Best Social Media Marketing Tips Every Marketer Should Know

Social media is an indispensable tool for business growth and success in the present times. If it’s not on social media, it doesn’t exist – that’s pretty much the unsaid norm. It becomes imperative then for marketers to not only incorporate this all-important tool in their marketing and promotional strategies but also master its many intricate nuances. After all, almost everyone today runs social media promotions and campaigns, but only a handful of people can put out content with the potential to go viral.

Here are some social media marketing tips that can help you hit the right notes with every campaign:

Identify the Campaign Goals 

It’s easier to work toward an outcome when you know what that outcome is. As any successful social media marketing professional would tell you, it is good practice to set out working on a campaign by setting the goals and then devising plans to achieve those goals. For this, it is important to communicate clearly with the business you are working for and align your understanding with the objectives of the company. One of the most invaluable tips is to include the following in your goals setting process: 

• Specific outcomes that can be quantified at the end of the campaign. Instead of setting a vague goal such as ‘promote the business’, set quantifiable goals such as ‘more social media shares.
• Define goals in a manner that it can be measure definitively.
• Keep it realistic and attainable. Setting lofty goals and failing to meet them can be frustrating and demoralizing.
• Make sure your goals revolve around social media marketing ideas that are relevant and in vogue.
• Incorporate timelines in your goals to ensure timely delivery.

Identify Your Target Audience 

Social media is a cauldron of diversity with the presence of people with every imaginable demographic profile. In such a scenario, even the most successful social media marketing can get lost in transition if not targeted at the right audience. Therefore, if there is one thing you want to take away from all the social media marketing tips and tricks you’ll ever come across, make it this one. To successfully identify the target audience for your niche, start by creating a customer profile covering the following: 

• Age
• Gender
• Ethnicity
• Location
• Marital Status
• Occupation
• Annual Income

Of course, you can add any other parameters to this list depending on their relevance to the products or services for which you are developing social media marketing ideas.

Once your dummy customer profile is in place, talk to the people within the organisation who deal with customers or target customers regularly to get a sense of how the product or service is being perceived in the market so far. This will help you analyse which type of customers are happy with your product, what are the pain points in expanding the outreach of the products and what are the customer expectations. This information can be valuable in building a social media marketing campaign that will get the right message across to the right people. 

Choose Your Platforms Carefully 

Trying to do a little bit of everything will in all likelihood get you nowhere. As the number of social media platforms continues to multiply, it is imperative for successful social media marketing to carefully select the ones that are most effective in reaching out to your target audience. If you try to build a presence on a dozen social media platforms all at once, the effort to build up a sizeable presence of each can get overwhelming quickly and the result just fizzles out. 

Facebook and Twitter are social media giants and a presence on both these platforms is almost non-negotiable for building a brand presence, but beyond that, it is your own judgment as a professional that counts. If your social media marketing ideas are focused on seniors, for instance, it is futile to build a presence on Snapchat or Instagram. Similarly, unless you are aiming for business-to-business collaborations through your social media campaigns, focusing on LinkedIn may be unnecessary. 

In addition to this, keeping track of your competitors’ campaigns can prove to be an invaluable social media marketing tip. This helps you understand their online presence, engagement levels and strategy, which, in turn, helps devise your own more effectively. 

Consistency is Key 

Putting out several updates in a day in the beginning, followed by a radio silence when you run out of things to say is practically social media suicide. Online users have a short attention span and even shorter memory of what they see online. The only way you can create a brand recognition value is by being consistent in your efforts. Here are some ways to do it to be successful social media marketing efforts: 

• Create engaging content in the form of blogs, social media posts, videos, stories and put them out on your chosen platforms with clockwork consistency.
• Adding value to your content by sharing information that is relevant to your audience instead of making sales pitches the focal point of all your social media posts is also one of the most effective social media marketing tips and tricks.
• Engage with your audience by responding to their comments and reactions, and using relevant tags, hashtags, and links to grab their attention.
• Leverage the power of influencers to get your social media marketing ideas across to your audience.
• Running paid ads has become integral to successful social media marketing in the present times. In an ideal world, we’d all love to earn our followers organically. But given the competition in the online space and the forever changing algorithms of social media platforms, it is not an attainable goal any longer. So, be prepared to invest in your social media campaigns.

Master Social Media Marketing  

Does the rush of a million likes excite you? Think you can write a mean social media post to grab eyeballs? You can very well turn it into a career. All you need is the right training to master all the important social media marketing tips and tricks.

Looking to sharpen your social media marketing skills? Join Shaw Academy's top-rated professional diploma in social media marketing today!