In an early-2020 survey, 83% of marketers stated that they used social media for marketing. That gives you an idea of how many brands are competing for attention on the various social media platforms.
Anyone seeking to enter this scene needs to prepare for a serious marketing battle. For example, that mainstay of social media marketing, the image post, is no longer enough - because everyone’s already using it!
You need to optimise your social media marketing to expand your reach and increase awareness of your brand. You need an actual plan to increase engagement and convert audiences into customers… because it won’t happen by itself.
Here, we’ll share how to optimise your social media marketing strategy, especially its content.
Why is content important on social media?
Let’s answer this question first, because you might wonder why we chose to focus on the content part.
Frankly, even on social media, content remains king. Put out the right content and you can hit it big; do the opposite and you’ll find your social media accounts stagnating.
In fact, Hubspot states that 20% of consumers unfollow brands on social media due to repetitive or boring content. That means you could lose a big part of your audience just by posting the wrong things.
And it’s not just about the content itself either. It can also be about the way you put out that content. 15% of consumers say they also unfollow brands too for posting too often (though it depends on the platform).
So there are obviously right and wrong ways to do social media, relative to content. You don’t want the latter, obviously, or you could end up spending marketing dollars in a way detrimental to your actual goals.
Fortunately, optimising content on social media - whether paid or organic - isn’t complicated. Let’s go over how you can do it now.
How to optimise your social media content
1. Recognise your audience
Different social media platforms target different audience subsets in the same way different businesses can have different customer demographics.
That’s why it’s vital to understand how the different platforms work and what your target audience on each one prefers.
We’ve talked about this before in our article on how to drive traffic into your marketing funnel.
This is a critical step in your content strategy. It means identifying your audience, segmenting it if needed, and choosing the best platforms as well as content formats for reaching them.
Here are some queries to ask yourself:
What age group is your audience?
What are their professions?
Are they direct consumers or people who refer you to others?
What type of data do they need?
Do they need to be educated about the product/service?
Is the item something they can buy instantly or a big-ticket purchase that needs a lot of thought?
When is the best time to approach them?
Do you need a sales support team for your customers?
These can help you make the right decisions at this stage. You should also remember that each social media platform has pros and cons and areas of focus.
You don’t typically go on LinkedIn to sell potato crisps directly to consumers, for example.
Nor do you usually go to Instagram to sell a complex B2C service that can’t be expressed easily in visuals.
That’s related to why you don’t need to be on every social media platform. Every smart content strategy needs good channel selection: it doesn’t waste time and resources on the wrong channels “just because”.
You can start by building a strong presence on a few channels first. Once you’ve succeeded, you’ll likely already have the resources to think about expanding to other channels your audience may frequent.
2. Create your content strategy
At its simplest, this just means crafting your own media in whatever formats are necessary for the channels and goals you’ve selected.
That means making text, image, video, audio, or other types of content to suit your purposes.
Keep in mind that you need to develop a consistent brand image and style across all the platforms. Even if it’s advisable to do some form of content differentiation across platforms (see this article for more on that), consistency is still important. It keeps your image cohesive and credible for your audience.
You also need to balance various things when crafting your content, from quality to length. You need the posts to grab attention but also don’t want to lose people midway through because they’ve lost interest.
Don’t forget to set targets and track your performance too, of course. It’s hard to run a campaign or assess a strategy without doing this.
What you actually measure is dependent on how you set up your objectives. Samples of measurable points of information are likes, shares, clicks, and even purchases.
The data point should match your purposes. If your goal is to get more traffic to your website, you might measure the number of visitors you get to your site from a social media post, for example.
3. Build a profile
Your profile is actually another prime piece of real estate where you can put out content. It’s also crucial to your branding, so don’t overlook it!
Here are some basic tips for building your profile:
Include a bio and profile picture that actually reflect your brand.
Use your company logo in visual assets wherever possible.
Offer contact information on your profile page by adding email, phone, and website details, as this can help you grab leads and convert.
4. Leverage Facebook’s extensive marketing options
If you’re doing social media marketing, you’ll likely use Facebook. When that happens, don’t forget to make the most of the platform’s many marketing tools!
Facebook has a tonne of options for both organic and paid marketing. You can run ads to targeted audiences, time ads to match special events in consumers’ lives (like anniversaries or christenings), and even use a variety of CTAs.
Don’t ignore these tools, because they can support your digital marketing content strategy very effectively.
5. Maximise engagement
Keep an eye out for ways to maximise engagement on the platforms you’re using. The best tactics for this vary based on the platform and sometimes, even by industry.
As an example, consider the way many marketers in the lifestyle and consumer market use Instagram.
They know the Instagram audience tends to be young and highly engaged. They love connections, quality visual content, and brands interacting with them.
So, marketers on the platform tend to collaborate with influencers and churn out quality content regularly. That’s how they get engagement.
On LinkedIn, by comparison, people are more focused on business networking and knowledge. Yet people also want expertise even here, as well as a degree of personal authority.
As such, some businesses actually have their employees create posts on their pages that refer to the company. This is because engagement is still higher here for people’s posts compared to posts on the company page.
6. Use video marketing
People love visuals and they love video best of all. Sprout’s Social Index sees video named the most valuable content type for achieving marketing goals (at 54%), and we see that regularly ourselves in our own campaigns.
So, consider using video on YouTube or other platforms in your content strategy. It can serve purposes like the following:
Educate consumers on your product or service
Offer product demos
Provide solutions that your target audience needs and that are often related to your business
7. Use marketing automation tools
Don’t kill yourself trying to manage your social media strategy manually. There are actually automation programs that can help you with a lot of the tasks involved, including performance monitoring.
Even the platforms themselves sometimes have tools that can help you out here. Check out the built-in automation tools on Facebook and Instagram, for instance!
Where to Go with Your Social Media Marketing
Since social media marketing is as relevant as ever, businesses need to get on it or risk missing out. With over 4.7 million social media users in Singapore in 2020, you could miss a tonne of chances to reach your target consumers if you’re not doing it.
If you want to try social media marketing for your business, it’s vital to have a sense of the role content and planning play in a successful social media strategy. Above, we’ve laid out key tips that can get you started in the process.
If you find that you need more help, though, don’t be afraid to reach out to us. Whether you need guidance in social media marketing or some other digital marketing matter, we’ll be happy to assist.
Contact us for a chat for your digital marketing needs!
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