To avoid wasting tons of money and countless hours on unsuccessful social media marketing, you need to have a near-fool-proof plan to execute it successfully. You can learn such strategies through a well-designed digital marketing course.
Here’s a glimpse of some of the insights you can get through such a course.
Learn From Influencers but Do Something Different
Getting useful insights from successful social media influencers is a great way to start. However, you should not try to replicate their way of doing things. That’s because of two compelling reasons:
- The fact that someone has done something new and innovative means that thing is now old news. People will no longer view it as original and creative, or get excited about it.
- The success of many strategies depends on more than the plan itself. It also relies on the specific person who applies it, the target audience, the duration, and time. Unless you can completely replicate each of those aspects, duplicating someone else’s strategy will likely fail.
The best way to go about it is to identify the underlying concepts that contribute to the success of top influencers. These are universal concepts that can work for you too.
Once you have the underlying concepts, you can come up with strategies that are even more powerful than the strategies used by top influencers.
Identify a Target Audience Vis-à-vis the Platform
The worst mistake you could make when starting with social media marketing is identifying a specific audience, but setting up your presence in the wrong platform. Different social media platforms have unique demographic characteristics that may not match your target audience. How well you can specify your target audience will help you figure out exactly where to find them.
If you’re targeting adults interested in technological topics, you need to find the platform with the largest concentration of this group. Often, you can quickly figure out the audience characteristics on social media platforms using the audience analytics tools from social media platforms. Facebook and Twitter, for instance, have highly advanced audience analytics tools.
While at it, you might have to consider how easy it is to reach that audience within those platforms. You may have a large concentration of your target audience in one platform, but it may cost you far more to reach them compared to another platform.
Find Out Why Your Audience is on Social Media and Match That
If your goal is to market your brand or products to your target audience, you should think about how they will respond.
People don’t ordinarily go to social media platforms with the expectation of being bombarded by marketing material.
In fact, you might find that the same people are more responsive to marketing material through one platform compared to another. That’s because they likely use one platform for leisure and the other for networking.
Understanding this concept can cut down your marketing costs drastically.
You’ll not only have an idea of which platform to use in getting your target audience’ attention but also know how to frame your content in a manner that appeals to them.
If your target audience is using one platform for leisure, you can use it to build your following through fun content. Then, you can use the other platform for marketing your products/ business.
Get the Cadence Right Based on the Content Value
How often you publish posts on social media depends on many aspects, but one of the main ones is the value of the content. If you don’t know, the main reason people get irritated by marketing content is simply that it doesn’t offer value to them. It doesn’t have much to do with it being marketing content.
If you create highly valuable content, even if it’s 100% marketing content, your audience will be eating it up and begging for more. They’ll be asking you to post more and more content. This means you can even publish new posts every second and everyone will love it.
The only challenge with creating valuable content is that creativity takes time. So, unless you have a large team of highly creative people, you can’t post too often. If your content isn’t producing the engagement you need, take more time to be creative instead of posting more.
Learn from Game Apps – Addictive Content Patterns
The most successful game apps use intelligent design to keep players on their platforms for hours on end. They do that by creating patterns of reward and challenges that inspire the desire for adventure in users. It’s much the same as how social media sites like Facebook design their timeline feature. There always seems to be something new and exciting.
You can publish your posts using the same pattern. As much as you stick to your particular niche, you should create enough variety in your content to make people interested in what you have.
Start with Feelers and Focus on Winners
It’s certainly good to have a predetermined plan on what you’ll post on social media. But it can be even more rewarding to start without a fixed template and instead use feelers (random types of posts to figure out what your audience will love most). When you see more engagement in specific types of posts, focus on those.
After all, when you look through the historical timelines of many famous YouTubers, you’ll see this exact pattern. They often started with multiple types of videos and gradually focused on the types of videos that did better than the rest.
Join and Create Groups
Groups are the micro-versions of social media platforms. Since major social media platforms have become huge, groups create that focused, specialized feel where almost anyone within the group can be heard. Essentially, it’s precisely what social media was supposed to be.
By joining and interacting in groups, you build stronger relationships with your target audience than what is possible simply with a business page. If you have a reliable team, you can also create a group of your own too.
Conclusion
Using these useful tips, you can get your social media marketing started with a bang. Your chances of success can improve simply by using such smart strategies. But don’t expect instant results. Unless you’re pumping in tons of money or have an extraordinarily innovative idea, building up your social media presence will take time.
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