Since social media came on the scene back in 1996, it has infiltrated half of the 7.7 billion people in the world. The average person in 2020 had 8.6 social media accounts, so a critical reason why brands who invest in a social media presence can attract customers. It's one of those cost-effective marketing tools a marketer has available to them to interact with the targeted audience in building trust and brand awareness.
But the challenge is becoming that with so many brands sharing different content 24/7, it's being a crowded space and becoming more challenging to get your brand into the minds of your audience and eventually turning them in to customers.
If you would like to understand better how you can get more from your current social media marketing strategy and increase your ROI to drive more customers, continue reading this article.
Picking the Right Social Media Platform
A critical element like a lot of marketing to being successful is how you target your targeted audience and talk to them through personalization. Therefore, an essential task you need to do is to make sure you have done your research on understanding where your customers hang out with social media. Once you have narrowed your search, you to then focus on those key platforms to maintain your social presence. Picking a social media platform where your audience is not hanging out is just a waste of your time and isn't going to give you any returns. So why bother investing in places that aren't going to provide you with an ROI.
When researching the social channels, try to narrow it down to the channels that will give you the highest returns and also will allow you to be more focused when you're not trying to support all of them.
When it comes to finding the right platforms, it's not necessary a "one shoe fits all" for all brands as it's going to depend on what you're selling and who you're targeting.
For the channels where you can gain more impact, you might want to double down on those compared to the other channels you may have chosen to maximize your budgets to achieve the best ROI.
When producing the content, you will share, make sure you tailor it according to how the appropriate social media channel works and how the audience expects to receive it. You can also think about developing user-centric content for your visitors to help achieve better results.
Remember, your content's quality is what has the most significant impact on your business gaining or not gaining when it comes to ROI.
Looking at implementing retargeting ads that have shown interest can also help you in converting them.
Posting Frequency
When it comes to social media, we are also looking to make sure we deliver fresh, quality content relevant. But what we don't want to do is overdo the frequency we post. The big question now comes, how often should we post? Many studies suggest the right balance for most SMB companies would be around one post a day, but two would be the maximum. You could find that it actually has the opposite effect by posting more, and you start seeing a lot less engagement. So more is not always better.
What is more important than more posts is the consistency, frequency and stick to your social media plan. So if you were just to post once in a while, you're not going to see many long benefits from it and probably when not see any growth and sales either.
Scheduling of your social media posts allows you to manage your social media better, and also it helps you maintain a better rhythm/frequency for when you post each day. You should also research the best time of the day your audience typically engages on the appropriate social media you are posting. There are many tools out there that can assist you in doing this, or you can go old school, which will take a lot longer and do more on a trial basis and learn by testing various times yourself. I suggest you find a tool to help you as this will spend up the process, but I would recommend that you review this at least once every quarter to see if those times have changed.
Create a Sales Funnel on Social Media
Now, this is where we need to get real and set expectations. It's going to take time, and it's not going to happen overnight, so while you're working on that, you need to find ways to turn those leads that may be not visible somehow into your sales lead funnel. So look at landing pages and try using the A/B appropriate from a testing standpoint to help.
Analysis Your Success
The brands that either don't measure or don't consistently measure their social media performance results typically are the ones who see a low ROI and tend to get annoyed with social media and give up.
As I say, you can never have too much data to analyze when it comes to your social media marketing strategy. Measuring your results and learning from what is working and what isn't working allows you to adjust and adjust again if needed, as that's what social media is all about.
Many of the social media platforms have their own built-in analytics, but they don't always give you everything you need to understand how specific campaigns really worked or not entirely. Therefore it's worthwhile investing in additional tools for assisting you in a more in-depth understanding.
Conclusion
With the right social media, you can convert social media clicks into sales leads and long-term customers. So having the right content is essential to your social media marketing strategy's success and being about to increase your ROI and increase your SEO with your social media marketing campaigns.
If you want to have a chat about social media marketing, then feel free to contact me either by sending me an email to jon.rivers@marketingmonarchs.com or calling me on +1 617 256 6178.
About the Author
Jon Rivers – Jon has been recognized as a pioneer within the partner channel as a digital marketing expert for his leadership in helping partners develop social brands, marketing strategies, and content to drive successful marketing campaigns.
Before starting Marketing Monarchs, Jon spent many years working in the Microsoft Dynamics ERP ecosystem system. Jon serves on various boards, including Directions North America, IAMCP (International Association of Microsoft Channel Partners), and CMA (Channel Marketing Alliance).
When Jon is not busy running Marketing Monarchs, you can find him Co-Hosting Leadership Goes Beyond, one of the fastest-growing virtual conferences for Leadership.