14 Social Media Marketing Strategies For Effective Branding

Table of Contents

• Introduction
  • Set Achievable Goals
  • Understand Your Competition
  • Manage Your Content 
  • Define Your Target Audience 
  • Plan Your Social Media Budget
  • Work With Influencers
  • Use the Right Tools
  • Determine Relevant Metrics 
  • Use the Right Media For the Right Audience 
  • Pay Attention to Trends
  • Build Relationships 
  • Invest in Cross-channel Ads
  • Understand the Types of Advertising 
  • Consistency is Key
• Conclusion
• Frequently Asked Questions 

Do you know that more than 13 million people across the globe use social media platforms every day? And, emerging and developed countries are more inclined towards this trend. Most of the users using social media platforms fall between the age groups of 16 to 40. In fact, the use of social media platforms has increased, but the way people are using them has changed. Social media started off by allowing users to connect with friends and colleagues; but now, especially after the COVID-19 lockdown, social media platforms have also become a thriving marketplace. Today, various social media channels offer a business approach for companies looking to use them as a platform. 

One of the prime examples of a social media channel offering a business platform is Instagram. While it allows users to connect with multiple users, it also allows businesses to spread awareness about their offerings to these users. Instagram – like any other digital marketing platform – allows you to reach out to potential clients as well. The same goes for other social media channels as well. 

In fact, the latest data by Data Report shows that there are 4.33 billion social media users around the world, which means it equals 55% of the total global population.

Now that we have established that Social Media is a lucrative option for businesses looking to use these platforms for their digital marketing efforts, let’s talk about some strategies. 

1. Set Achievable Goals 

Make a plan. Creating a social media strategy and operating all social accounts in a thoughtful, measured way, is the way to go. Your goals have to be measurable, specific, attainable, relevant, and time-bound. Do not try to excel on all social platforms. You need to understand why you are using the particular platform and what you want to gain from it. Different social media platforms serve different goals. You can create your goal accordingly. If you are interested more in selling your products or creating awareness about them, then Instagram is the best platform. Similarly, if you want to create brand awareness using only images, then you can opt for Pinterest. Here’s a quick guide of what your goal should include. 

Your goals must include:

• Increasing brand awareness
• Increasing sales
• Measuring RoI (return on investment)
• Driving footfalls in stores
• Improving your follower base

If these goals are incorporated into your present plan, then they will help you grow your business – no matter whether it is big or small. 

2. Understand Your Competition 

No firm grows in isolation. All your competitors have a social strategy. Get sneaky. It’s part of the game! Find their mobile-desktop traffic share. Detect their direct, referral, paid, search, and social traffic. Locate the countries their traffic comes from. A competitor analysis will help you better understand their strengths and weaknesses. You need to identify who or what is your competition in order to generate positive results. Competition research helps you understand better what’s going on and how to build your brand and make it stand out from the crowd for better eyeballs. Understanding the competition is a crucial part of creating a social media advertising strategy.

3. Manage Your Content

Creating good content is not just promoting your brand. Create content that your followers would love to see; make user-generated content. Consumers want entertaining videos, giveaways, snapshots of behind-the-scenes, quizzes, games, polls, and blogs, etc. Make your imagery enticing and create variety, while staying true to your brand. The content should include different types of posts and other content that suits your audience. 

By using proper content management tactics, the social media campaign strategy will work. The main goal is to focus on your audience and their response to the content that you are posting. You need to find and maintain the right balance between posting promotional content and content that is informative. User engagement increases with content management. You can also hire a content manager for this post to understand what your business needs at a given time. They will identify the requirements and create content accordingly.

4. Define Your Target Audience 

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Who are you selling your product to? What is their mindset? Know your buyer. Not everybody visiting your site can be your customer. A customer’s problem must be solved by you. Analyze their problems and consider how you will address their needs. Find their information channels and identify their pain points, problems, triggering events, and priorities. Once you touch the pulse of your audience, it becomes easier to plan content. Without knowing your audience, all your social media marketing ideas are most likely to fail. You can find what the majority likes and focus on giving them similar content as well as capturing a similar audience. 

5. Plan Your Social Media Budget 

Social media marketing has no magic number. To reach out, you must create great campaigns. How much you must spend on ads and your RoI will largely depend on the efficacy of your campaign. In social media marketing, a higher expenditure does not necessarily equate better success. Budgeting will ensure that you have the funds to achieve your goals. Conduct a comparison with other available marketing channels, and then allocate your budget to social media; otherwise, it will become impossible to know the true ROI of your work. Sometimes the budget can exceed your given budget; so be prepared for that as well. A good social media marketing strategy is the key to planning and preparing your social media budget. 

6. Work with Influencers 

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Social media influencers are on the rise. To offer a simpler explanation, influencer marketing is a form of social media marketing where individuals recommend and make product mentions on social media channels like YouTube and Instagram. They have a dedicated social following and are viewed as social content creators with niche audiences who can often offer more value to brands. The method works because these influencers have built a rapport with their followers over time. You can also build a relationship with these freelancers when it comes to your products. It is an effective way to capture more audiences in a short period of time.

7. Use the Right Tools 

You can use several tools for your social media marketing campaign. These tools make your work easy and allow you to create better quality content.

