5 Things You *Must* Know about Soci

Social media marketing is one of the most prevalent forms of digital marketing used today. With so many people participating in the medium, some might say the social media marketing environment is oversaturated. This is a vast exaggeration.

There has never been a better time to use social media as an advantageous tool for your brand or business. That said, there are still things you can do to stand out in an ever-growing crowd of content creators and digital marketers. From defining audiences and goals to audience interaction and professionalism, here are 5 ways you can make your social media campaigns more successful.

1. Know your audience.

You may be familiar with the funnel marketing technique, for which the first step is the audience and customer identification. Regardless of your prior experience with marketing, knowing who your audience is is key to a successful marketing campaign.

One of the benefits of social media is how customizable everything is — from images to captions, profile pics to bios, your page is essentially a microcosm of your brand. For this reason, knowing your audience is vital in order to edit your brand to adhere to your audience’s expectations and preferences.

The first step in knowing your audience is figuring out who your ideal customer is. Ask yourself questions about this ideal customer — how much do they make? where do they live? Once you have sufficient information about your ideal customer, you can start branching into audience demographics such as what interests your potential customers are likely to have.

All advertising social media platforms have a native audience builder. This is a part of the campaign builder responsible for forming and editing who will see your social media marketing campaigns. It is important to tailor the campaign to a niche that aligns with your brand, but you have to be careful to not over-filter, as this can cause you to exclude too many people.

2. Know your goals and KPIs.

Having well-defined goals and key performance indicators (KPIs) is akin to building the perfect foundation for your social media marketing campaign. You want to be able to tailor your campaign to yous specific goals and intentions.

If you are struggling to generate goals, try the SMART goals technique. This is a popular method of coming up with goals because the SMART technique forces you to think in-depth about your goals and vision for the campaign. The SMART technique has 5 parts. Try filling each one out in order:

• S: Is it specific? You want your goal to be specific, rather than overgeneralized.
• M: Is it measurable? One of the assets of social media marketing is the wide range of analytics that are afforded to you. For this reason, it is best to choose a goal that can be measured quantitatively (e.g., website visits instead of “brand awareness”).
• A: Is it attainable? You want your goal to be within reach and something that can be accomplished through a social media marketing campaign.
• R: Is it relevant? The goal should be something that specifically pertains to social media marketing, such as conversions via Instagram posts.
• T: Timeline? Setting a concrete timeline for your goal increases the chances of success. You can set multiple timelines, such as a biweekly check-in, and set a KPI target for each.

Regardless of whether you used SMART goals or another strategy to come up with one or more ideas for goals for your campaign, having these under your belt (along with associated KPIs to keep an eye on) will help your social media marketing success.

3. Know your platforms.

Don’t just stick to one platform when launching a social media marketing campaign. You want to simultaneously use multiple campaigns to increase your brand’s success. Using multiple social media apps helps your SEO, brand awareness, and overall growth.

Backlinks are links to your website from another website page. The quality of a backlink matters — reputable websites provide more value for each backlink than less reputable websites. Social media sites are an excellent source of backlinks because the sites themselves are very trustworthy and popular. Additionally, each time someone shares a link to your site on social media, you could gain a backlink. For this reason, having multiple social media accounts across platforms can increase your search rank.

Brand awareness is improved when you use multiple social media platforms because there are more opportunities for audiences to see your content and engage with your brand. Each social media account you have is a unique opportunity for customers and potential customers to engage with your content and interact with your brand online.

4. Know your followers.

Audience interaction is one of the primary reason audiences love social media so much and explains why brands like it too. The opportunity to engage with customers outside of your business used to be rare, although now it is commonplace and expected.

Interacting with your audience can boost sales, and brand awareness, and can convert leads into customers. The unique aspect of social media marketing is that it is substantially less formal than email; your customers can even feel friendly. Use this to your advantage and interact with followers and customers frequently.

Customers are much more likely to buy a product if they speak with someone at the business prior to purchasing. You can even automate these messages to make it easier. As long as you are engaging with your content audience — be it liking comments, replying to messages, or liking posts that you’re tagged in — you’re doing Step 4 right.

5. Know that quality comes before quantity.

You want your brand and your business’s image to be associated with only high-quality content. While it can be tempting to launch a ton of content on your page to boost brand awareness, keep in mind that if a customer only sees your lowest-quality post, this is what they may come to associate your brand with.

Because you should prioritize quality, it can be more time-consuming to produce content. Fortunately, there are a plethora of tools that can help you. My favourites include Canva and RenderForest, though there are many more online that are additionally free.

It is worth it to spend the extra time creating quality content because your social media pages are essentially the face of your brand, so you want them to look great!