the unique feature such as content disappearing is especially popular with younger users such as teenagers.
YouTube: If your brand has the resources or in-house team, you should not miss creating and updating relevant videos about the brand and your service or products.
4. Consider a manager
The growth of social media has increased rapidly over the last ten years, and as a result, so has the need for qualified people to manage and organize all the social media channels. Just like there is a manager in place to lead your sales team, a social media manager needs to be put in place to manage and develop your social media presence and lead your social media team.
There are some following factors that you may consider when you plan to hire a social media in-house manager
Strategic mindset: You should have a clear discussion about the short and long-range goals. The social media manager needs to understand how to lay outposts, write content, choose or create the right video graphics/photo, and engage with followers in a way that brings them toward success.
Management skills: To be able to run a successful social media campaign requires someone that has a proper strategy. They need to stay on track, analyze, focus, and real-time updating not like “I want to post when I want to”.
5. Work with an influencer
In a way that is easy to understand, the businesses pay for influencers a certain amount of money depends on how popular the influencers are which aims to promote these business brands. Cooperating with the social media influencer in your niche is probably the best way to connect with your customers.
If you are a small business, using a celebrity for your marketing strategy could be way more expensive with your limited budget. The best option for you is to cooperate with those influencers who are popular in your niche products. The one with an average follower (micro-influencer) with the follower ranges from 3 to 100k followers could be ideal at the beginning of your marketing campaign.
Why do we advise you about this? The answer is very simple, these influencers are still not really popular so it’s easier for you in dealing with publishing the post. Have you ever heard the sentence ” many a little makes a mickle; slow and steady wins the race”. For instance, if you are selling sports drinks and you are cooperating with a micro-influencer in the sports field, you can see your drinks reaching out with thousand and thousand of potential customers for every post. And the best thing is, you don’t spend a fortune to pay for the influencer in this way. Your micro-influencer marketing campaign will help you attain a suitable influencer that is considerably cheaper to work with while still getting the best brand promotion.
6. Deliver Consistently
If you’re serious about developing your social media game, then delivering consistency is the key factor.
Many start-ups and small businesses consider social media marketing as a cheap and cheerful way to share information about your brand. In reality, even though social media can be a great way for you to connect and interact with your audience on a limited budget, it takes a lot of time. If you’re serious in developing social feeds as such a way for your brand awareness to your business, you’ll need to have a proper plan for keeping your brand consistent.
There are some key factors to achieve brand consistency on social media:
- Make sure all your social media channels look similar and that they match your overall brand identity, including your website, your logo content, or any type of way to communicate to your audience.
- Make sure the post aims at your target audience and how you’ll communicate consistently with those people. For instance, the way you write the content and photography for the Z Generations is totally different from Boomer generations.
- Build up social media content with a clear timeline. Work on ideas in advance and don’t be afraid to repurpose and organize, as long as you are consistent with your overall brand image.
7. Grow an engage audience
Have you ever seen your post on Facebook, Instagram just have a few “likes” and no one even bothers to comment, interact with your post. If it happens like that it may mean that you don’t know your audience well enough. Each business or account is different. Getting to know your audience is the key to knowing what they like, which time they usually are active and interacting with your post..by understanding and practicing it well you can see a big leap in your social media campaign. There are some notes that you need to consider:
Current customers: It’s funny to see many business owners figure a way to get more new customers but they forget their current one. Make sure to keep your current customers happy and follow your social media. Regularly updating your new products/services or the one are on sale, gifts away..will turn many of your current customers to keep buying your products frequently.
If you are struggling with attracting more followers to your page, you may want to consider buying some real followers online. Order and enjoy the benefits of instant followers, which will help to enhance your personal brand reputation and reach a wider audience on platforms such as Instagram.
Paid ads. Organic is awesome but it always takes such a long amount of time to get your brand noticed. If you have a budget, Paid Ads such as Facebook Ads, Instagram Ads…are great ways to reach your buyers that would otherwise never come into contact with your message.
8. Use Analysts
Whenever you are finishing your campaign or you are running the campaign, to be able to improve your social media marketing strategy, you must analyze your results. Otherwise, you won’t have any idea which strategies are really working and which ones are failing. Don’t be afraid to learn from our failures.
There are many social media analytics tools that can help you track your social presence such as HubSpot, Google Analysts, Buzzsumo.. from free to paid version. Depends on your budget but they are all aim to give you the insights information about:
Followers. Compare the change in the number of followers with the old numbers of every platform you are running to, will it reach your target goal?
Likes/comments/shares. Calculate the engagement of your audience with every post. Which content has a large engagement? Which one has less? Check the comment, is it a “spam” comment or a real response from your audiences? Keep notes on which contents have the best performance.
Clicks: This is a critical part of the analysis process. You should have a deep look into your CTR (Click through rate) responses. Which posts have made the customer click to your web or event turn out to buy your products.
Leads: Time for the most important part. Social media marketing is considered as successful if there is an increase in the number of qualified leads for the company. This is the metric that let you know the most about your efforts. If the results were not turned out as you expected. Remember it always takes time to nurture strangers into leads, even how amazing your content is. Be patient sometimes.
9. Get reactive
Social media is growing and developing nonstop.
If you have not reviewed your social marketing strategy for the last few months, well it may be the time for you to overlook it again. When analyzing and improving your marketing strategies, make sure you write it down, focus on metric data, and measurement all the metrics to support your decision.
The data can give you the insights of your audience, your business, and ROI (return on investment) number. It may turn out that things are still going well, however, there are always some things you need to get updated.
By measurement and using your insights metrics through analytical tools, assess what needs to adjust in your strategy. That’s how you learn new trends and keep improving your social media marketing strategy throughout the campaign.
10. Create great content
As you read here, we saved the best for the last one on our list of top 10 tips for successful social media marketing is simply to produce the best and great content ultimately! There is always the right to say content is the king in terms of digital marketing.
Every single content, every post, images, or videos that you post on social media is a reflection of your brand or company, where it’s a beautiful image, a video, or a long text. You should aim to only produce the highest quality content to be pushed out to your followers, subscribers, and customers. Always be hard to yourself about the post, analyst, and update content daily.
Last but not least, our last advice to you, quality over quantity! Focus on building quality content.
Dung Ho is a passionate by heart digital marketer at an SEO agency Vietnam. He focuses on creating brand content that is conversational, engaging, and bring values to people. His passion for visual storytelling and creating a meaningful customer experience has turned him a force to be reckoned with.