There is a lot of perception of the best social media marketing strategies one should use to reach their company’s goals. Every marketer or entrepreneur’s main agenda is to efficiently use social marketing to enhance their brand’s strategy and to formulate tactics used to reach their brand’s goal.
The reality is that the best strategies to use in social marketing and companies that strategize with them have become more sophisticated. The competition continues to grow as more new brands start to understand how to use these social media and how to best leverage the tools needed to build a larger audience.
Without further ado, we’re going to give you 5 of the best strategies you can use in social media marketing to improve your engagement and interaction skills to leverage your brand’s foundation.
#1 Make Your Game Plan and Stick to It: One of the best strategies to use in social marketing
When we talk about having an advanced social marketing strategy it means coming up with a technique that employs more than a normal social media presence. It does the multiple tasks of presenting your audience with a powerful marketing message at the same time pushing them to view your brand’s business site. However, you can’t go about having an advanced strategy until you understand the importance of experiencing customer engagement and the basics of online marketing.
If you don’t have a strategy prepared, you can’t expect your content to stay afloat for long. It starts with the simplest things, like setting a limit to how many tweets you send out in a day or how many posts you make live on your Facebook page per week. These are things that seem to be easy to hit, but having a number or target you want to hit also means having a goal for your marketing.
Another thing that should be a part of your strategy would be to consider checking out your competitors, what they are posting and do some research on the amount of content they publish on each of their channels. It’s best to be active with your strategy, just be careful not to be overly active.
You should also include in your strategy a way for you to compile all of your content in an organized easy to read calendar. Set it up weekly, and share it with your co-workers within your content team so that they can provide feedback before you start publishing your social media posts. It’s always best to plan ahead, and just continue adding things when necessary. As this is one of the best strategies to use in social marketing, it also means you should take the time to look into different kinds of social media management and automation platforms. This will help you schedule your posts and manage the monitoring of your different feeds and analytics.
#2 The Strategy of Multimedia Usage
Your audience now gives a whole new importance to the term “A picture is worth a thousand words”. Most consumers take the time now to look for products they’re interested in by searching the internet for pictures and videos. This is because they want more information on what they might consider investing or buying in. Technically, even for small time brands, this isn’t a hard practice to keep up with.
Another social media marketing strategy to consider is to start taking more photos and videos of your products and special events as a way for you to help your brand highlight its best features. This helps to both convince consumers to buy from you and other companies to work with you. It is also a great way for the company to get some good ambiance in its HR department.
If your brand usually needs to explain the dos and don’ts or how-tos of its products, it would be best to prepare numerous videos. When you can show your audience step by step instructions, it provides them a bigger impact on the product than any written content you decide to post. The good thing is you don’t have to invest hundreds to create a good video. Get the company its own personal camcorder, and take easy not so techy videos to use for your marketing needs.
If you haven’t already noticed it, your multimedia usage helps determine your business-consumer sales flow and will help make your company seem more appealing to people. This is why the use of videos and photos is so widely appreciated, not only is it part of the list of best strategies to use in social marketing, but it shows consumers that your brand is: fun, employee friendly and most of all customer oriented.
#3: It’s All About the Customer Service You Provide
Your audience is everything, if they post something or make a comment on your tweet or Facebook page and never receive any sort of feedback from you, you’ll lose their trust. This can cause your potential consumers to turn to competitors for answers since you weren’t able to provide the necessary communication. However, if you respond in a timely fashion with a thoughtful response, your audience will be satisfied with your brand. It’s a natural human practice to respond to give time for responding to inquiries and building authority.
Any sort of negative feedback should and needs to be addressed in an orderly manner and as soon as possible. You just have to remember to do with patience and respect. This is where you can go about assigning a responder for these kinds of feedback and monitor the channel it’s on. It will serve as an opportunity for you as a marketer to use your social channels to promote how well you treat your customers.
You can also take the time to create organized tables and troubleshooting libraries for common complaints that might arise. Take the initiative to make sure issues are addressed properly and on time. Some feedback might need more attention or might need you to discuss confidential information. It’s important to prepare yourself with email support and a helpline in case that happens.
If you’re trying to pacify an unhappy consumer, part of being one of the best strategies to use in social marketing is to be creative. You can use giveaways and a pleasing personality to entertain these customers and possibly even turn them into brand promoters. Just remember to never ignore any sort of feedback on your social channels, each is critical to your brand’s marketing.
#4 Get Going With Interesting Contests and Discounts
Forming a community and network around your brand is only a part of social marketing. You have to be able to know how to use this network in driving sales, promoting marketing and sourcing operations. This is how social media actually works and helps get your brand traffic. One of the best strategies to use in social marketing that will help excite your consumers is to brainstorm on creating a contest or offer special discounts. Not only does it build buzz, but it helps make certain content that you publish along with it go viral. Great contests should include the practice of sharing as a necessity for a consumer to win.
