Almost every brand that you know has a social media presence now.
Almost every brand that you know has a social media presence now.But let me ask you this:
How many of them are successful in maintaining a thriving social media presence?
How many of the brands are just there for the sake of it?
If you haven’t even fully optimized your social media profiles, don’t share meaningful content, or don’t attempt to get to know what your customer is saying, then it’s time to revamp your outdated marketing strategy.
Read about how you can boost organic growth on social media while developing a meaningful and long-lasting relationship with your customers. We assure you that these benefits will be worth the wait!
Be Mindful of What You Post:
Social is about building a strong relationship with your customers first. This means you have to get them to start trusting you. That is why it is so crucial to share trending, relevant and informative posts that they find engaging. Tap into the right topics to create content that drives attention to your brand!
1. Share Customer Testimonials and Reviews
According to the statistics, 88% of the consumers put their faith in online reviews on par with personal recommendations. And there’s no better way of proving why your customers should choose you than to tell them a success story. Ask your happy customers if they would be willing to share testimonials or reviews. Or you can even run a social media campaign and ask users about their favourite feature.
Share reviews and testimonials like this:
2. Focus on User- Generated Content
In marketing, user-generated content (also known as UGC) refers to any type of content related to your brand – text, videos, images, podcasts, reviews, social media updates – that has been created by people, rather than brands. Brands will often share that update. It is considered UGC if it involves your brand, and has not been posted by affiliates or your employees. This aims to incur credibility within the brand when a user posts it to their own audience, and the brand can repost it.
Unfortunately for us, marketers are always positioning their products in the best light possible, and in doing so, we might overlook the flaws.
But this isn’t the problem with UGC. It shows the true reality of what it could be like for you!
Let’s look at an example from Sephora:
And Starbucks that created a marketing campaign to encourage users to share their images and then reposted the best ones!
The takeaway for marketers:
As a brand, you can encourage your users to share their experiences and results when using your product. These images will help a prospect understand what to expect. These images will speak for themselves.
3. Carefully manage Hashtags
Most of us are familiar with the term called Hashtag. A hashtag isn’t a new internet trend – it’s almost 12 years old! They are actually an integral part of digital marketing as they help you build a brand, increase engagement and reach by joining conversations about trending topics. If you participate in a conversation about a trending topic, you are more likely going to gain visibility beyond your followers to anyone who finds the topic interesting. Ultimately, a greater audience means more leads for your business, higher engagement and growth!
However, here’s the tricky part. Hashtags continually keep updating and evolving. What’s popular now will be outdated tomorrow. So, you need to keep up with current news, and discover trending hashtags based on your content!
Now, imagine if you could curate content, and find out trending hashtags based on that. Wouldn’t that make your life much easier?
4. Build Lucrative Relationships with Influencers:
In simple terms, an influencer is someone who can influence others. Influencer marketing is a collaboration with an influential person to promote something. This can be in the form of endorsements, product mentions, or a shout-out. Influencer marketing is likely to become a $10 billion market by 2020, according to an article on MediaKix.
Initially, this started in the form of Celebrity Endorsements. Instagram’s growth in recent years has given rise to content creators who have dedicated and loyal followers in their niche. This level of trust with their audience is fruitful for brands that want to promote their products. With the right influencer, you can establish trust, increase engagement, and bring leads.
Now here comes the tricky part:
In the sea of possibilities, how will you discover the most suitable influencer to collaborate with?
Understand the Influencer Market
The first step is to immerse yourself into research for social media influencers in your region and industry. Ask for recommendations, conduct surveys, and let yourself decide!
Analyze
You want to look at followers vs. average interaction in each post. After shortlisting all the profiles, analyze the engagement of the influencer with the user, and the relationship they have.
With the Influencer Discovery feature, you can view Influencers’ detailed statistics, including their interests, top posts, hashtags they use, and their average engagement.
Make a lucrative offer
Make sure that the offer you are making is lucrative enough to attract influencers. Do not ask for a free shoutout, or try to misuse your position to coerce them into promoting your products.
Don’t hold back in asking for detailed engagement reports of their posts. Instagram Stories aren’t visible to the public, so it makes sense to analyse their statistics before making a decision.
Word of caution: Marketers have had experience with fraudulent influencers so remember to get analytics! Which takes us to our next topic…
5. Analytics
Social media without analytics is like diving into an ocean while not knowing how to swim; you’re bound to drown! We understand that social media is competitive, it’s ever-evolving: you continually need to adapt to new strategies to find out which suits your brand best. Whether it’s the best time to post or the type of content that results in maximum engagement, you need to evaluate your performance based on past data and make a decision accordingly. That is how you come up with the best marketing strategy suited to your audience. The best way to keep track of your social media analytics is by using a social media management tool
Here is how analytics shape your strategy:
Study top posts:
At the end of each week, you can analyze your posting activity to see which posts had high engagement (resonated most with the audience), and which had a high reach. Perhaps, you had posted about a certain topic that users are more interested in? Consequently, with this information, you can plan the content for next week!
