One of the challenges that small businesses face is figuring out how to make social media create returns for them. For many businesses, it takes too long to build an audience, there’s very little engagement resulting from their posts, or there’s simply a lack of strategic direction. What separates the beginners from the master marketers is that master marketers use a set of winning social media strategies to get immense value out of their social media efforts. To give you an idea of what they’re doing, here are five different strategies that they are using to build their businesses with social media.
5 Winning Social Media Strategies From Master Marketers
1. Taking Advantage of All the Marketing Tools and Advertising Options
Most businesses are only using a small fraction of the marketing tools and advertising options that the social media networks provide. Learning how to use these tools can mean the difference between campaigns that work and campaigns that are home runs. It takes a lot of time to learn the tools that the social media sites provide you with. You need to carefully read through their guides, go through tutorial videos and start experimenting with all the different functionalities in order to get the most out of your social media marketing and advertising campaigns.
For example, Facebook has things like Pixels to help you hone in on your target audience better. They also offer video ads that do a better job in getting attention on news feed ads than regular ads. Instagram offers carousel ads and stories ads to help you add a more complex visual presentation to your ads. What’s more, the social media platforms all offer you advanced analytic tools to help you figure out what’s working and what’s not.
Note: For social media, it’s advised that you open an advertising account even if you want to focus on the marketing side of things. If you have a problem in opening an account, you can always try to get in touch with the customer support team. You can read about ways to contact Instagram, for instance. They will help you in any case, whether it’s about opening a non-advertising or advertising account.
2. Using Social Media Advertising to Increase Their Followers
For many new businesses, it can be difficult to build followers for their social media profiles. But the master marketers are skipping the long process of building an audience by purchasing traffic to their social media profiles instead of attempting to build it organically. Rather than focus on selling in their advertising campaigns, they’re creating content that their target audience is interested in and driving traffic to it via social media advertising.
There are many social media platforms that have advertising platforms. The list includes Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and Pinterest. After they drive engagement and get followers through social ads, master social media marketers are building a relationship with their audience. They’re sending their followers to their email lists and blogs as well to have more channels to reach them in. Finally, these followers are leveraged to bring in, even more, followers and build their brand.
3. Using Engagement Data to Drive Future Decisions
Speaking of marketing tools, the best thing you can do to improve your social media marketing campaigns is to use the analytics to focus on the engagement numbers. Look at which of your posts and content is resulting in likes, comments, shares and follows. Some other things to experiment with include hashtags, photos, filters, and day/time of post. By figuring out what kind of posts and content your audience responds to, you can make better decisions about what you should be publishing. If you’re just starting out and need ideas, you can use trending tools to see what posts related to your keywords are popular based on pure engagement numbers.
4. Using Social Media Tools to Automate and Simplify Management
Master marketers treat social media as a real marketing channel that needs to be managed. One of the better known winning social media strategies is to use social media tools to automate social media activity. Master marketers are taking this to another level. They are scheduling posts months in advance, keeping track of brand mentions, managing their online reputation, tracking multiple campaigns on each social media platform, managing an important conversation with possible partners and recycling winning posts with these tools. Here is a list of the best social media tools if you need help in making a decision on which tool to invest in.
5. Partnering Up with Influencers
Influencers are social media users that have established a large following on social media platforms. Big brands know that influencers have access to valuable audiences and put a heavy focus on working with them to promote their products and services. In fact, 94% of companies reported it to be an effective strategy. The key to making influencer marketing work is to target influencers that have audiences that complement your products and services.
The reason why influencer marketing is so effective is that influencers already have an established relationship with their followers. As a result, their reviews, recommendations, and posts yield higher engagement and sales numbers. When approaching influencers, you need to come up with a win-win deal where they benefit as much as you do. You need to make sure that the partnership also protects their trust and credibility as that is worth more than short term earnings to influencers. There are a lot of examples that show how brands are working with influencers.
These are just five of the many winning social media strategies that master marketers use to grow their businesses. There are many more effective strategies to use social media. You have to be creative and experimenting with social media to really uncover the growth potential it can provide to your business. Just keep your eyes peeled with new strategies, follow the updates to the social media sites and put in the time to learning everything you can about using these platforms.
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See also: 7 Proven Strategies for Promoting Content across Social Media Platforms
