The Right Way to Leverage Social Media for Marketing

A woman on her phone with graphics of hearts and likes floating away from her social media accounts.

Social media has become the main avenue for businesses looking to gain a bigger audience and more customers. It’s where most people spend their time and how they consume content. The time for TV, newspapers, and magazines has passed its prime, and audiences are choosing to follow short-form videos, influencers, and Artificial and Virtual Reality instead.

The change has made it more accessible than ever for small businesses and enterprises to gain huge notoriety and followings to promote offers and products. Those businesses that figure out the attention code and leverage social media positively will boost brand awareness and engagement and get a cost-effective solution with measurable Return on Investment (ROI).

See how businesses are leveraging social media for marketing and how direct interaction with target audiences is becoming the main method to attract and convert more customers.

Foundations of an Effective Social Media Strategy

Finding social media success is a process that takes you through difficult decisions and a range of emotions. Having a foundation to always rely on that gives you a structure to continue building is how you’ll navigate the process with ease.

Defining Your Goals

Every social media campaign you put together needs to feed into your larger business goals. Need more site visitors to try and get more sales? Your social media strategy should have a defined goal to increase website traffic. Need to reach a new audience segment for a new product? Create a social campaign to extend your brand awareness.

The same goes for lead generation, sales, and other company goals. Align your social media goals with your broader business objectives, and you’ll achieve your full potential with your social media investment.

Your goals will act as a compass, giving you a general direction to aim for. However, you’ll need more research to know your audience and where to reach them to illuminate the full path ahead.

Understanding Your Audience

You don’t want to waste time, effort, and money creating social media posts that don’t perform well or reach the right people. A buyer persona is a tool to narrow down your audience to ensure your content is relevant and gets engagement.

To create one, you’ll start with demographic data you can gather from competitors. Look through their old posts to see if they mention groups of people or what kind of people are in the videos themselves. You can also look through comments to see what types of people are engaging.

Analytic tools like Google Analytics, Meta Audience Insights, and even personal surveys will make the job easier.

Choosing the Right Platforms

Every platform has a unique audience that decides what is popular and influences the type of content made. TikTok has a younger audience and is primarily used by Gen Z. LinkedIn, on the other hand, is primarily for business professionals and B2B companies.

Your primary objective is to match the platforms to your target audience and goals. If you sell sneakers, you’re better off using TikTok or Instagram. LinkedIn has a more relevant audience if you sell commercial air conditioning services. 

Most of the advice you’ll find on social media emphasizes an omnichannel approach that reaches all the platforms at once. While this may be possible for big brands like Target or Apple, small-to-medium-sized businesses should focus on key channels first, then branch out when finding success.

Content Creation and Planning

The content creation and planning phase is where your research and foundations come to fruition. Armed with a few best practices and tools, you’ll have a consistent flow of high-quality content that resonates with your audience.

Types of Content To Create

Businesses get caught in the content creation trap, constantly feeling the need to make different and “new” content. In most cases, sticking with a type of content and continuously refining the quality is how you’ll grow an audience and achieve your goals.

Here are a few types of content to consider that do well on social media platforms:

  • Educational: Examples include tutorials, how-to guides, and practical tips that provide value to your audience.
  • Entertaining: Examples include memes, challenges, and stories, which help to create a sense of community engagement.
  • Promotional: Examples include product launches, discounts, and testimonials, which attract audiences by showing the value of a product or service.

Sticking with one or two types of content initially will help to ease the creation process. Instead of deciding every day what the video will be, you can narrow down choices that fall within your selected category.

Visual and Video Content

Every platform has slightly different video and photo dimension requirements for great-looking posts. You’ll want to use a social media cheat sheet for quick reference that tells you each platform and the size requirements.

Even simple changes like vertical videos for TikTok versus horizontal videos for YouTube will make your creation process much harder if you don’t know what type of video and visual content to create ahead of time.

New trends, like Instagram Reels, Facebook Live, and short-form videos, are becoming more popular and should be incorporated into your content strategy. Instead of trying to post on every platform, try posting every type of content possible on the platform you choose. For example, you can make content for Instagram posts, Instagram Reels, Instagram Stories, and Instagram Live.

Personalization

The best-performing content on social media is always directed to a specific audience and resonates deeply with their preferences and values. Your content needs to do the same with personalized messaging that lets your audience know you understand who they are. Your research during the foundation stage will help you develop clear messaging.

A great example is the Coca-Cola “Share a Coke” campaign that ran in 2011. Instead of the Coke logo being placed on all the bottles, it was replaced with a person’s name. The campaign encouraged people to buy a Coke for a friend they knew or themselves, who had the name for a personalized experience.

A clothing brand could use the same personalization principles by launching a social media campaign that allows customers to customize apparel with their names or initials. People respond when being addressed more personally compared with a broad campaign appeal.

Content Calendar

Your content calendar is your accountability buddy throughout the content creation and planning process. Every post, story, and reel should be scheduled in advance to create consistency with each platform. The calendar has it all logged for easy reference, so you don’t have to spend time looking through platforms, searching through spreadsheets, or scanning documents.

Have the entire process organized for you with social media tools that include built-in content calendars. Here are some of the more popular choices:

  • Hootsuite: Access to schedule, analyze, and monitor posts across multiple channels from one centralized dashboard. It’s known for its user-friendly interface and deep analytics features.
  • Buffer: A favorite with smaller businesses, Buffer is an intuitive tool with all the content scheduling features you want. Best for those just starting out to schedule social posts.
  • Sprout Social: An all-in-one social media management platform that helps you schedule posts, analyze performance, and engage with your audience across multiple platforms. Best suited for medium-to-large businesses or teams that need advanced tools.

