5 Tips to Improve your Social Media Marketing

Most of us will be in agreement that social media platforms are an extensive source for news and information. Not only that, they also provide the perfect stage for businesses to interact with customers. You may have a social media presence, but, how do you grow your followers? Do you want to improve your engagement rate? Here are my top tips to ace your social media marketing.

Tip 1 - Establish a Social Media Strategy

You may have a marketing plan, but does your plan include a social media strategy? To be successful in social media marketing, it's advisable to have a separate social media strategy which encompasses the following:

1. Your Objectives

2. Defining your Target Audience (s)

3. Creating Engaging Content

4. Optimising your Posts

5. Measuring and Testing

Begin by defining your social media mission statement. Think about what you want to be known for? What is your purpose on Instagram?

Once you’ve defined your mission, you can then set your objectives – examples of these could be: brand building, growing followers, increasing engagement, demand generation, or repositioning. Your objectives should be SMART; specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-bound. It’s important to review results regularly to check whether you are on track.

Tip 2 - Talk to the Right Audience

As a business owner, you should know exactly who your target audience is. Where is your audience online? Which social media platforms are they interacting on? What are they discussing? Now review your followers on your platforms. Social media platforms contain audience insights with data such as age, gender, interests and location. Do these align with your target audience? If not, then you may not be talking to the right people. Utilising paid advertising can help you acquire the right followers quickly; by using lookalike audiences or uploading your own list, you can be very accurate in your targeting. You also have control of your ad budget by setting daily caps.

Another tactic to acquire followers is through influencer marketing. Here’s an interesting stat: “49% of consumers depend on influencer recommendations on social media.” [1]. You don’t necessarily need a massive budget to utilise influencer marketing, some influencers are satisfied with a few products in exchange. If you want to try this, identify who the influencers are in your sector. There are various tools on the market to help you, a few worth mentioning are: Followerwonk, Awario, Buzzsumo, which all have different price plans.

Tip 3 - Create Engaging Content

Only posting "salesy" content alone to drive sales can be off-putting to your followers. Learn to understand what your audience wants to hear and post different types of content. Try breaking your content into different pillars, for example:

• Product features

• Service offerings

• Company culture

• Team members

• Give-aways/Competitions

• How-to guides

• Thought Leadership/Advisory

• User generated content

Keep your content varied. I would recommend a mixture of non-promotional posts to encourage engagement, along with valuable content, such as how-to guides. Yes, you can do your "salesy" posts, (but just not every single time)!

I’m going to use Wiggle as a good example. They are an online retailer selling sports gear for runners and cyclists. The Haribos they send out with each order is also a sweet touch. On Facebook, they strike a good balance between selling, providing helpful advice and offering training sessions to their audience.

Tip 4 - Optimise Your Content

What does good look like?

It goes without saying, that striking visuals to accompany your posts will grab attention. These could be images, infographics, or even better, video. Research has shown that videos are a consumer’s favourite type of content to see from a brand on social media. Whether you target B2C or B2B, users expect to see video content. This is one of the reasons why Tik Tok has enjoyed exponential growth since its launch in 2018. People love video content.

When using images, it’s often best to produce your own. Alternatively, there are stock images you can purchase, or download from free stock imagery sites such as Pixabay. Learn to use Photoshop so you can amend images. A lot of brands opt to include their logo in all their visuals. This also has the added bonus of helping to protect copyright.

Different platforms have different image size specifications, so if you use multiple platforms, the image size for an Instagram post will be different to that required for your Tweet. This is a personal bugbear, and a common error that I witness, people using the same size image across all platforms. Do check what the size requirements are for the relevant platform. I use Sprout Social’s guide.

What does good sound like?

If you take one thing away from this article, “Be resourceful, don't be a sales pitch.” Make sure that you provide informative content. Your content should connect with them, put yourself in their shoes. What will they find relevant and interesting?

If you re-purpose your social content from other sources, e.g., white papers, adapt the copy to a conversational tone for social posts. Use clear and concise language. Good social media copy also creates urgency ("limited time", "offer expires", "now", "hurry"). A solid example is this post from Screwfix. Here they use concise copy, with a clear call-to-action and a UTM link (we discuss UTM codes later) to the product. Note the urgency in the copy.

When is a good time to post?

Learn what your best posting times are for your audience, and be mindful that if your audiences live in different time zones, then you may want to adjust your posting times. Sprout Social has a useful guide on best posting times for different platforms and sectors. This is where using a social media scheduling tool is helpful, so your posts can be sent at an optimised time. There are a lot of tools available, a few are: Hubspot, Hootsuite, Buffer and Sprout Social.

Tip 5 - Measure and Test

UTM Tracking Codes

Different platforms will give you insights into post performance. I’d also strongly recommend that you deploy UTM tracking codes. I recently did a talk on UTM tracking codes outlining what they are and how to use them. For a copy of my slide deck, click here. UTM codes enables you to measure the effectiveness of each post through Google Analytics. This will help you to understand what type of content drives traffic to your website as well as which type of content coverts to sales.

A/B Testing

A/B testing, aka split testing is the process of simply comparing two different versions of an ad/post against each other to determine which one performs better over a period. It can be used consistently to improve your ads/posts to ultimately improve your conversion rate.

Social media is undoubtedly a powerful tool for marketing your business, and one that is easily accessible to all. However, too often people underestimate the time, effort and skills needed to implement it effectively. If done badly, at best you'll be wasting your precious time (and money), at worst it can damage your brand and reputation. If you think social media marketing is something to leave to the intern, think again!

[1] https://www.oberlo.co.uk/blog/social-media-marketing-statistics