Seven Steps to Successful Social Media Marketing (and Five Errors to Avoid)
Once considered an optional addition to a broader digital strategy, social media marketing is now a compulsory prerequisite—at least for marketers looking to reach the world’s largest audience of connected consumers and generate a potentially huge ROI.
The sheer size and complexity of the social media landscape can make it difficult to know where to start. By now, we’ll assume that your business already operates a social presence. Even if it’s something as simple as a Facebook Business Page and a relatively inactive Twitter account, you’re probably ‘on’ social media to some extent.
But what should you be doing to leverage the enormous power of social media to grow your business? How can you take your current strategy to a higher level, enabling you to outperform your competitors across all key platforms?
Everything is best when it is kept simple.
A Simple Seven-Step Process
Contrary to popular belief, upping your social media game effectively and quantifiable isn’t particularly difficult. You must take seven primary steps to turbocharge your social media marketing strategy.
Step 1: Conduct a Detailed Social Media Audit
The first is to take the time to assess your current position and performance. It’s cliché, but you cannot get where you want to be if you don’t know where you are right now.
Conducting a social media audit means taking various things into account, including but not limited to the following:
The platforms you have opened accounts with
How often do you publish content
Your level of audience engagement
The networks that bring you the most value
Your performance compared to your competitors
The quality and variety of your content
Examine everything you’re doing from an objective (if not slightly critical) perspective. Only by identifying your social media strengths and weaknesses will you be able to make improvements accordingly.
Step 2: Build a Profile of Your Perfect Customer
This is an essential step in determining when, where, and how you should target potential customers for your business. Avoid ambiguity and consider the finer details of the perfect customer for your business by way of more information such as:
Their age
Where they live
Income level
Hobbies and interests
Job title
Preferred social networks
General lifestyle
Preferences
If you identify your ideal customer as a young male professional aged 21 to 35 who lives in Central London, earns £100,000+ per year, primarily uses Facebook and is married with kids, you’ll do far better than if you were to target ‘parents’ as your preferred audience simply.
Step 3: Establish Specific Goals and Objectives
Effective social media marketing can be used for just about anything. For some, establishing a presence on social media is all about reputation management and positive PR. For others, it’s about as many products and services as possible.
Setting clearly defined goals and objectives is essential, as they will strongly and directly influence everything you do after that. For example, a social campaign to sell more designer clothes won’t (or shouldn’t) look like a separate campaign to boost awareness of environmental issues and raise money for charity.
Step 4: Identify KPIs at an Early Stage
You cannot improve something if you cannot measure it—something—this is something to remember throughout your social media marketing campaign. Again, what defines ‘success’ will always differ significantly from one strategy to the next, depending on what your goal examples of KPIs to keep track of when evaluating the performance of a social media marketing campaign include the following:
Audience engagement
Brand mentions
Total reach
Time spent on page
Conversion rate
Shares, likes and reposts
New fans and followers
Keeping track of your most essential KPIs from start to finish is the only way of ensuring your campaign achieves its objectives.
Step 5: Invest Heavily in Quality Content
On average, 500 million tweets are tweeted on Twitter, 95 million pieces of content are added to Instagram, and at least 350 million photos are published on Facebook. Making your voice heard above the noise can seem impossible, but remembering that most content published on platforms like these lacks quality is worth remembering.
In social media marketing, ‘quality’ content is anything relevant and valuable to your target audience that is also unique. It needs to appeal to them directly and be something they cannot find elsewhere. Hence, before posting anything on a social platform, you must question its quality from your audience’s viewpoint.
Step 6: Invest in Third-Party Social Media Management if Necessary
Does professional social media marketing management cost money? Of course, it does. Will your business be worse off financially if you hire outside help? Not.
Smaller businesses, in particular, often avoid third-party SMM involvement to save money. However, in doing so, they overlook the potential for an experienced social media marketing expert to generate a vastly superior ROI for their business.
The simple fact is that if you cannot appropriately handle your social strategy in-house, you must consider outsourcing. The consequences of an inadequate social strategy far outweigh the potential costs of expert involvement.