Discounts also provide a great way to connect with your audience. If you give special or exclusive coupons to those loyal consumers, you’ll be rewarding them. This gives them a sense of importance and reminds them your brand is great to engage with and buy from.
#5 Mishaps are Normal, Learn From Them
As humans, mistakes are normal and undeniably unavoidable, no matter how much we try to avoid them. This is an especially common thing when it comes to social media. The last of our best strategies to use in social marketing would be to embrace them, instead of fussing over them or worse ignoring them.
We don’t mean that if you miss a comma on a tweet, you have to go and announce the small flaw to the whole world or even worse go and delete it. Rather than let it slide, it’s most likely that your audience has already started to follow it and they’ll more likely to notice something is wrong if you have to go and re-post it after putting in that comma. If you just happen to make one of those larger scale mistakes like product errors or multiple credit charges, then do your best to respond to your consumers with apologetic feedback and humble manners.
You can also send out content on your channels apologizing and addressing any minor errors people might mention there. Instead of digging yourself a ditch, sometimes it’s best to just embrace the fact that you’ve made a mistake and make a comeback from it. You’re more than likely to have created awesome content and have provided great customer service majority of the time, and that earns respect.
Wrapping it up
The process of putting these strategies into action depends on you as a marketer. You have to put in the resources and allocate your time into making it worth with your brand. Most of the time inner constraints are the reason companies lose tactic and strategy, so getting your head in the game and focusing your attention on making it work with these strategies for social marketing will do you a lot of good.
Elochi says
Hello Jarvee,
this is indeed a great post you got here. truly i must say that social media marketing is becoming the order of the day, by which it helps to increase ones visibility online and perhaps grows your brand for effective audience.
Logan says
Thank you for the good remarks Elochi, we highly appreciate that. You are indeed correct, social media is the new tv and radio of the 80’s.
Yang says
I highly agree with #1, however, I would like to include that one shouldn’t spend too much time planning when they are initially starting out. It’s better to initially craft a dead-simple plan and then keep amending and making it more complex as time passes by and one has more data about things.
Logan says
Awesome tip Yang!
Sebastian says
#5 is not only true for marketing, but life in general. Actually, this is what differs a great entrepreneur from someone who can’t succeed. the former embraces their failures and mistakes and MOVES ON.
Logan says
Words of wisdom 🙂
Sebastian says
Personally, before crafting a plan i jot down all the main strategies my competitors are using. I try to find a little bit of analytics if i can as well, and then with that data, form a realistic plan. It works great and I’d suggest everyone to use that strategy!
Logan says
Thanks for the tip Sebastian!
Kathy says
+1 for mentioning how companies should have more pictures and demonstrations of their product.
These days long sales content isn’t as effective as short demonstration videos and pictures of a product.
Logan says
Exactly! We’ve mentioned that in our previous articles as well.
Ahad says
Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Apple. ALL of them have excellent customer service and it is exactly because of that reason why they have grown so much.
If you’ve used Microsoft support, you’ll notice its blazing fast and they are extremely well trained in terms of responding to ones queries.
Logan says
Nice observation Ahad!
Heather says
I’d want to add, discounts are most widely used for the start of a sales funnel or quality lead generation. Many people overlook this without realizing its potential
Logan says
Indeed!
Quentin says
Setting goals and benchmarks in ones social media strategy and amending it as more data is obtained, is by far the most important aspect of online marketing i have observed.
Will Mcarthur says
You shouldn’t be running your social media without a proper plan. It’s at the same time easier to have everything planned in advance and not work under pressure to plan and create content and it looks more professional when you have a certain flow and when your followers know what they can expect from you.
Tiffany says
Posting both videos and photos is something that your followers expect from you. But don’t give them just anything. Take advantage of each posted post. It’s better to post 2 times per week and show them awesome stuff about your brand or products, than to post each day something that will not get any reaction.
Hung LI says
Social media marketing is leading marketing platform nowadays. If we do as told in this article, btw great article, if we manage to creat good strategy and to implement all those advices, then there is no need for us to worry about our future. We have all the tools out there,we just need time and we must work hard.
Karen Mclean says
Never ignore your audience. Even if you get some bad feedback or comments, you should always respond and turn the situation into your benefit. Respecting your customers and potential customers online is something that they appreciate and leaves a great impression about the business.
Harris says
Using social media for promoting our ideas and products not only we save our money, but we also became experts and we are gathering so much experience and “knowhow” and we became more independent.
Mich Swarezny says
I agree 100% with the last part (section) of this article,when we make mistake it means that we have learned something new and each mistake,or fall is the chance for another win and rise, it’s an opportunity, not the end of world.