The social media is currently one of the most effective tools for marketing. But if you do not do adequate research and learn the laws of an effective social media marketing campaign, you may be forced to sit and watch as your campaign tears through your budget with little or no significant return on investment.
Whether you are trying to launch a Facebook campaign, tweeting away on Twitter or trying to use Instagram to market your brand, you need to know what works best for you. It is therefore imperative that you know just how to launch, run, scale and optimize your social media marketing campaigns from the go.
Below are six best practices to help you make the best of your campaigns.
- Choose the Right Platform
All major social media platforms are content oriented. But each of these social media platforms has a content-type preference that they are majorly known for.
Twitter for instance is ideal for bloggers and authors, basically all text based content. Instagram and Pinterest are more visually oriented, while Snapchat is the place to be if you choose to go with video content. Facebook on the other hand, is more or less a combination of all of the above.
But, you need to be sure what your business is about and what kind of content you want to engage your audience with in the first place.
- Establish Realistic and Measurable Goals for Your Campaign
Setting goals that are realistic and measurable will keep you motivated to keep striving, while also giving you the capability to be able to track and evaluate your success. This means that you will be able to focus on winning strategies and you will be able to change your approach if results stop going the way you planned.
Social media marketing is much more than retweets and likes, shares, pins and comments. Whether it is engaging customers, building brand awareness, gaining new customers or strengthening customer service, make sure that every social media post is working towards one of your goals.
- Get Rid of the Sales Funnel
The sales funnel is supposed to be an effective way of guiding your ideal customers safely throughout their sales journey from engagement to closing the sale. Sometimes however, there are just too many processes in between which can make leads lose interest.
For instance, you can shorten your sales funnel by getting rid of the landing page. I mean, many social media platforms offer ad formats that allow customers to contact your business directly without having to go through the stress of browsing your site’s landing page.
Facebook for example, will offer mobile users, the option of a “call” button on their Facebook ad. This way a mobile user can immediately call your business just by clicking on your ad.
Just that singular move will give them access to all the information they need to know about your business. No more sales funnel into which potential leads disappear forever.
- Never Compromise On the Visual Experience
Imagine that you were able to pique a potential customer’s interest through your well-designed ad and he/she clicks on it only to be sent to a hideous looking landing page.
That is a massive turn off for anybody!
It will most likely mean that you lose that lead.
When you are designing your webpage, make sure that it is worthy of the social media ad you created for it.
This is not the time to be thinking strictly about accepted best practices. Your landing page has to be aesthetically acceptable. Only when it has visual appeal will a lead decide to go ahead to browse the content on the page (which should be just as good).
- Study the Competition
Your competition, besides being your competition, can also be a source of some great learning within your industry. This is even more so if they have been in the business longer than you have.
Do an in-depth analysis of your competition, find out what they do to grow their brands on social media, see which of their post updates or ads are making the most impact etc. You could get some serious insight into what they are doing right and what they are doing wrong, both of which can help better your own business.
- Own All Your Original Content
The like, share and re-pin features help to widen your business’ reach exponentially, which is a good thing for your business. However, it can also mar originality. This is because after a few shares, nobody will be able to tell where the content originated.
Make sure that you brand all original content that you post on any of your social media channels (especially images, infographics and videos). This way your content will ride on the wings of all the thousands of shares and re-pins, carrying your business’ identity with it. People will always be able to trace it back to your business.
Use these tactics and expand your business by leveraging the power of social media. Let us know in the comment section if these tips helped you or share what you have used in the past to make your content pop.