Step 7: Track, Analyse and Continually Optimise
The seventh and final step is to recognise that social media marketing is a continuous process rather than a ‘cut-and-shut’ task. Considered by most SMM pros to be the most crucial step, tracking your campaign's performance holds the key to continuous improvement.
All the analytical tools you could ever need are at your disposal – most o—hich are free to use and easy to get to grunderstandy areas for improvement, eliminate anything that isn’t working and level, rage your strengths for the bto benefitampaigns.
Overcoming Obstacles and Avoiding Errors
If preferred, you could examine the whole thing from a different perspective. Rather than consulting a long list of things you should be doing, you can also factor in everything you shouldn’t do.
No social media marketing strategy is perfect, and it's not uncommon to occasionally slip up along the way. Nevertheless, knowing the most common errors and obstacles you may encounter is essential to understand how to overcome them where necessary.
Let’s take a look at five examples in a little more detail:
1. Posting simply for the sake of it
Social media is all about generating engagement through quality conversation. As in any everyday setting, talking simply for the sake of talking doesn’t make you an appealing prospect. When you post merely for posting, you waste your audience’s time and come across as uninspired and unauthentic.
As previously mentioned, it’s always helpful to take a step back before posting and consider the quality of your content from the recipient’s perspective. Get creative and ensure every post you publish has an identifiable value proposition and purpose.
2. Being inflexible in your approach
This may seem contradictory, but hear me out for a moment. On the one hand, yes – you need a detailed and developed social media marketing strategy to work by. On the other hand, this doesn’t mean you cannot and should not deviate from your original plan if it becomes necessary or preferable.
Your decisions should be based on your results. Pay attention to what works with your audience and what matters most to your fans and followers. If something you’re doing works better or worse than expected, don’t hesitate to deviate entirely from your initial action plan.
3. Forgetting the ‘social’ side of SMM
Like many businesses, you may primarily use social media (or exclusively) to sell more products and make more money. In this case, the key to making it happen lies in strategically hiding your intentions from your target audience. If you spend the wrong message and too much time promoting products and openly attempting to sell things via social media, your social media as a sales and marketing platform is all about mastering the fine art of ‘selling without selling’. Social media provides the perfect platform for cultivating trust and respect with a potentially enormous audience. You show them the people and the personality behind the brand, provide them with valuable content, and engage them in relevant conversation.
Over time, you build solid and meaningful relationships with your customers. Thus, by removing the hard sell requirement, products effectively sell themselves.
4. Trying to do too much
Specifically, this refers to the temptation to spread thinly across as many platforms as possible. Maintaining an active presence on Facebook and Instagram can be presence challenging. Throw another half-dozen platforms into the equation, and you’re quickly looking at something that goes beyond a full-time job in its own right.
Of course, any business able to outsource its social strategy and benefit from a significant multiplatform campaign should probably do just that. For everyone else, it’s a case of focusing your efforts on the platforms that bring you the most value. If the vast majority of audience your business's relevant audience members are on Facebook, feel free to sideline other platforms.
5. One-way communication
Social media provides businesses with the perfect opportunity to nurture open discussion and generate engagement. Unfortunately, many companies continue to use social media as a strictly one-way communication platform. They bombard their target audience with posts and content of varying value, though they do little to encourage conversation and rarely interact with their followers.
This is where things again verge dangerously on ‘sales’ social media marketing, which is almost always unsuccessful. As already touched upon, building trust and establishing meaningful relationships is all about becoming a part of the community you’re attempting to appeal to. Make all reasonable efforts to reply to every comment and question that comes your way while actively encouraging people to share their thoughts and opinions on your brand.
A Final Word on Brand Consistency
Whatever makes your brand unique should be promoted and celebrated on your social media pages. More importantly, it should be consistent across all of them. Rather than viewing each of your social accounts as a separate entity in its own right, it’s better to focus on your combined social presence as one deeply connected marketing asset.
If an individual switches from one of your social accounts to another, it should be immediately apparent which brand the page/profile represents. It should reflect the individuality and personality of your organisation without necessarily being a carbon copy of your other social pages.
Brand consistency is critical to maintaining a unified and appealing presence on social media, which is an essential contributor to a successful marketing strategy.
This is a great video by Rock Your Brand explaining the importance of consistency.