The power of social media has grown exponentially over the past few years, and every business is hoping to get on it. However, being on social media is not enough.
You have to learn how to use it and leverage it to make the most out of your digital advertising efforts.
If you’re new to using social media for business or you’re looking to expand your reach, here’s a guide on how to nail your brand’s social media marketing to reach your business goals.
Define Your Goals
It may be tempting to jump onto whichever social media platform you are eyeing for your business or your brand and see where it takes you. While taking action is crucial to seeing any results, so is having a plan.
The first step to your social media marketing is to define your goals and make a plan.
Some of the top goals for businesses engaging in social media are:
- build brand awareness
- drive traffic to business website
- nurture relationships with customers
Some social media marketing goals may not apply to your specific situation.
For example, if you’re a new brand, your priority is not to nurture customer relationships as you haven’t built a customer base yet.
Be discerning about which goals serve your brand and business best at this stage.
Audience and Platform
A social media presence is part of a strong digital marketing strategy. However, your brand and business must be more specific than that.
To know which social media platforms to use, you must understand your target audience and where they hang out.
Data collected by Pew Research shows that the top user groups for Instagram are women between 18-29. For Facebook, the top user groups included women between the ages of 30-49.
If you haven’t yet, create a buyer persona (or multiple) and find out which social media platform is most conducive to your marketing efforts.
Content
After you’ve decided which platform to get onto, you have to plan and create your content.
Some of the best and most effective social media marketing content includes shareable posts. Create posts that users can easily share on platforms like Instagram to help expand your content’s reach and drive traffic back to your page.
Learn more on powerful Instagram marketing strategies and similar content tips to boost your social marketing efforts.
Expand Your Reach
It’s not enough to be on social media platforms. You have to leverage the platform’s users to reach your social media goals. Here are a few tips to help expand your social reach.
Try viral trends. The social media wave can help get your brand discovered.
Be relatable. Bridge the gap between your business and your customers, especially on social media.
Nurture relationships. Engage with your audience and share posts that help your audience decide to purchase.
Learn More About Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing is a whole field of its own, and you cannot boil it down to fit a short blog post. There are a lot more strategies and tips to try to further your digital marketing efforts.
Don’t feel like you have to do everything at once. Try out different strategies and see if they work. Switch to new ones when you feel the impact of one strategy has died down.
Running a business is a lot of trial and error, but it is better to have done and made mistakes than to have never tried at all.
For more help running a successful social media campaign and building a lasting brand, check out more from our advertising and marketing sections!