Social media has a profound impact on nearly every aspect of our lives. This is one of the most effective channels for connecting with your audience in 2022.
Marketing, influencers, and brands have a unique opportunity to engage with customers using social media platforms throughout the entire customer lifecycle. They do so on the platforms they actively follow for news, entertainment, and other purposes. We understand the importance of knowing how to leverage our social media marketing campaigns to build our brand, increase demand, and engage our customers. We've compiled Equiturn's top tips for getting started in such a competitive industry.
Understanding your audience
Take time to understand your audience before proceeding with the tactical details of your social media strategy. Begin by establishing a detailed understanding of who the prospect is, where they work, what they do, what their business objectives are, challenges they face, pain points (and how you can assist), and their role in the purchasing process. Next, determine their interests, such as content types, topics, and products that appeal to them, and what messaging will resonate with them.
Lastly, determine where your audience is spending their time as their preferred social networking sites, forums, and login times will influence when you should post. Conducting your due diligence will help you determine the content you will need, its tone, and the method it will be delivered. The buyer's guide highlights sources of information and how buyers consume information about specific topics. When you conduct research or ask your audience directly, there is no need to speculate about their needs. Investing in this upfront effort will pay dividends throughout the customer lifecycle, not only on social media but across all marketing channels.
Channel-based optimization
Social media marketing cannot be approached as a one-size-fits-all strategy, so your approach will need to be individualized to each network.
You should consider Twitter an excellent medium for promoting yourself and demonstrating that you are "in the know." It is a fast-paced network, so you must move swiftly to maintain your position. A very effective way to do this is through live tweeting and polling, which generate incredibly high levels of participation in real-time. Additionally, Twitter is an excellent platform for engaging influencers.
Consider utilizing this platform to show off more extended content and broaden the scope of your brand. Despite being vastly underutilized, video content gets three times as much engagement as other posts, so you should consider your video strategy. The Facebook events tab provides a way to keep your community educated and engaged about upcoming events.
Think graphically when using LinkedIn, as posts with images receive 200 percent more engagement than those purely text-based. Quick tips and other quick tidbits are efficient. Share company culture posts and posts from senior management to enhance your recruiting efforts.
While the previously mentioned networks are among the top three for B2B, a competitive strategy is not complete without Instagram. According to Sprout Social, it has the highest engagement per post of all social networks. We have seen an increase in concentration with quote templates derived from blogs, interviews, and other content sources. Instagram is also an ideal platform for posting behind-the-scenes footage of your corporate culture or corporate social responsibility efforts. Consider featuring events in posts or stories.
Be attentive and learn.
A platform for active listening is one of the most critical components of social media that is often overlooked. People use social media to air grievances and seek customer support. As a result, you must be prepared to respond when it occurs and have a plan in place.
At Equiturn, we have seen a significant increase in support requests on Facebook and Twitter. Due to this, we developed a system that allows our support team to receive immediate notifications so that they may respond quickly. Social media adds transparency and allows for real-time responses as a customer service tool.
You should keep in mind that these comments are public, so you should take the time to plan how quickly and which messages you will respond to. By addressing concerns directly, you can turn a negative into a positive.
Business owners can also use social media to answer questions, reducing the volume of emails, phone calls, and chats sent to the customer service department. In an emergency, a service outage, the release of a new product, or other situations in which you need to quickly get the word out to many people, this is especially useful.
The final step is to listen to customer feedback about the product and incorporate the key aspects into your roadmap. There is no better way to please your customers than to listen to and act upon their feedback.
Social media: the four R's
Following these steps will help you create the most effective social media content.
Reorganize
Create smaller breakout pieces with sections of a more significant asset. You can, for example, pull stats and key figures from an infographic and use them in upcoming posts. By highlighting relevant sections of a campaign by channel audience, you can extend the length of a campaign.
Rewrite
Create entirely original content from existing material. See if you can find tidbits of information in your content library. Even older assets may contain valuable takeaways or quotes that your audience would find helpful. It is also possible to rewrite content to extend its usefulness.
Retire
Delete outdated posts. It is imperative that you keep your brand up-to-date on social media because it is instantaneous. To keep old social content alive but less visible, create archive folders if you still wish to reference it from time to time.
Redesign
Bring new life to an old piece. Some assets require a refresh of their branding to feel fresh again, and there is no need to reinvent the wheel. It is worthwhile to redesign an existing creative for different audiences or personas.
Measuring ROI
The success of social media marketing depends on measurement, just as with any marketing endeavor. Make sure your metrics relate to your business objectives. In addition to following and engagement statistics, pipeline and revenue attribution are equally significant.
Marketing automation is necessary for this purpose. You can then track and score the leads that come through your social media channels and the revenue generated by your campaigns. Measure your pipeline-to-spend ratios with a marketing automation platform to identify your most productive channels and allocate resources accordingly.