Social Media Marketing is a powerful tool to create brand awareness and help the business grow. It can help enhance sales funnel right from the start i.e., bringing new customers, building quality leads, and retaining loyal customers. The essence of an effective social media marketing plan is to define goals, strategize accordingly, and evaluate implemented strategies to optimize them and maximize profits.
Building a brand on social media channels is a daunting task, but with proper planning and execution, you can achieve your branding goals and grow your business exponentially.
Here are specific tips and tricks which can help you devise effective social media marketing plans:
A specific plan for each platform
There are numerous trending social media platforms these days with millions and billions of users such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, YouTube, and Reddit, etc. One must find solutions to critical questions such as finding the pros and cons of using which platform should be opted in or opted out from, targeted audience on the chosen platform, and content relevancy for better engagement on a platform, etc.
Catering to all these platforms requires a specific plan for each one, as what works on one platform does not confirm that it will work for all other platforms. There are proven practices that must be carefully incorporated and implemented for the best results.
Content and Consistency for the win
One of the most crucial steps of an effective social media marketing plan is developing relevant and unique content for users. This ensures that your followers keep engaging with your content in terms of likes, comments, and share and also encourages different users to subscribe or follow your page/channel for more such content.
Another critical step is to be consistent with all your social media platforms. In the age of digital marketing, everybody is connected and likes to get constant updates from their favorite brands, such as new products, offers, or discounts. Hence, one should utilize all the features of their social media platforms to engage their followers, such as posting stories, etc. For example, on Instagram and Twitter, users tend to visit the accounts multiple times a day, which provides excellent opportunities to social media marketers to get the maximum potential.
Platform-specific communication
One of the best parts of utilizing multiple social media channels is that each platform comes with its own demographics. Hence, the communication used on every channel should be tailor-made for your audience.
A robust communication enhances targeting as it attracts a relevant and interested audience, and the retention rate remains high. For example, a post on the LinkedIn account of a business tends to be in a formal tone and detailed, whereas on Instagram, the post needs to be quirky and appealing.
Keep up with trends
It is the age of viral marketing content. As a social media marketer, one should always keep up with what’s trending to increase the engagement of your audience. For instance, numerous challenges on TikTok and attract millennials and Gen Z age groups.These trends help you gain popularity. But such patterns should not let you go astray in terms of relevancy of your brand communication. Choose which trend to follow based on its relevancy to your brand communication.
Evaluate and Optimize
Accurate measure and optimization is the key to maximize the performance of any social media campaign on any platform. Tracking different metrics helps you determine whether the social media strategy performed well as planned or what can be implemented to enhance the current numbers further. Some of the metrics to keep track of are reach, impressions, shares, likes, comments, and subscribers, etc.
Video Content is the next big thing
One common thing on every social media platform is that video content is booming. Hence, it is safe to say that video marketing is the next big thing in 2020. Not only video marketing provides better engagement, but on specific platforms such as LinkedIn and Facebook, the algorithms are even designed to rank video posts higher, leading to better exposure. Every platform has been launching features that help create better videos such as LinkedIn Live, Instagram TV, Facebook Live, etc.
A/B Testing to the rescue
Conquering social media marketing game is a pretty tricky task. One is never sure what will work and what will not, not to mention what works well on one platform might be a flop show on another one. Hence, one should always do A/B testing in terms of targeting, communication, etc. This hit and trial process will help you find what kind of content is relevant for your audience on different platforms to drive better engagement and better ROIs.
Wrapping Up
Although social media keeps on changing with new complex algorithms, marketers must keep up with new functionalities and algorithms to reap significant benefits from social media. Crafting suitable social media marketing strategies is essential to stay the head of the competitors and grow the audience as effective social media marketing adds value to the overall brand marketing plan.