Keep in mind that not all platforms will actually post social media content when you schedule them due to restrictions from the platforms. If you really want a hands-off approach, you’ll need to look at the features of each platform to find the right one for you.

Engagement and Growth Strategies

Unless you actively participate in your social media campaigns, they’ll never reach the level of success you want. You need to engage with your audience and find ways to get more reach and views using best practices.

Building Engagement

Your audience is the lifeline of your social media campaign, and without their support and help, your posts will go unnoticed. Your job is to build authentic and frequent engagement with your audience at every opportunity.

Respond to every comment you receive, even if it’s with one emoji or one word. Anytime a business makes a personal connection with the audience, it increases the chances of engagement and action. The same is true of direct messages inside the platform. You should be directly responding within an hour of any message you receive.

Other great ways to build engagement on social media are through built-in tools, like polls, quizzes, and User-Generated Content that fosters community interaction. These types of content are direct attempts to talk with the audience and relate to their needs and wants.

Influencer Marketing

Influencers have a built-in audience on social media; partnering with them is a way to get in front of your audience immediately. The key is to find influencers that align with the brand’s values. You want to collaborate with influencers who share your passion, whether it’s to educate, entertain, or build community.

A successful influencer relationship isn’t just personal; the results must be aligned with your brand goals. The influencer will promote your service or product with creative content strategies. Here are some common ways businesses are working with influencers:

  • Product reviews
  • Giveaways
  • Exclusive discounts

Leveraging these types of partnerships is a quick way to build trust with an influencer’s authority and to get in front of an established community.

Hashtag Strategy

Social media platforms use hashtags to label content, so viewers can find it more easily. Using a tag like #plumbingtips or local tags like #houston will make your content more discoverable. When a viewer enters your tag into the search bar, your content will pop up.

Content with well-researched hashtags tends to perform better and get more engagement. Viewers are already looking for this type of content and are more likely to comment or take action.

One strategy for using hashtags is to create your own hashtag for a promotion you are running. If someone on social media uses the tag, they get a discount or something special in return.

Paid Promotions

The quickest way to get in front of an audience on social media is to run a paid promotion. Meta is well-known in the marketing industry for having highly targeted ad campaigns that could put your content in front of the exact type of audience who would take action.

They aren’t the only platform anymore that has highly targeted ad campaigns. You’ll find analytic tools inside Instagram, TikTok, and LinkedIn that let you fine-tune your audience preferences.

Even with access to deep analytics, your ads might miss the mark and cost you money. You want to A/B test your ad creatives, like headlines, images, and other copy, to see what resonates and works with your audience. 

Measuring and Refining Your Strategy

Every design, copy, and upload takes time and effort from you and your team. It’s all costing your company resources, especially if you’re running paid ads.

You’ll need to measure and refine your strategy over time to get the most ROI possible with each campaign.

Metrics to Monitor

All the social media platforms collect data on the users who engage with your channels. Tracking these metrics over time is how you’ll measure your campaign progress and success. Built-in tools, like Facebook Analytics, LinkedIn Analytics, and YouTube Studio, can be used to get started.

Here are a few engagement metrics across all platforms that will signal how audiences interact with your content:

  • Likes
  • Followers
  • Comments
  • Shares

Other metrics to follow focus on your overall reach, conversions from the platform, and your return on your investment (ROI). To gain access to the data that would help you track conversions and ROI, you may need external tools to track how social media traffic impacts other assets, like websites.

Iterative Improvements

The last step in refining your social media strategy is building a system for iterative improvements. Ideally, you make small, consistent changes over time that improve your channel performance and build deeper connections with your audience.

To do this, you’ll need to rely on the platform analytics to identify trends and patterns in audience behavior. You’ll start to notice that your audience responds positively to certain types of posts you make or certain subjects you talk about.

Use this data to improve your future posts by slowly adding observations from the data. Get the most from the process by conducting regular strategy reviews that compare your evolving company goals with the content and results produced.

Legal and Ethical Considerations

Before setting out on your social media journey, there are legal and ethical considerations that have major consequences if not accounted for ahead of time. 

Compliance With Privacy Regulations

Governments around the globe have established guidelines and requirements for social media to protect users. The GDPR in Europe and CCPA in California are examples of how these governments establish social media regulations.

Not only do you need to read up and become familiar with the regulations, you need to follow them thoroughly. Be transparent about data collection and give clear opt-ins for paid ads and any kind of data tracking.

Becoming non-compliant is a serious violation subject to government fines and penalties. Companies at fault for non-compliance also suffer from bad publicity and lose the trust of the audience. The repercussions could take years, if ever, to come back from the violation.

Transparency in Influencer Partnerships

The Federal Trade Commission of the U.S. now requires every influencer partnership to have proper disclosure, per their guidelines. The exact way in which the partnership is disclosed is open to interpretation, but most partnerships use a simple hashtag to let viewers know about the arrangement.

Using a hashtag like #ad or #sponsored is an easy way to inform audiences without making it the main message.

Accessibility

The digital experience often lacks consideration for those who require more accessibility. Social media and search engines are placing more emphasis on accessibility and giving those who cater to the change more reach.

Add captions to any videos you have to make your content more inclusive. It will also help those who don’t listen to sound while searching through social media, like those at work or riding public transportation.

Leveraging Social Media Success

Harnessing the power of social media marketing is your ticket to creating deeper relationships with your audience to reach your company goals. Only by skillfully following best practices and using the proven method outlined in the article will you grow your channel and audience. 

Do it right, and your social channels will become a nesting ground for new customers and clients interested in your business. However, you need to get started and keep iterating to start seeing the results you want.

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