Social media marketing is a powerful tool that businesses use to increase awareness of their brand and services on different social media platforms. Businesses typically market their products on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other platforms. Marketing does not solely involve constantly posting promotional posts since your target audience will easily get tired of the same old content. Customer engagement is key in a successful social media marketing campaign.
You can post about other things on your business’s social media account to better engage with your target audience. Showing that your brand is aware and cares can make a positive impact on your customers.
How Do You Conduct a Social Media Marketing Campaign?
1. Create and Develop Social Media Profiles
The first step to social media marketing is creating and developing a social media profile to operate from. Having profiles in multiple social media sites allows you to engage with a variety of customers who typically have different preferences on social media platforms.
Some people might frequent Facebook more than Twitter or others might stay on YouTube and only watch various videos for one whole day.
2. Observe Current Trends
The current digital marketing landscape is constantly changing as social media platforms receive new features, netizens frequent particular platforms, and influencers release content on different platforms. You must understand that you need to stay in touch with the changing trends to engage and retain your customers.
Influencer Marketing:
Many brands have started partnering with celebrities and popular online influencers to promote their products and services. These people can influence their target audiences to transact with your business through word-of-mouth and sponsorships either through your or their social media accounts.
Influencer marketing on Instagram is currently the trend and is more active than Facebook, however, there are other platforms where brands invest in influencer marketing. YouTube is a popular video-sharing and social media site where people create different content according to their interests. Several YouTubers have become celebrities in their own right in their particular niche and brands approach them and sponsor some of their content. The partnership between the two parties benefits them both as the content creator essentially gets free content and possibly resources for future projects while the sponsor receives better brand awareness through the influencer’s reach.
Using Stories:
Snapchat, Facebook, and Instagram have the “Stories” feature as a core part of their applications. The stories are brief and temporary content that typically vanishes after 24 hours. They differ from the typical content in the news feeds in that they’re temporary and are only 10 seconds to about a minute long, depending on the platform.
You can use stories to engage your average viewer with an easy to digest content that also doesn’t require large production costs compared to long videos. You can also use Instagram’s Story Highlights to retain a particular story on your Instagram profile for visitors to see in the future.
More Paid Content:
Achieving organic growth from the get-go is getting increasingly difficult as the more well-known brands effectively drive traffic to their sites and social media accounts. Another reason is that social media platforms extensively use paid and promoted content to the point that getting them is necessary to drive traffic to your account.
3. Produce Content
Social media marketing relies heavily on content and you’ll need to make sure that you constantly post, create, and push content. Without content to interact with, your target audience won’t know what your brand is all about.
Your social media page won’t receive any traffic if it doesn’t have content that you and your visitors can share unless you invite friends and employees to like your page. Such traffic alone is not enough to sustain your business and you’ll need to extend your reach through paid content, sharing other pages’ posts, and others. Once you gather a steady following, you’ll need to have new and engaging content for them to interact with.
Create Brief and Engaging Posts
Online users swipe or scroll past long text posts, so you must have content that can grab people’s attention. You should focus on short text posts that go straight to the point.
Use Unique Photos and Graphics on Your Posts
You can either use photos as a standalone post or use them with your short post. Take care not to use stock photos since they do not perform as well as unique ones showcasing your products and services. Using photos of your office space and employees is also ideal when writing a featured post regarding them to connect more with your audience.
Share Relevant Industry News
You don’t necessarily need to ensure that all of your page’s content is about your products and services. You can also inform your audience of the latest news on your industry. As long as you stay within your industry, your visitors won’t likely feel out of place with the content you’re sharing.
Share Customer Reviews
Many people shopping online through Facebook will look for comments and reviews about your services. If you’re selling items, you can post photos of a transaction and your customers’ reactions to your services. Customers will trust a seller or service provider who has positive comments and reviews from other customers.
Host Social Media Contests and Events
An excellent way to grow your audience quickly is by hosting online contests. Any contest that involves engaging with an event-specific post through likes, comments, shares, and tags can effectively drive traffic to your social media page. You’ll also have to think of an enticing prize to encourage your visitors into participating in the contest.
4. Merge Different Channels and Social Media Sites
Channels are now changing and it now makes sense to stop treating social media, email, and others as isolated channels. You can reuse any existing content from one channel to another to increase that particular post’s reach and have better engagement.
Marketers now use both Facebook messenger and email to inform their customers that added items to their carts that they haven’t checked out yet. You can now use both channels and different social media sites to reuse your posts and integrate them into your overall digital marketing strategy.
Merging channels and tools helps cut your content production costs and leverage the benefits of publishing one content on different platforms. This move also helps your brand stay consistent on different platforms without creating different posts.
5. Increase Ad Spending
Organic reach is down and social media sites are making it extremely difficult for brands to build an organic following. The reason is that social media platforms want to encourage businesses to spend more on advertisements.
Social media sites want your money to continue their operations and you’ll have to think carefully about where you want to increase ad spend. If you have a young audience, you might want to invest in Tik Tok. If you have an older audience, you’ll want to spend more on Facebook.
Takeaway
You’ll need to follow the steps above to get started with your social media marketing campaign. If you’re still having difficulties executing the campaign, you can depend on a social media agency to help you out. Social media marketing agencies have the tools and experience to handle your campaign and ensure that it produces results.
