Social media is now the single most effective means of representing your business on a day to day basis. Even companies that traditionally aim to present themselves as exclusive or highbrow have recognised that with little to no upfront cost, and a huge audience, socials are worth it.
In 2020, for the first time ever, social media use now encompasses more than half of the population of the globe. According to the same report by Datareportal, this included a 10% increase in the last year alone – a staggering 1 million new users every single day. That’s an enormous potential audience.
Compared to traditional marketing, social media is one of, if not the best return on investment you could be looking at. Since at the core, social media is a free resource, you could theoretically never spend a penny and see it bring new sales, clients or fans to your page.
Let’s cool down for a moment here though. Realistically, not every single social media user is a potential customer – and nor should you want them to be. What you’re after here is engagement, and visibility. You want your audience to consider your social pages a hub for all of your announcements, insights and expertise, which will keep them coming back and interacting with your posts.
Building a Social Media Strategy
Before beginning a social campaign, you should always understand a few key factors. These aren’t necessarily specialist knowledge – even the not so social-savvy amongst us can put these together – but any social media manager will be deeply appreciative of a proper understanding of where the campaign is aiming to go.
Firstly, as above, who are you targeting? While more generally you might say “People who like SEO”, it’s far more effective to take a look at what represents that group. A few different questions you should consider are as follows:
- Age
- Gender
- Location
- Job Title
- Salary
With each new question that we consider, we increase how specific our campaign can be. A more targeted campaign brief can be utilised more effectively by your social media manager. Understanding the composition of your audience allows you to understand what will appeal to that audience, and what they’re likely to want to see from you.
Secondly, what do you want the outcome of your campaign to be? There are multiple uses of a social media campaign beyond what you might expect. Perhaps you’d like to use social media as your primary PR device, since it makes for a public forum to demonstrate effective customer service and announce any charitable causes you back? For some businesses, it’s used as a way of maintaining a presence – 74% of all shoppers use social media to inform their shopping decisions. A dead social media page can be off-putting to someone that, in practice, you had already made a sale to.
Making your Mark
A classic mistake in many campaigns is attempting to overreach while building your following. As an example, let’s look at the use of Instagram hashtags. Starting out, you might be tempted to look for the biggest hashtags in your industry – take Content Marketing for one. With over 3 million posts, it’s certainly an active tag, and theoretically has a huge audience for you. But without already being an established company with a strong following, you’re unlikely to be found amongst all the other voices here.
Related tags, however, look more optimistic. #contentmarketing101 comes in at a healthy 22.9k, and #contentmarketingexpert even lower, at a mere 7.3k. Building an initial following through these channels is going to be considerably easier. It’s better to be the big fish in a small pond. Once you’ve acquired this initial following, you can start competing with larger companies for tags with higher engagement.
Time vs Money
If there is one area that social media marketing is distinctly less efficient than traditional marketing channels, it’s the time investment that goes into fully fleshing out your image. With standard online advertising, the kind you might see in banner ads for instance, there is an initial time sink while plans are laid, but once the campaign is out in the world it’s really just a matter of monitoring that campaign’s effectiveness.
If you have time to properly utilise social streams, they can be of great value to your brand. But social media campaigns require constant interactions, often through half a dozen different channels. Multiple tweets, posts and stories a day is a constant drain, especially when each of them should be with a specific purpose in mind regarding your aims and audience, using fit-for-purpose content and keywords. This is, if you’ve ever wondered, why social media manager is a career in itself, and shouldn’t usually be rolled into the duties of another staff member.
Each business, charity or food stall is going to need a personalised campaign based on a plethora of factors – keywords, ongoing advertising, SEO and PPC to name a few. However, not every one of these is going to have the time, expertise or budget to hire a full-time manager. This is where you might consider looking at outsourcing your social work to an SEO agency that specialises in lifting your influence. They will have processes already in place to act as a framework for your business to move forward and grow on.
Conclusion
Today we’ve looked at a few basic considerations for social media marketing, why you might be interested in it, and why if you aren’t, you probably should be. Looking at social media as one vital part of a larger scale marketing push may help you understand the role it plays in the new world of marketing, and that role only seems set to grow as we move deeper into the 2020’s.
