Over the last 8 years, social media spending has increased by 200 percent (Source – The CMO Survey 2017). Still, 43 percent of respondents in the same survey said that it’s been challenging to show the impact of social media on their businesses.
As social media marketing becomes a norm, marketers are feeling the pressure to show ROI. Why? Brands are repeatedly making the mistake of focusing on metrics such as Facebook likes. However, those likes haven’t amounted to much – certainly not a lot of purchases. So, what’s missing?
The answer is engagement. Marketers need to start adding value through the social campaigns. The need of the hour is to reinvent the social strategy in a way that it’s more customer-centric and adds value instead of shamelessly promoting a brand. However, it’s easier said than done. Let’s look at 10 stupendous ways you can revise your social media campaigns
1. Know your Audience
What happens when you don’t know your audience? You create random content. And what does random content do to your marketing ROI? It leads to destruction.
“Random Acts of Marketing (RAMs) will destruct your ROI morsel by morsel, post by post. There is no way around it.” Pam Moore, CEO & Founder, Marketing Nutz.
The heartbeat of social media is people. You can never go wrong by investing in human beings. Thus, it becomes important to do your homework and outline the audience you want to target. Who are they? Where do they live? Do they have a family? Where do they hangout? These trivial details give you insights into the kind of content they want to consume and how you can make it relevant for them.
2. Stay Atop of Trends
Understanding your audience isn’t good enough if you have no clue what they’re reading, searching for, and talking about. Real-time monitoring of trends helps you make your content relevant and timely by gauging what people are looking for online. A good way to start staying atop trends is to follow industry influencers and see what they are talking about. You can also keep a keen eye on journalists in your niche to stay updated with latest happenings. You can use tools like Buzzsumo and Google Trends to your aid. While Google Trends help you find out what your audience is reading and searching about, Buzzsumo gives you an idea of what’s being shared. Both these metrics help you determine the kind of content you’d want to create and distribute on your social channels.
3. Don’t be Afraid to Experiment
While following trends is important, it is equally important to be creative with what you do. Don’t stick to particular type of content when it comes to your social campaigns. Rehash, reinvent, repurpose – do whatever it takes to refresh your content lineup. I’d suggest experimenting with interactive experiences like videos, quizzes, calculators, and assessments. As the customer attention span continues to reduce, it becomes imperative to serve them with content that not only adds value but also interacts with them. Adding a touch of personalization is a plus. Interactive content not only results in real-time interaction but also provides instant gratification, which leads to better engagement. In fact, in a Content Marketing Institute research conducted earlier this year, 46% of the marketers reported using interactive content. Reason? Engagement.
You can also experiment with the posting timings. This will help you understand when is your audience most active. The images below from CoSchedule highlights the best times to post of various social networks according to 20 studies! Refer to this or create your schedule. Whatever you may follow, be consistent.
4. Focus on the Customer
It’s time to reinvent social media from the customer perspective as well. A good thing is to use these channels to address customer concerns and optimize them to get closer to the customers.
Social media holds unprecedented potential for companies to get closer to customers and, by doing so, facilitate increased revenue, cost reduction and efficiencies – IBM
One way you can get started with this at your level is to involve your customer support and success teams while building your social strategies. This is something we practice at my organization. Not only do we create awareness about the product and its various use cases on our social pages, but also use them to resolve customer queries. That results in a quicker turnaround time and higher customer satisfaction.
5. Learn from Millennials
Millennials are the heartbeat of social media. Decoding their behavior and optimizing your campaigns accordingly can help you improve your updates, customer service, and social media tactics. For instance, if your target audience are these new age digital natives and you’re still stuck on Facebook, it might be time to revise your strategy. In a recent survey, 41% of millennials still use Facebook every day, however, Facebook was found to be more popular with non-millennials. Every other measured social media platform (YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest, Twitter and LinkedIn) was found to be more popular with millennials than non-millennials.
Sounds alarming? It sure does. Thus, it becomes imperative to keep a track of how millennials social interaction and behavior. This will help you refresh your social campaigns.
6. Stop Selling, Start Helping
What is the one thing you turn to the internet for, most often? Help. With so many resources available out there for your prospects to seek help from, why would they pay attention to your salesy banter? The need of the hour is to shift the focus of social campaigns from selling to helping your prospects and customers. It’s a better way of engaging them and showing them that you care.
Hellmann started the WhatsCook campaign where it let WhatsApp users to make something delicious using the ingredients they have on-hand. Click a picture of the ingredients in your refrigerator to a real chef, who’d tell you delicacies you can create using them. Pretty cool, right?
7. Come Out of the Corporate Shadow
Position yourself as a personal brand, and not a corporate entity. People are more comfortable interacting with brands that have a face and voice to them.
People are more welcoming of personal brands. Why do you think they started the concept of mascot, brand ambassadors, and advocates? In the online world, these roles can be played on by your customer success or social media managers. Some organizations are already doing that. Vidyard, for instance, created short videos as a part of one of their email outreach campaigns wherein one of their sales reps not only referred to prospects by their first names but also gave references to their colleagues.
8. Don’t Miss Out on the Fun Factor
What’s social without some fun? Don’t forget to make your content fun. This can take the engagement to new heights. From interactive quizzes to sarcastic memes – use all your assets to keep your audience hooked. Incorporate some jazz in your copy as well. Write short crisp sentences with a tinge of humor. How? Here’s some inspiration from some of the most humorous social campaigns I have seen thus far.
9. Track and Measure
Tracking and measuring your efforts should be the backbone of your social media strategy. After all, proving the ROI of your social campaigns will define the shape of your strategy in the upcoming years. Though you might want to measure specific metrics depending on your marketing goals, there are some metrics you must measure – awareness, engagement, traffic, and advocates and fans.
Hootsuite offers a comprehensive guide on tracking social media success. Check it out here.
<Video Attached> Source – H