Your social media strategy should be a core component of your digital marketing strategy as whatever your target audience, they are almost guaranteed to be on at least one major social media platform. There is a big opportunity for your business to capture the attention of your existing and potential customers when you are active on the same social platforms as your audience. Therefore, running a freakishly effective social media can boost your business to new levels.
Social media marketing has a unique role as it provides you the opportunity to establish a direct line of communication with your audience. You can respond to feedback promptly, entertain followers with interesting content or thought-provoking questions, and hold social media contests that encourage immediate engagement and sharing. Sharing useful and interesting content on your social media platform on a regular basis will add value to your campaign over time.
Freakishly effective social media strategy
Social media campaigns serve many important functions in today’s marketing landscape, ranging from brand awareness and relationship-building to targeted audience engagement and lead generation.
But how do you conduct a freakishly effective social campaign?
Stick tools that are easy to use
There’s no magic formula that creates social media success overnight. However, there are easy-to-use tools that can help you create a clear strategy, filled with useful content, engaging images, videos, and visually compelling branding. They can help you to encapsulate and deliver your strategic vision.
Before you start a freakishly effective social media campaign, you need to have your social media branding in place. Your branding should be visually appealing and instantly connect and engage with the viewers as they see it on various social media sites.
Choose platforms that suit your message
The effectiveness of your social media campaign is determined by the platforms you choose to reach your target audience.
One way of deciding which platforms to use is to review the up-to-date behaviour characteristics and demographics of your target audience. You should focus on the platforms that give you the highest ROI, while exploring other social media as well.
Tech giants have been some of the world leaders when it comes to freakishly effective social media campaigns. From the examples given below, you can see how different social media campaigns suit different businesses within the same industry.
Microsoft, IBM, Cisco, GE, HP, and Dell all use carefully chosen platforms when marketing new products and services. HP and IBM both use LinkedIn, and HP was the first to have one million followers. Microsoft has over 900,000 followers on Instagram, GE has 27,000 followers on Pinterest, and Cisco uses Twitter to promote its technological ideas.
You can use age as one of the demographics as the use of Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube varies between ages. Though all are popular with adults aged between 18 and 29, Instagram and YouTube’s usage drops away with adults aged 30 to 49, whereas adults aged 50 to 64 prefer Facebook.
You can choose different platforms for different marketing strategies and product placements based on these statistically driven demographical results. Using this data, you can explore new techniques and strategies and conduct freakishly effective social media campaigns.
Adapt your social media strategies
Due to the pandemic, you cannot simply continue promoting as if you are oblivious to the global and local tragedies taking place. When people are suffering, they don’t want exuberant language and inappropriate emojis. If you put across the wrong message at this time, it may cause a disconnect between your brand and your customers, and the repercussions for your brand could be devastating.
When rethinking your strategy, consider the user’s point of view. Most are focusing on physical and mental health issues, feeding the family, home-schooling, and for some, even basic survival. So, if your products or services aren’t relevant, don’t promote them, instead look at ways of using your social media platforms for offering support, helpful information, guidance, and provide credible resources.
One approach to consider is how people are now using social media as a replacement for everyday physical interaction. They are watching videos and live broadcasts more, and these are ways for you to connect with your online community on a personal level.
Know what you are posting. If you’re using an editorial calendar tool, regularly review what’s due to be released. Check that what you’re posting is relevant and sensitive to the situation which your online communities’ are facing, and follow your social media analytics to see how users are engaging with your posts. If there’s no engagement, you might want to reduce or remove it.
Promote with a social conscience
If you do have products or services that are relevant during the current crises, then you should be promoting them via your social platforms. But, there are things to consider to ensure you get it right and don’t come across as a business that seems insensitive to the current scenario.
A balanced approach can help you keep on selling while ensuring you’re serving the community and coming across as genuinely sincere.
Focus on the benefits of your products or services, highlight them across your chosen social media platforms, and show how they can help solve any problems people are currently having and encourage them to share. If possible, run a temporarily reduced pricing model, an installment payment plan, or even a deferred one. It’s better to sell now and get paid later than not get paid at all.
As with all marketing, freakishly effective social media marketing is about selling. The only thing that makes it different is how that sale is achieved. It’s done by building relationships, building trust, and building demand. The key to achieving a great name and reputation among your followers is by being genuine and authentic. The engagement should build trust with the audience via credible, authoritative messaging.
As such, freakishly effective social media marketing is far more than an online popularity contest, and the better business owners understand that, the better they can use it for their companies.
Far too often, social media marketers who have started the process of creating channels for their companies essentially run out of time to maintain these channels and brand relationships.