Last updated on 07/13/2022
Social media is an excellent tool for promoting and growing your business. Some, such as Instagram, have even become essential in some industries, such as beauty and fitness.
But what strategy should you use? Which social media platform should you prioritize?
Is a brand’s presence on social media or the broadcasting of advertisements on numerous social media platforms profitable in the long run?
First of all, an internal audit is necessary.
What are your business goals?
Your goals are the foundation of everything before you even begin to prepare an acquisition strategy. And these objectives must be precise.
Here is an example with the SMART method:
Business goals:
- I want to generate 30% of my revenue from Facebook Ads vs. 10% today by 2022.
- I want to promote the launch of my new product line with influencers and get an ROI of 5 and $300,000 in product sales to clear inventory in Q1 and Q2 2022.
- I want to gain an additional 8% market share in the 18-25 age group in the US.
Marketing goals:
- Generate $200,000 in revenue over the next 6 months with Facebook Ads.
- Grow IG community by 100,000 followers in 3 months to attract mega-influencers and celebrities for partnerships.
- Launch an influencer marketing campaign with $60,000 and generate $300,000 in sales over the next 6 months between Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok.
- Reach 20 million people (20% of the total US audience) who have an interest in fishing and hunting during the first half of 2022.
Based on your business objectives, you need to define consistent marketing objectives.
If you don’t have a direction, it will be difficult to choose a direction afterward.
These goals give you an idea of where your marketing efforts are going. Don’t rely on them much. Influencer marketing, for example, is growing rapidly, with prices, campaign profitability, and reach constantly changing according to algorithms, new platform features, and times of the year.
Content is King
You should already know that content is key if you want to invest in social media.
As a result, you should consider whether you are capable of producing or have generated digital material on a regular basis.
It’s not about posting 1 or 2 times a year or having 1 or 2 advertising assets to activate social media. You need 1 to 2 pieces of content per day.
Unlike Google, where launching an Ads campaign with just your website and an advertising text (after thorough keyword research, of course) is sufficient, social media is hungry for content.
The variety of formats (picture, carousel, short video format, long video format, interviews, video customer reviews, photo customer reviews, lifestyle image, ambassador portrait, and so on) allows you to disseminate and reuse a significant amount of content.
This brings us to a crucial topic, which, in my opinion, must be addressed prior to the formulation of SMART objective…
Do you have the skills/ideas/resources to create content?
You can always outsource all of your marketing and content creation to specialist firms, but if you’re on a budget, doing it in-house will save you money.
Do you have a social media staff with experience in these channels?
Do you have a creative director or someone who can create social media-specific creative briefings?
We’ve seen far too many firms that don’t take content development or management seriously, instead of handing it to an intern with minimal expertise. Remember that this is your external communication, and if you’re a brand, it’s one of the most crucial aspects of your business.
Surround yourself with specialists; if you want to learn this rapidly, freelance consultants with considerable experience who can guide you on these topics can be found. They might even be able to negotiate rates for you so that you come out ahead financially.
Ok, I have the budget, a good team, and defined objectives.
Where do I start?
Have a social strategy
On social media, everything is posted. Some very good and some not so good, even bad, very bad.
There are yesterday’s strategies that still work, strategies that no longer work, those of now that work well, and those of tomorrow that we must prepare for.
Indeed, social media change a lot, but some types of content or trends are “Everygreen”; they never get outdated.
When you define your pillars, you need angles that never get stale, that reflect the deep values of your brand and your mission, that will not change.
Storytelling
Storytelling is defined as a communication method based on a narrative structure similar to that of tales and stories.
The Hero’s Journey
Brand storytelling is the most powerful thing on social media, giving voice to your CEO, your employees, your customers and telling a story as a thread.
- Disruptors are the problems your future customer faces without your product in their possession.
- Mentors are your brand, your employees, the CEO
- The allies are the other customers who talk about your product and tell their experience, the influencers.
