11 August 2021
Top 5 Tips to Elevate your Social Media Marketing
1. Define your goals/objectives
2. Understand your target audience
3. Build a strategy
4. Share quality content
5. Utilise social media analytics
Today, you’re not reaching top business performance if you’re using social media marketing. It lets you tell your story, sell a product, sell a service, and improve customer relations. If you’re not making the most of your social media, you’re losing business. These Top 5 tips will help get you started.
Define your goals/objectives
This is the first step to social media success. If you don’t have goals, how will you know what you are trying to achieve? Winging it and hoping for the best is a mistake that far too many businesses make. Specific goals allow you to develop specific content with increased results.
The key to setting goals is to make sure they are SMART.
Specific
Measurable
Attainable
Relevant
Time-based
However, it is important to not try and achieve everything all at once. Focusing on a small number of goals will help ensure your success.
Understand your target audience
Connecting with the right audience is one of the biggest challenges most businesses face. A target audience on social media is defined by behaviours and demographics. Knowing your target audience will help you make every decision from what content to produce to which social platform to post it on.
To understand your audience, you first need to identify them. You can do this by:
- Creating buyer personas
- Looking at your competitors
- Finding the social media platforms your current customers use the most
- Surveying your customers
Once you know who your audience is then you can tailor your content to their needs.
Build a strategy
Building a social media strategy will help keep your marketing in check. Your social media strategy encompasses everything you plan to do and achieve on social media. It is how you judge your success and decide on what action to take next. Keep your strategy focused and concise.
When preparing your strategy, you need to consider your SMART goals, what social platforms you’ll be posting to, how the content will appeal to your audience, when is the best time to share content and who your competitors are. Creating a theme and marking key dates will help to build your strategy. Building your strategy around these factors will improve the quality of your content and message.
Share quality visual content
Visual content now dominates the way people consume information. A report by Cisco, projects that by 2022 global internet traffic from videos will make up 82% of all consumer internet traffic.
Not only do people consume more visual media, but they remember more information when it is paired with visual content. Brain Rules found that people are likely to only remember 10% of information three days after hearing it. However, 65% of the same information is retained three days later when it is paired with a relevant image.
Visual content offers so much more engagement for social media than text alone. By integrating well-made video, infographics, charts and photos into your social media your audience is more likely to view and remember your content.
Utilise social media analytics
Social media analytics are a business tool crucial to the success of your marketing strategy. By using analytics, you can better understand your audience, see your best performing social networks, drive the creation of better content, understand your competitors, inform the adjustment of your strategy and evaluate your performance. It allows you to review your data and see which of your tactics and strategies are working to better focus your time and content.
Metrics that can be viewed through social media analytics include:
- Clicks
- Comments
- Reach
- Shares
- Views
- Growth
An effective social media marketing strategy is an essential part of your overall marketing plan. Using these Top 5 tips will help to take your businesses social media to the next level.