Did you know that almost half the earth’s population is active on social media every day?! Or that we spend an average of 3 hours every day scrolling through different social media channels?
Yes, social media is a powerful tool where most of your target audiences hang out. It is one of the most profitable marketing channels for businesses today, be it B2B or B2C.
But, simply creating a business page on Facebook and LinkedIn won’t work. All social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, and even TikTok are highly saturated today.
If you want to have a competitive edge in the market and make the most out of your social media strategies, then you need to take your social media marketing up a notch.
Read on if you are looking for some actionable and trending ways to take your social media marketing strategy to the next level and maximize your business profits.
1. User-Generated Content
User-generated content (UGC) is a highly effective medium to increase your brand awareness, generate more leads, and maximize your conversion rates.
The reason why this format is so popular, because user-generated content is essentially the contents created by your users. Hence, there is a little chance that this strategy may go wrong.
But, how can you devise an effective user-generated content strategy? Here are a few steps that could help:
- Pick a platform: User-generated content is most popular on Instagram. But, you can use other platforms too such as Facebook and YouTube. Ensure that your target audience uses the platform regularly.
- Brainstorm a creative strategy: This is the key to your user-generated content strategy. If you want to reach more people and raise brand awareness, you need to think of a hook for your users. This hook should be such that your users can’t stop themselves from creating content for your brand. This would also urge them to share the content with others.
- Create a hashtag around it: Usually, your users will create UGC using the hashtags that you devise for the campaign. Using the hashtags you will be able to track their content. Ensure that your hashtag is relevant, catchy, and resonates with your brand voice.
- Launch your UGC campaigns: Put your users on the center stage and give them the attention that they love. You may do this by featuring user-generated content on your website home page, or Instagram page. Appreciate their efforts and this will keep them coming back to you.
2. Leverage Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing is the biggest rage in social media today. Influencers have gained a loyal customer base by adding value to their followers’ lives for years. Hence, influencers have the power to boost your products and services like nothing else.
- Identify relevant influencers in your industry whose audience will most likely be interested in your offerings. You can have a mix of big and small influencers.
- Reach out to as many influencers as possible and let them know about your unique offerings and value proposition.
- Collaborate with them to create unique and innovative content regularly. Use analytics to understand influencers’ reach and fine-tune your strategy based on that.
3. Maximize Engagement
The competition is so high today that consumers’ expectations are nothing like they were a few years ago. Today, simply optimizing social media pages and putting out content is never enough. Engagement is crucial for building a strong special media presence.
Here are a few ways you can use to increase engagement on social media platforms:
- Reach out to your target audience using personalized connection requests and messages. The inbound strategy takes time to turn into an effective lead generation medium. Hence, outbound works best when you are starting to build your online presence. Hence, you must try and reach out to your target audience with personalized conversations. For example, if you are a B2B business looking to generate leads through LinkedIn, you can use a LinkedIn automation tool to schedule ultra-personalized messages and follow-ups to your target customers.
- Actively engage with people on social media groups, the comments section of your posts, as well as comments on their posts. When you have active conversations with target customers on social media, it will improve your brand’s reach. You’ll also be able to build more trust this way.
- People tend to use social media platforms to vent out their issues and complaints. It is important to tend to such customer complaints and concerns on various social media platforms. This will lead to increased customer satisfaction and thus better brand reputation.
4. Do your Research
Doing social media marketing without proper research is like shooting blind arrows in the air. All your efforts would go to waste if your marketing strategies are directed towards the wrong people in the wrong places.
- Research and gather data on your ideal customer persona. Starting without your customer persona in mind would be a huge blunder on your part. Even if you have already done some research, you should consider going deeper. As your business evolves, your target audience will also evolve. Hence, use your website analytics, social media analytics, conduct surveys, or research your competitors to get more in-depth insights about your ideal customers.
- Hashtag research is another super-important area of social media marketing. The hashtags that you use for your social media posts can make or break your brand’s reach. Hence before posting anything on any social media channel, always spend time curating the best possible hashtags.
- Another effective way to research is to directly interact with your prospects or customers. You can reach out to people personally on social media and try to understand their problems and pain points. Using this data, you can optimize your products and services.
- Another way is to research your competitors and find any missing gaps in the market. Creep on your competitors’ social media posts and see if you can spot any common complaints about their products or services. Use this as an opportunity. Filling in these gaps present in the existing market will increase your brand awareness.
5. Use Hyper-Personalized Approach
Consumer expectations have completely changed because of the advent of mass selling and advertising on social media platforms. A one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t work now. People want to believe that any product or service pitched to them fits their specific needs. This is where personalization comes in.
When you personalize social media engagements with your ideal audience, you are bound to generate more leads and achieve more ROI. Here are a few ways in which you can personalize your social media marketing strategies:
- Have personalized one-to-one interactions with your prospects. You can do this by sending personalized connection requests and messages to your target audience. You can also reach out to people who have engaged with your posts.
- Using a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool, you can segment your prospects based on various factors such as interests, demographics, customer journey stage, etc. You can then devise personalized social media strategies for each of these segments. Such campaigns will be tailored to your prospects’ exact needs and thus you will have higher chances of conversions.
- You should also consider personalization for paid social media advertising. Social media platforms such as Facebook also allow you to upload a customized target audience list. These lists can be used for targeting and retargeting your prospects with ads that have been personalized to solve specific problems that they might be facing.
6. Keep up with Social Media Algorithms and Trends
Social media algorithms are always changing. There is no guarantee that the things that worked a year back will work today.
Social media channels keep coming up with new features and trends. Hence, you must keep track of all the latest trends related to the social media platforms that you are using for campaigns.
- Subscribe to the latest industry news and blogs that will help you stay aware of the latest algorithm changes that social media channels come up with. You’ll also gain plenty of knowledge about how you can quickly adapt to these new changes so that the least possible damage is done to your current reach.
- Next, don’t wait for the perfect time. Start implementing these strategies as soon as possible. When the Instagram reels feature rolled out, very few were actually using it. Hence, the few who figured it out and started using it first saw their reels becoming quite popular.
7. Keep Adding Value
One of the main rules of marketing is the reciprocity principle. You can’t keep expecting people to convert into your customers unless you do something for them.
If you keep putting up promotional posts and talking about your brand, people will most likely scroll past through your post.
When you genuinely help people out, add value, and make their lives better in some way, they will automatically trust you. This is, and always will be the key to building your brand and growing your business.
Hence, make it a point to reach out to your prospects and solve their problems. Create high-quality content that will genuinely help people out. This will always keep you one step ahead of your competitors.
Conclusion
With almost half of the world’s population being active on social media, almost every business out there is trying their hands at social media marketing. Being one amongst thousands of other brands will not get you any farther.
If you want to stay relevant and stand out amongst the sea of competitors, you need to take your social media marketing up a notch. The strategies in this post will help you to do that. Hence, start implementing these strategies today and you’ll see fruitful results in no time!
