Social media marketing can be one of the most effective tools at your disposal for helping you to reach and exceed your marketing goals, if used properly. The situations in which it works best include those which are intended to increase website traffic for your site, increasing the number of conversions you have, elevating brand recognition and awareness, establishing a positive brand identity, and increasing interaction and engagement with your target audience.
The better your engagement is with a target audience on any social media channel, the easier it becomes for you to accomplish all the objectives you’ve identified for your marketing initiatives. The trick of course, is in how to use the social media to best advantage in order to accomplish that increased engagement with your target audience. Here are some tips you can use that should prove helpful in establishing greater interaction with those individuals whom you are targeting with your marketing campaigns.
Plan your social media content
First of all, you have to develop a plan for your social media marketing. One of the basic ways to get started in this area is to conduct extensive keyword research, so that you’ll know what your target audience is searching for, and so you can sync up with those searches. It would also be beneficial for you to do some competitive research so that you can develop content ideas which will be of significant interest to the individuals you’re trying to reach. This means that you should check out what your competitors are doing in their efforts to increase engagement through the social media. It’s very likely that some of the ideas they’re using will be appropriate for your own business, and you can adapt these ideas for your own purposes, to achieve your own goals.
Develop compelling content
Just like any other area of online marketing, it is absolutely essential for you to develop interesting content that will have relevance to your target audience, and which can be useful in their lives in some way. Your content should solve a problem for users, or satisfy a need that they have, providing them with information which is both valuable and interesting. Post regularly on each of your social media channels, so that users will come to rely on you as an information source, and do your best to position yourself as an authority in your field. You should also vary the type of content that you post on your social media channels, and make sure to include videos, images, infographics, how-to articles and tutorials, and articles of general interest as well.
Stay aware of your rivals
Throughout all of your own initiatives, make sure to keep an eye on the competition, because they can provide you with a great deal of insight, as well as some fresh ideas that you hadn’t thought of previously. You might possibly learn a great deal about the keyword research they have conducted, and you can take advantage of any insights they have learned about the target audience, so that you can put them to use in your own efforts. Anything that seems to be working extremely well for your competitors is something that you should be considering for use in your own marketing initiatives. Don’t be bashful about borrowing ideas, especially those which appear to be successful with your target audience.
Promote your content through social media
One of the most effective ways of promoting your website blog or other content is through social media posts. After you’ve established a good solid following in the social media, you can begin supplying them with posts that refer to your website and to your blog. Almost anytime you have new material to offer your target audience, you should announce it in some way on your social media channels, so as to increase readership and to inform your users when there is something of significant value for them to read on your site or on your blog. It’s also a great way to actually link to any material you want your target audience to read, and anything that you think might be of real value to your audience should be a candidate for a link, so they don’t have to go searching for it.
Share curated links
You don’t have to limit your links to just those posts that you’ve created for your own business, and in fact you should take advantage of any really great content you come across, by linking to it in your social media channels. Linking to outside sources will show your target audience that you truly care for their needs and wants, because you’re providing them with information that will be of great relevance and usefulness in their daily lives. This will also help establish trust among your followers, because they’ll realize that you’re willing to provide them with external sources if it will benefit them.
Develop a consistent brand image
You should use all of your social media channels to project the same brand image to all of your target audience. When users of those various channels come across a consistent brand image on each of them, it will begin to sink in that your company is reliable and consistent in its messaging and in its interaction with users. Even though each social media has its own specific following and its own environment for users to interact with, when you can project the same core identity to all your target audience, it will go a long way toward establishing consistency and a rock-solid identity in the minds of your followers.
Measure your success
It is essential for you to gauge the success of your marketing efforts by tracking data with the use of analytics. One of the best tools available for measuring the success of your campaigns is Google Analytics, and you can use this tool to determine which campaigns are actually resonating well with your audience. You can also determine which campaigns are garnering relatively less success, and would be candidates for either rework or abandonment altogether. In order to properly monitor the success of each of your marketing campaigns, you should attach tracking tags to them, so it’s easy to associate all data with an individual campaign. Ideally, you should use analytics on each of the social media channels that you’re active in, so that you can tell which ones are performing the best.