- The solution is your product.
Be Social
The most important aspect of social media marketing is to interact with other users. Many companies never interact with their customers, and those that do are frequently quoted.
Being social on many platforms and being a part of trends, whether short or long term, is a significant competitive advantage.
For example, we will have
- Challenges on TikTok
- Hashtags on Instagram
Being active on social media will help you get awareness and followers. Who’s how many firms that debuted later on the social media scene, and continue to do so today, manage to develop faster and gain more followers than large established brands that aren’t on social media at all.
The increased involvement in each of their articles allows them to gain awareness on social media; each new piece of content, whether video or image, generates more engagement and new followers, resulting in more traffic and, ultimately, more revenue.
Loyal Community
Being social results in a strong and dedicated community that supports, protects, and serves as your ambassador.
Converting your clients into social media ambassadors takes time and effort. But the effort is worthwhile because once you’ve built a loyal following, you’ll benefit from word-of-mouth marketing that extends beyond social media.
What social media marketing offers
Know more about your persona
Your clients express themselves freely on social media; they also share about their lives and convey their voice, their interests, their lifestyle, and their hobbies.
This is a marketer’s fantasy since they can instantaneously access the minds of their possible future clients.
Your customers know more about you
From a brand awareness perspective, social media are an excellent channel to communicate with your customers about what you want to do for the world, your next product launch, your new 100th employee, how and where your products are made, by whom, etc.
Reaching new audiences
Influencer marketing via partnerships with influencers allows you to reach their audience and get your brand seen by an audience with certain interests.
We have the big niches such as:
- Beauty
- Fitness
- Food
- Health/wellness
- Fashion
- Business
- Lifestyle/vlog
Partnerships with other brands in other industries that have the same persona as you allow for a very interesting “visibility exchange” as well.
Promote your content
The most intriguing aspect of social media is that its revenue model is mostly reliant on advertising generated on its platforms (application and website).
As a result, any brand may use these networks to target specific audiences based on demographics, interests, keywords, favorite pages, and most importantly, visitors and followers.
It’s usually very profitable to promote your content to an already engaged social media audience. Your return on investment will be much more intriguing than if you target “cold” audiences that have never heard of or seen your brand before.
Engage with your fans
We mentioned earlier that you should be social, and in order to do so, you’ll need to communicate with your followers to keep them loyal, entertain them, and convert them into recurring customers that produce cash for you.
You can achieve this by organizing challenges, prizes, and social media campaigns involving influencers and ambassadors, for example.
The goal is to position yourself on social media trends, or to create them yourself, so that your community and fans may interact with your business. The more they engage with your material, the more you’ll appear on their news page or in stories.
Direct customer support
Social media has also become a location where your clients may reach you to resolve any difficulties they have with their post-purchase experience.
While an email address has been chosen and made public on your website, they understand that the immediacy of social media means they will receive a response sooner. And if you don’t answer quickly enough, they can always leave a comment on your most recent article to let you know what’s up.
Show the evolution of your brand
Another way to engage with your community, especially when you are a young brand and looking for visibility, who wants to acquire loyal customers and give credibility to your brand, is to publish the backstage of your business. Many new Direct To Consumer brands are starting to publish TikTok or YouTube videos of the backstage of their shoots, making their employees talk, giving their numbers, as if they are sharing with their shareholders.
This usually has a very good impact; many brands suffer from criticism of their authenticity and transparency. It gives a more accessible and transparent image of how the business is done.
Then, if this is told through storytelling, you can involve your customers in the adventure; becoming real advocates and ambassadors.
And above all, to humanize you with your audience.
Instant product feedback and customer experience
With social media, you will get instant feedback after publishing your idea for your new design.
Glossier is the brand that revolutionized the industry with this approach, it’s the customers who say what products they are interested in, and they co-construct the collections via social media and Slack to give immediate feedback to the brand’s product marketing team.
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