Social media has never been so prevalent and so important than today, so it is important to maximise your social media impact to stay ahead of the competition in your field.
The world has shifted online over the past 12 months faster than was previously anticipated, and it was happening at speed anyway!
Increasing engagement on social media is the secret to making the most of the various platforms. We have passed through the phase of simply blasting the platforms with adverts to increase exposure; to gain any kind of traction, our posts now have to engage with their audience.
Here are 4 quick tips to help you improve engagement with your market and maximise your social media impact.
1. Create your ideal customer avatar
As with any marketing, you need to know who your target market is. Create your ideal customer avatar – who they are, what they do, income, worldview, which media platforms they use, etc…
You cannot target a social media campaign until you know who you are aiming at.
You would have done this for all your marketing campaigns previously (hopefully), no doubt, but now you need an idea of your perfect customer avatar specifically for social media interaction.
Depending on your market and your product, this may be similar to, or completely different from, your average customer.
Once you have done this, you can then begin to plan and build your social media campaigns based on your target avatar. Once this is successfully done, repeat the process with a second, third (maybe fourth) avatar, designed around each product, demographic etc… as each of these will generate a different market personality with different touchpoints.
Repeat as many times as fits your business/market.
2. Build engagement into every post
Every post on every social media platform needs a call to action. Simply posting an image or a comment is rarely enough these days – it may get looked at but then the vast majority of viewers will simply scroll on and not think of it again.
So unless you are rolling out the early stages of a teaser campaign, and the images are deliberately obscure and don’t require a response, think about putting a call to action into every post.
OK – so you won’t always need one – but the point here is to make having a CTA the default position unless there is a reason not to – as opposed to the other way around.
Engagement is what you are after – so allow viewers to engage and give them a reason to.
There are so many different ways to ask for a response in a CTA that it’s impossible to list them all here but be aware that 2020 has led to some changes in the rules of customer engagement.
Splento has created a special report on this subject for you – and it’s free. Click the button below to download your copy now:
3. Create a robust social media plan
Don’t just throw random posts out onto social media platforms without having a strategy in place.
There are now so many platforms, it is essential to know what you are doing before you do it. Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter are just a start. You may well have a presence on one or more of the many others. Then there are tie-ins to your blogs, vlogs, website, landing pages and email campaigns.
The strategy of success is coordination.
Social media campaigns require planning and can stretch over several weeks – sometimes even months – so planning each stage is necessary to determine the resources you are going to need (photos, video, graphic designs etc…).
They should be designed to fit into the company marketing strategy, which they play an important part.
Just throwing out random posts without thought may get a little response, but not enough to justify the time and effort that will have gone into them.
Imagine a restaurant where the menu wasn’t planned, and the chef just cooked whatever was left in the stores from the day before. It only takes a moment to realise that the menu would be all over the place, waiters wouldn’t know the dishes, the customers would not be around for long and the restaurant would gain a reputation of being unreliable (at best). Most likely it’d be closed within weeks.
Menus need planning so everyone knows what is happening and what food needs ordering.
Your social media campaigns are the same.
Plan them, gather your resources, and create a schedule with a purpose that supports the aims and targets of the rest of the business.
Doing this also means that when planning the visual media required, photoshoots and video sessions can be arranged collectively, and this will reduce costs.
Then you can hit every platform that you want to – at the right time, in sync with other posts on other platforms and what you end up with is a smooth, planned, cohesive campaign.
4. Test everything
Once you have a campaign planned and executed – monitor and test it. And keep monitoring and testing.
Use A/B testing for posts and landing pages. Monitor what works and doesn’t.
The only guarantee is that not everything will work well, and you need to know ASAP so that you can adjust as you go.
All results are good – they either bring the desired engagement or, if they don’t, then they teach a valuable lesson for the future.
Replace what isn’t working for you but try and figure out why it didn’t work. Often, the easiest way to do this is to simply ask people!
You’ll be surprised by the helpful results you get from a simple email to a non-customer who viewed your posts (maybe even interacted) but didn’t eventually place an order.
Test, review, research, learn. Repeat.
Engagement is the key to success in the online marketing world – and social media is an amazing tool for this specific task.
But it needs to be done the right way and at the right time, and aimed at the right consumers, which is what these four tips will help you to achieve.
If you need any help planning a social media campaign, then Splento is happy to help. Feel free to contact us anytime.
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