Social media marketing requires a measured approach. Not having a strategy or the resources to maintain consistency might even damage your brand reputation.
The first step to increasing your businesses productivity through social media is understanding what the goals are. They can be very similar reasons, if not the same, as why you have a website? What is the purpose? What am I trying to achieve? Who am I targeting? This is often a great starting point when we address social media with our clients. What do you want to achieve and who are your target audience?
Every social media channel has a varied demographic and reach potential. There are, of course, cross overs with the platforms available to businesses. Start off by detailing some of the simpler metrics: gender, age group, geographic reach, profession, interests. We compare this data with the channel breakdown statistics and align the audiences. This forms a very important part of our methodology when researching your company, competition and online opportunities. A few pointers to get you started, when understanding your target audience, would be:
- What channel/s are they using to consume their news and updates?
- How do your audience consume content i.e. video, image, text?
- What type of content are they engaging with?
- What are the best days and times to reach your audience?
- What does the competition audience look like?
A few other considerations when identifying where and when a large majority of your target audience is online would be:
- Do you understand the platform algorithms?
- Do you have the resources to roll out and implement an effective strategy?
- Does your business have the time to be consistent and interesting?
There are many business pages set up and engaging social media, with a varying degree of effort applied but then left dormant. It is vital to understand the return you will receive given the correct amount of time and consistent effort applied. Surely it would be considered rude to ignore a customer that walks into your shop. Would you close up and just leave them there?
Once the target channels have been identified, we delve deeper to identify your target audience and explore how we capture their attention, gain their trust and entice them to click. It is important to not only analyse your social media posts through measuring ‘likes’ or ‘retweets’ but align with the original goal of – why am I marketing on social media? Having an understanding of how your potential customer interacts with you is vital. For example, are you monitoring social media traffic on Google Analytics? Do you have low engagement levels but high clicks through to your website? Have you tailored your website to suit the journey of a user coming from social media? A common misconception is that social media marketing ‘does not work’ or ‘my business tried it and didn’t see any benefit’, but in reality, you may be experiencing high bounce rates due to not understanding how social traffic engages with your website.
In our next blog we will be discussing the various types of content posting and tone of voice that can be used to increase engagement.
Thanks for reading, please feel free to get in touch with us on Facebook or Twitter @skylight9ltd
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