The vast majority of small businesses make use of social media as a marketing tool, but only a small proportion of them do so with maximum effectiveness. A recent study found that while more than half of consumers communicate with businesses using social media, only 8 percent were satisfied with the interactions. If you want to be sure your social media strategy is a success, the following tips will help keep you on the right track.
Start small
A common rookie mistake when trying to launch a social media marketing campaign is to try to tackle every single channel at once. This is a poor strategy because each social media channel has a slightly different and specific approach in order to get the most from it. A better idea is to start small, targeting one or two of the main channels and then building from there once you have mastered the essentials of engaging and targeting your audience.
Begin with the site that most closely matches the demographics of your market and ensure you have committed the necessary staff and resources to not only post content on a consistent basis but also to respond to all customer inquiries in a timely manner. Our Coventry digital marketing team can help you choose the correct strategy.
Choose how to measure your ROI
Calculating the return on your investment into social media marketing is far more difficult than with other, more traditional forms of marketing such as direct mail. Although it is easy to record the number of retweets or mentions that you get on a particular site, it is far more difficult to establish how much your business will earn as a result.
The key is to have clearly defined goals that you wish to achieve as part of your social media marketing campaign and then to track only these specific metrics. In order for this approach to succeed, it’s essential that you choose goals that are measurable, such as email sign-ups, downloads or purchases.
Create engaging content
If you are new to the world of social media marketing, it’s important to understand that it is a world that works very differently from more traditional marketing. Social media users don’t want to be sold to directly. Instead, they want to be engaged and entertained. Most of all, they want to be provided with information that is of genuine use to them. The key to success is to provide great content that steers users towards your products and services in a subtler way.
With such a wide range of content available on social media, it’s important to know what works best for your particular enterprise. One of the best ways to establish this is to spend some time looking at what businesses in similar fields to yours are doing and the level of success they are achieving as a result. Find the Instagram and Twitter accounts that you admire the most and follow them closely for a while, using them as a source of inspiration for your own ideas.