With more than three billion active social media users across platforms such as Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube in 2019 – companies of all sizes have seized the opportunity to increase brand awareness by using social media to engage with existing and potential customers.
Social media provides businesses with the opportunity to target, influence and interact with their customer bases, allowing these companies to develop high-quality relationships with returning clients that in turn draws in new business. Regardless of the size of your company, designating a social media budget is essential for growth, and it does not matter how much money you allocate for the budget, but rather how the money is spent that determines whether or not a social media campaign will be successful.
Social media marketing is an effective, cost-efficient way to target thousands of customers. The strongest and most successful social media campaigns utilize a variety of platforms to engage with customers, but it can be difficult to understand how to allocate funds for each platform to maximize your ROI. If you budget properly and maximize the potential of your social media budget, you will gain a significant ROI and see organic growth in your company.
Social media success looks different for various businesses, but by performing the following steps and focusing on a few key aspects, you can make the most of your social media marketing budget.
Develop a Plan
Social media advertising allows companies to promote their brands while engaging customers, but it is not enough to simply be present on various social media platforms. To make the most of social media marketing budgets, you need to ask yourself these questions to develop a strategy that works:
- What does the company want to accomplish with social media?
- Who is the company’s target audience?
- Which types of content does the target audience prefer?
- How can the company engage with its target audience?
The answers to these questions will help you develop a comprehensive strategy that encourages current customers to engage with your brand while also reaching new consumers. Having a proven, effective strategy in place ensures you are using your social media budget wisely.
Determine What Your Social Media Goals Are
Before you can set a social media budget, you have to know what your business goals are so you can create an effective strategy instead of throwing money away on ineffective content. Social media has a lot to offer, but if you are using it with no goal in mind, you will not see a significant ROI because your strategy is not appealing to your target audience. Your primary use for social media marketing may be any one or a combination of the following goals.
- Increase sales
- Expand brand awareness or brand authority
- Increase brand loyalty
- Improve customer engagement and customer service
- Increase customer retention rate
Once you understand what you need to accomplish by using a social media campaign to promote your company, you can determine which KPIs you need to use to measure success. This allows you to develop a comprehensive social media strategy that is customized to fit your company’s individual needs. For example, a new company looking to increase brand awareness may focus on promoting products to get its name out, while an established business that needs to improve customer engagement may focus on interacting directly with customers to make them feel valued and happy. Knowing your company’s social media goals allows you to create a productive strategy rather than posting on a social media platform strictly for the sake of producing content that will not generate growth.
Learn About Your Target Audience
Your company’s target audience determines which social media platforms will be most beneficial for accomplishing your marketing goals. Identifying who is your audience also allows you to create the type of content needed for each platform. Using the following demographics allows you to identify your niche market so you can improve your social media presence.
- Ethnic background
- Income status
- Gender
- Age
- Marital status
- Location
- Occupation
- Income level
This information is vital for a successful social media presence because users from various demographics typically gravitate towards different platforms. For example, a poll conducted by Sprout Social found that the majority of Facebook users in 2020 are females between the ages of 30 and 64, while Instagram dominates among users between the ages of 13 and 29. Snapchat is most common among younger users, while Twitter is more popular with young adults between the ages of 18 and 24.
Therefore, if your company’s target audience is women between the ages of 30 and 64, Facebook will be the most effective social media platform to advertise on. Instagram would be an excellent secondary platform, but there would not be a good ROI if you used Snapchat or Twitter primarily to target this audience. If you want to target teenagers, your business should allocate more money for a social media presence on YouTube or Snapchat.
Social media success for businesses is reliant upon correctly identifying and targeting your niche audience. Knowing the social media preferences of your target audience allows you to determine how to best to use the funds you have allotted for social media marketing. Instead of putting money towards the content on a platform that has little ROI, you can concentrate on platforms that are more effective.
Decide How To Target Your Audience
There are three ways to grow your company with content. In terms of ROI, content is either owned, earned or paid and you may find any or all of these methods beneficial.
- Organic growth: The company generates its own content to promote its products.
- Influenced growth: The company pays someone, usually a celebrity or influencer, to promote products.
- Paid growth: The company purchases ads from third parties to target a wider audience.
Generate High-Quality Content That Appeals to Your Audience
A successful social media presence relies on more than just meeting your target audience on the platform it prefers. You also have to provide content that is informative and engaging so customers will view it thoroughly. There are many types of content, including those listed below.
- Blogs
- Videos
- Infographics
- Motion graphics
- Live videos
- Memes
- Gifs
- Lists
Any of these types of content can be effective when utilized correctly, but is it important to keep up with current trends in social media marketing. Visual content is particularly appealing to customers across all demographics as this type of content makes a lasting impression in less time, giving you more for your money when it comes to a social media budget. Live video is a huge trend in 2020 with twice as many users engaging with it as with other types of content. By streaming live videos, you can interact directly with your customers, answer questions and demonstrate products to make them more appealing to customers.
Test and Analyze Your Social Media Strategy
Because social media is constantly evolving, there is no perfect strategy for any company. You must constantly test your strategy and analyze data to determine if it is effective. You may test out several different types of content to see which one leads to a better ROI. You should also experiment with the frequency of posting content. Content should always be about quality over quantity, but many consumers prefer to have a company engage with them directly via comments, posts and messages rather than generating content for the sake of having it.
Every aspect of social media should be analyzed periodically. When you want to optimize your social media budget, not only do you need to be willing to expand upon your current marketing strategy, but you also need to:
- Maintain the same company values and types of content among website and social media platforms
- Repurpose content in a fresh and engaging way
- Build upon momentum and success with fresh content
Ensure Your Company Website Is Accurately Represented By Social Media
Regardless of what your primary goal is for your social media presence, your ultimate goal is to improve your click-through rate and generate traffic to your website. While you may not think of your website as part of social media, it is important to ensure that it accurately reflects the image your company portrays on social media. If your brand is friendly, helpful and reliable on social media, then the website needs to reflect these same values.
Customers appreciate authenticity and are more likely to become loyal consumers of your brand if your company is honest. To maintain this honesty, allocate a small portion of your social media budget to keep up the website and make sure it uses the same types of content as your social media platforms.
Stretch Your Budget By Repurposing Content
Most likely, your social media strategy will involve several platforms. You will need an incredible amount of content to maintain a daily presence across multiple platforms and generating this much content can quickly drain your budget. While using the exact same content across multiple platforms is an effective strategy, you can repurpose content to save money.
Take a piece of content for use on your primary social media platform and then break it up into smaller pieces for other platforms. You may create a single video and then upload small snippets to various platforms. You could also divide an interview or blog post into several pieces and promote that information across several platforms.
Capitalize On Success
Every type of content you create has the potential to go viral and every company wants to generate content that spreads rapidly across multiple platforms. When content does go viral, many companies often coast upon that short-term success and expect it to last. Instead, you need to capitalize on viral content and create additional posts that expand upon that success.
For example, if you create an engaging video that goes viral and causes a drastic increase in sales, you need to keep to your posting schedule. You may want to revise future advertisements and content so it is reminiscent of the viral piece, but you cannot expect that one piece to catapult your company to long-term success. You may achieve momentary global fame, but you need to capitalize on it by continuing to generate similar content and keeping new customers engaged.
Create a Strategy That Works
Focusing on how the social strategy funds are allocated is vital to the success of the campaign. If you want to maximize your social media strategy and get the most for your money, let V Digital Services help you design and implement a customized strategy that works for your business. By consistently analyzing the market and staying abreast of current trends, we can help you stimulate company growth.
digital marketing tips, social media, Social Media Marketing, social media strategy