Understand your reach
By having a detailed breakdown of your audience, you can revamp your marketing strategy to match your target audience.
So ask yourself: who is your primary demographic on social media? Where exactly in the world are they located? What language do they speak?
You could experiment with trending local hashtags to maximise reach and consider their peak times to match that behaviour!
If you haven’t yet tried Facebook and Instagram ads, and you have a few bucks to spare, I suggest trying that as well! These insights will be particularly helpful while designing a campaign. You can also use Facebook tools, Instagram tools, etc. for best results on social media.
Consider the Best Time to Post
Being a content curator, you would know how difficult it is to stand out and increase the reach of your posts. With new updates, social media algorithms turn away from a chronological timeline to a relevance-based curation. To complicate matters, each social media’s posting time and frequency is different!
If you do have resources at hand, you can experiment to find these statistics yourself, with the help of Analytics.
For highest reach, engagement and exposure, it is essential to refine your strategy to when, where, and how much.
Tip: This is where maintaining different Content Categories or a Content Calendar to plan and optimize your content is helpful.
Making use of a comprehensive content calendar will help you schedule and diversify your content. If the best time to post is at 3 am at night in your time zone, you can schedule and automate posts in advance!
I should also point out that the benefits of Content Automation are endless. But how do you exactly automate your content?
Content automation is streamlining any content process that may seem repetitive, expensive or time-consuming. This not only saves time, but because it performs on autopilot, you can devote your attention to other tasks such as market research, sales, and customer care.
Have you noticed that sometimes our social media timelines get disrupted due to other commitments in life? Or maybe your target audience’s peak time is when it’s 3 AM for you. Does your boss expect you to wake up in the middle of the night to research and curate a post?
No, thankfully, it doesn’t have to be like that!
You can plan your content in advance – up to a year! That means whether you’re taking a day off, your content is going to post by itself. Whether you want your content to stay evergreen, or upload a RSS feed for your audience, let automation do its thing!
Ultimately, your calendar might look a little like this:
Retargeting
We like to think that the buying process is linear: A customer gets interested in the product, and he buys straight away. In reality, it is way more convoluted. What if the customer is not ready right now, but his situation might change in the future.
With the help of lead tracking software, you can place retargeting ads in the links that you post so you can analyse user conversions and click-through rate.
The result: you can
6. Implement AI:
As the role of Artificial Intelligence evolves in the business community, companies are considering implementing AI to drive sales and grow their sales. This kind of automation helps to save time, automate repetitive work, analyse habits and enhance productivity.
Predictive Analytics:
There is no denying that online shopping has made our lives so much easier! E-shopping, customers add desired items to their carts and immediately get recommendations on products they may like. And, before you know it, they are buying things they didn’t even know they needed!
Artificial Intelligence can be used to track habits and purchases, which eventually lets the system predict what users are most willing to buy. It follows clients’ preferences closely, so it already knows information that can take hours of research and interviews. By being one step ahead of your customer’s purchases, you can pitch them a product they won’t refuse. That is, even before meeting them face to face! Ultimately, this results in building long-lasting relationships, happier clients and increased sales!
Personalised website experience with higher CRO
AI still has a long way to go before being able to build new websites from scratch, but it can help you have a highly personalised website experience with increased conversion rate optimization.
By developing intelligent algorithms, you can personalize:
User web experience: By analyzing several data points about a user, such as his demographic details, a device he is using, and geographical location, we can find the most suitable offers and content to match.
Push Notifications: By personalising push notifications, we can deliver the right message at the right time to the right user. Imagine knowing exactly when a customer is running out of a product, and then cross-selling him a bunch of other products to complement that! Success with guessing may be slim, but with AI, you’re guaranteed success!
Is this possible? Most definitely, yes!
Let me give you an example. Uber analyzes travelling patterns using heat maps that are interpreted by AI technology to direct drivers to the right place and right time! With the help of Amazon’s AI technology, evaluating buying patterns and forecasting customer demand has never been more convenient! This consequently results in retaining existing customers and attracting new ones! For instance, many consumers search for website design in Dubai because most of these agencies enlist AI and user friendliness as a top priority.
Accurately pursue leads and maintain relationships:
Finding leads is surely a challenge for any business. To make the most of it, most people run cold marketing campaigns through emails.
Here’s where it gets interesting:
We can use AI platforms such as Tensorflow, Google AI platform, or Microsoft Azure to speed things up in data collection. By analyzing data at a faster pace, you can connect your business with potential, ideal customers! AI-powered analytics will enhance conversion rate significantly.
Similarly, machine-learning algorithms can analyze disengaged customers that churn. After building a predictive model, businesses can figure out the stage of churn and approach that customer accordingly.
Lastly
If you’re interested in taking your content and social media marketing to the next level, try out ContentStudio!
Mariyum is a digital marketer, content writer and photographer. She writes for ContentStudio – A social media management tool . She’s also most passionate about traveling!
