Social Media is everywhere and its evident impact is set to grow based on the fact that its users are projected to reach 4.41 billion by 2025. However, this unprecedented rise in social media use is accompanied by increasing competition among enterprises, as more and more businesses strive to bring their brands to a more established presence on social media.
Different social media marketing approaches are used for different activities such as to reach potential customers, increase brand awareness, and drive conversions. However, effectiveness of each approach varies depending on the quality of the goals, objectives and key performance indicators set by the business.
Below are several significant social media marketing approaches that are being used to maximize profitable action and/or engagement by digital prospects.
Integrating Content Marketing
The concept of valuable, SEO-friendly, and engaging content applies to almost every form of digital marketing action nowadays. And posting regular content with relevant hashtags is important to let customers find your brand on social media platforms.
The best thing about social media content marketing is that it’s often free. We can categorise it further as paid, owned or earned and media (POEM is a nice memorable acronym for this). However, to attract new customers and to deepen relationships with current customers, it requires strategic oversight, consistency, measurability and patience.
Choosing the Right Social Media Platforms
It’s impractical to try to leverage every social media platform for a business. Choosing the right marketing channels is important to attract and retain the right customers. Using customer personas is an excellent way to get clear insights on the platforms most used by your target customers.
It’s essential to identify where your target customers spend their time. Focusing on a medium that lacks your relevant audience just because it’s in vogue is not likely to bring a desirable conversion rate.
Using Video Content
Video content is growing in popularity. It’s the favorite type of content for most social media users and it’s impact in terms of SEO is shown as quite powerful with it estimated that in 2021, an average person will watch 100 minutes of online video every day
However, it’s critical that an enterprise align its content with its marketing objectives in order to target relevant people with or without video content. Short and interesting videos have a higher probability to drive profitable actions, particularly through social media channels which cry out for content. Indeed, according to Daneghyan (2019), “ Statistics show that 55% of people watch videos online every day, and social media videos generate up to 1200% more shares than texts and images combined.”
Creating video content is neither expensive nor difficult – its accessibility has never been higher. The future of such content is that many current solutions are already utilising artificial intelligence, toward producing high-quality videos quickly as Sabre (2018) notes here
Use of Chatbots
A chatbot, with its 24/7 availability and developing capability, is clear evidence of how AI can further make our customer engagement more convenient. Organisations can now use chatbots to automate customer interaction in their digital marketing efforts across platforms and through integrated marketing communications efforts.
Chatbot software like ManyChat for Facebook allows users to customise and automate customer interactions while keeping the overall experience realistic, efficient and more personable.
A great thing about this technology is that you don’t need coding expertise to implement the technology cost effectively. Moreover, customers are now able to place orders on social media through chatbots which is extending brand reach and conversion opportunities.
Analyzing and Improving
Courtesy of marketing automation software, organisations can now quickly analyze their performance based on their combined data from the platforms they utilise. A data driven approach – such as leveraging social media marketing, allows organisations to optimise and improve their strategies.
Without analyzing their performance, the probability of identifying and addressing strategic loopholes or opportunities based on trends in a timely manner is quite low.
Moreover, it’s also important to continuously consider and align key performance indicators toward assuring positive outcomes in Digital Marketing Strategy. KPIs will tell organisations whether their social media marketing strategy is working and through marketing technology, organisations will have opportunities to improve and iterate their efforts as they go.
Conclusion
This was a short introduction to social media marketing approaches. There are a lot of great resources to learn this subject in detail.
- To learn about social media marketing trends in 2021, click here.
- To have an in-depth knowledge of social media marketing, click here.
- And, here is an insight into social media intelligence.
- Here is a great short course certification on Social Media Marketing
Books:
Chaffey, D. and Ellis-Chadwick, E. (2016) Digital marketing: strategy, implementation, and practice. 6th ed. New York: Pearson.
Chaffey, D. and Smith, P. R. (2017) Digital marketing excellence: Planning, optimizing and integrating online marketing. 5th ed. London: Routledge.
Ryan, D. (2020) Understanding digital marketing: marketing strategies for engaging the digital generation. Kogan Page Publishers.
Tuten, T.L. and Solomon, M.R. (2017) Social media marketing. Sage.
Journals:
Drummond, C., McGrath, H. and O’Toole, T. (2020) Digital engagement strategies and tactics in social media marketing, European Journal of Marketing, 54(6), 1247-1280.
Harrigan, P., Miles, M.P., Fang, Y. and Roy, S.K. (2020) The role of social media in the engagement and information processes of social CRM, International Journal of Information Management, 54, 102-151.