• Engagement Management: Engaging with your customers is made easy with tools like Hootsuite that helps to centralize all messages and mentions onto one dashboard for your company.
• Analytics: Getting all analytics in one place can get you a bird’s-eye-view of your social media performance. Hootsuite Insights powered by Brandwatch gives you a great overview of how well you are capturing the conversation in your space.
• Graphics: VSCO, A Color Story, and Canva are some of the tools you can turn to if you’re having trouble creating eye-catching graphics for your social media posts.
• Content curation: Tools like BuzzSumo and Pocket can help you find and organize content to share. You can find more content curation tools in our beginner’s guide to content curation.

There are many other tools (paid or free) also available. Go through your content and creatives and select the best tool for your campaign. 

8. Determine Relevant Metrics

There is no guarantee that your social media efforts will bring you the desired results. So, the one thing that you need to consistently do is track your results to understand the success of your campaigns. How do you keep an eye on your progress? Some social networks provide analytics tools that can provide necessary data. For example, you will find an insights section for your Facebook page and Analytics sections on Twitter and YouTube. This will give you an idea of how you are progressing in your campaign. 

9. Use the Right Media for the Right Audience 

Never waste your time on the social network your audience will not use. No two businesses attract the same consumer. You must reach out to the right people through the relevant medium. For this, you can use buyer personas, which define your target audience and help you create content for that ideal customer.

Once you have identified your customer and determined the main platforms that are effective for your product, master your marketing strategy. There are chances that you might get confused about what platform you should be more active on, but it is important to understand that you need to start by taking small steps. Master one of the social media platforms and then switch to another as you see fit. Do not jump from one platform to another, as it can create chaos and will lead to no gain.

10. Pay Attention to Trends 

You must pay attention to trends. Not that you have to keep stock of every meme that goes viral. Social trends will tell you what people search for in their social channels. Content that resonates with what people are looking for will get you to the right audience. 

Social platforms are continuously evolving – they keep introducing new features and changing their algorithms. As a result, the trends change. Stay updated. It is rather difficult to start your own trend but if you have some excellent ideas you can create something new that can become a trend. Social media marketing tips will help you create content that is trending while also being relevant to your business. 

11. Build Relationships

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Relationships are built through social media interaction. Just like in the outside world, in social media, people laugh, get married, divorced, etc. A brand must offer value to a community by building real relationships. People use the internet to research brands. Part of that discovery is getting to know who you are as a brand and what you stand for. Reach out to your audience by creating a Facebook page or interacting on Instagram. It is the best way to connect with your users. You need to engage with your audience and make them feel important. When they ask a query you cannot keep them hanging, you need to interact with them, reply to them. 

You also cannot expect your audience to always be the first one to interact; sometimes, you have to make the first move and get involved. When you show that you are interested in your audience there is a great chance that you will get a great response from them as well. You can ask questions with them, interact with them, share details about your business, know more about them, etc. In the beginning, you might not notice a lot of interaction, but with time you will see a lot of people getting involved with your business. It’s a gradual process and will show results with time. You must also try to collect as much positive feedback as possible and share this online. It is not only a great way to build trust but also shows your responsiveness and quality of business.

12. Invest in Cross-channel Ads

Some businesses create a presence across all channels by having more than one social account and tying them together with cross-channel campaigns. They even include influencers and brand advocates in these campaigns. Match the target audience to a campaign and you can have many social accounts. But, that doesn’t mean you use the same content, unaltered. Think of a story you can tell across channels without repeating yourself; that makes it interesting. For example, you can use tweets and hashtags in your Twitter messages, use videos on YouTube, shorter videos on TikTok, and so on.

13. Understand the Types of Advertising

There are various types of advertising that can help you generate better leads that in turn convert you into potential clients. Here are a few types of advertising that can help you to have a better online presence.

• Video is always more impactful than text, though the cost is higher. 
• Quizzes engage the audience and enable better collection of data.
• Storytelling is possible on platforms like Facebook and Instagram.
• Image carousels are a series of images your audience can scroll through for a range of products.
• Messenger ads/messages come in useful to recapture customers who have drifted away.

14. Consistency is Key

Who doesn’t like to be consistent? Consistency is the key to achieving more. Be clear about the role each channel plays in supporting your business. How can each one be utilized to reach your specific audience? Define what each channel will do for you. Ensure that your content is of superior quality. Here, consistency and relevance are very important. Your consumer must be able to identify your brand by its look and feel, by tone, etc. 

By being consistent with your work, you tend to build more trust and establish a bond with your followers. It will make you look professional and will say a lot about your business. For example, if you post every alternate day or every two days, your audience will perceive that you are working hard and you have a lot more to deliver. If you are new to a field or have created a new account, then being consistent is one of the important ways to gain more followers or audiences, it is one of the social media marketing best practices. If you break this chain of consistency then it will affect your growth and also create a negative impression.

Conclusion

The attraction towards social media is increasing every year. An increasing number of users are now becoming a huge part of this social circle. When nearly half of the world is active on social media, use it as an opportunity to grow your business. These social media marketing tips will help you accelerate your business and make it thrive.

FAQs