Among most common questions businesspersons ask nowadays includes, what are the effective social media marketing strategy?
Let’s consider for a few moments that your business has a presence on social media. The question now arises, it this presence generating desirable results? Or is your social media presence just for namesake? If so, it’s high time to evolve or revise your strategies for effective social media marketing.
Why Social Media Marketing Strategy?
Regardless of the size of your business, jumping on the social media bandwagon is imperative nowadays. Unless your organization has a sound and effective social media strategy, it’s most likely your competitors will gain a leading edge.
A glance at various social media platforms would definitely reveal its significance to every business, small or large. Social media provides five distinct advantages that conventional advertising doesn’t offer.
- Social Media is Cost Effective.
- With smartphone and mobile data usage on the upswing, most people use social media as a primary source of information.
- Buying and selling are possible through social media.
- Social media enables faster communications with stakeholders & customers.
- It is an excellent customer service and consumer feedback resource.
Therefore, no serious business can afford neglecting social media or survive sans strategies for effective social media marketing.
Usually, an excellent social media strategy consists of several components. Include and adapt these according to needs and nature of your business.
Effective Social Media Marketing Strategies
Including these elements would help create an effective social media marketing strategy. Because that’s what people look for when access your social media pages and links.
Content Really Matters
That’s right. Nothing is more important than your content on social media. That’s because your content will decide the number of people who’ll actively engage with the business or organization. If you look at social media content of any large corporation, it will be clear they use multiple types of content: text, instant messaging, microblogging, Facebook, videos and podcasts, among others.
Videos are particularly useful when it comes to customers and stakeholders that access social media on smartphones and especially during commutes. They’ll have ample time to watch a complete video. Picture and text posts are superb when you want to convey a specific message while podcasts are useful to provide ‘how to’ and other instructions.
Content also has to be in various languages and appealing to people from various cultures, unless you’re targeting a specific community or ethnicity. It has to be relevant to readers and viewers. And above all engaging enough to keep people coming back for more.
At the same time, content shouldn’t be about tall claims and undeliverable promises. Because these claims and promises will be utilized by rivals to pull down your business. Therefore, the first element of a strategy for effective social media marketing should revolve around content.
Storytelling is New Trend
Effective social media strategy consists more of storytelling rather than harping over a company, brand, product or service. People are more interested in real life experiences of others that patronize your business or are benefitting from your service or product. Indeed, I can say without exaggeration that nothing is more appealing than people narrating their positive experiences.
Storytelling works like direct word-of-mouth publicity. Such publicity is invaluable for every business: it helps attract more people to your business that can translate as higher business. A story or experience can be in several forms. The best one would be a narrative about the value that your business brings to someone’s life and is helping them daily. That’s because consumers don’t pay for your service or product: they’re paying for the value it brings to their life. And this is where the emphasis of a good story should be.
The next best form of storytelling is in the form of interviews with real life people. Interviews serve as sort of FAQs and attract readers and viewers. People tend to identify with responses given by a consumer. They look forward to replicating the story in own lives. This is something any business can capitalize on, with the right kind of storytelling on social media.
Stories can also be in the form of pictures or regular text content. It depends upon the social media platforms you’ll use. Hence, it’s advisable to use different social media platforms than going with one or two most popular ones.
Know Social Media Platforms
Teenagers and millennials love Instagram, women prefer Pinterest. Professionals use LinkedIn and almost everyone is on Facebook. Let’s not forget instant microblogging website Twitter nor instant messengers such as WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. These are general observations and not exactly rules or limitations, as you might aver.
However, these observations clearly point towards a fact: that specific audiences prefer specific social media platforms. Hence, it pays to be active on multiple media platforms rather than one or two most popular ones, or ones you believe would fetch the best results. That’s because each social media platform has unique features. When you combine these features, you’ll find a killer combination that ensures you reach the right audience in the right manner and at the right time.
This also means you’ll need to customize content according to the target audience. While you may believe this poses a problem, it doesn’t. Instead, it works to your advantage. You can provide a variety of content to suit people from various walks of society and expand your business.
Customer Feedback & Response Policy
When you’ve people from various walks of life following your business on social media, it’s obvious there’ll be ample feedback. Such feedback is vital. It helps understand the popularity of a brand, product or service and gauge interest. Listening to customers can also help innovate your product and service- something vital to retain that edge over competitors.
However, it’s worth remembering, social media can also generate negative feedback. There would definitely be a section of people who’d have different opinion or inclination towards a rival. These have to be handled with extreme tacit. A blunder in responding to negative feedback can permanently tarnish your brand image.
This calls for an astute and practical customer feedback and response policy as part of your effective social media strategy. It’s advisable to strike the right balance while responding to both positive and negative feedback.
Blogging & Vlogging
Blogging and vlogging are two integral parts of any strategy for effective social media marketing. You can either have a blog on your company website. Or open one separately. Alternatively, you could also consider getting renowned bloggers in your field to write and publish about your brand, products and services.
Starting a blog isn’t all that difficult. However, you’ll require excellent writing skills and create interesting articles to keep on engaging people. The same holds true with vlogging or creating video blogs. You can open a free YouTube channel, Vimeo channel or share on Instagram and Pinterest.
While blogging and vlogging are excellent means to generate awareness about your business, they also provide an opportunity to earn a bit of money by subscribing to Google AdSense. A blog can also serve as a platform for affiliate marketing of your own products and services.
Wrap Up
Almost every successful business has a strong social media presence nowadays. Check Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram or any other presence and most organizations would already be present. This amply proves the importance of social media and the need for effective social media marketing strategies.
1 thought on “Top Effective Social Media Marketing Strategy To Follow In 2019”
I want free