Running an effective social media marketing campaign is proving to be even more difficult now than it was a few years back. In Singapore alone, about 88% of all businesses are using social media to market their products and services. That’s some heavy competition. So how do you get heard amid all that social media noise?
Well, figure out how to stand out. Stop doing things the same way as everyone, and instead come up with a tested strategy on how to get this done right. This is no easy feat. But there’s a handful of social media marketing tactics that can you use to cut through all that noise and be heard.
In a recent study, conducted by Constant Contact, brands that are active on social media are more likely to increase their revenue by about 20 to 40 percent. From Facebook ads, to live videos, to partnering with an Instagram influencer, there’s so much to gain from leveraging the power of social media.
However, the problem comes with knowing where to start. Luckily for you, we’ve compiled a few solid pointers to help you take your social media marketing campaign to a whole new level:
How To Level Up On Your Social Media Marketing In Singapore
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Go Beyond Social Media Monitoring or Listening
Much has been written about social media monitoring, and the role it plays in providing you with invaluable insights on how to wade through the muddy waters of social media. But things are changing, and social media listening alone is not enough.
As a marketer, you have to learn to look far beyond. With listening, you’re only interested in taking notes. There are two parties involved, and your role as a social media listener is to pay attention to what social media users are saying.
That used to work until it became apparent that social media marketers can be trendsetters too. You don’t have to listen and adjust your message. For all we know, you can be an active force in this.Learn to engage. You can do this by responding to some of the questions your prospects have. Look out for brand loyalists putting in a positive word for your business and give them a shout out.
Or how about you talk to an upset customer that’s busy throwing a tantrum on social media following a bad experience they had with your business?
Most marketers approach social media with a reactive mindset. But in actuality, they should be more proactive instead. Every time a prospect engages with your brand, it’s part of your job to amplify that voice and let the world know what has been said, whether good or bad. Echo their sentiments and respond to them in a manner that shows you’re responsible for the experiences your business brings.
Engaging allows you to personalise the experiences of your customers, influencers, competitors, and prospects. It also allows you to obtain the opinion of your customers to find out what topics your brand is spiking so you can know what to address.
So while social listening is still important in this, it pays more to be proactively involved in what’s going on within the social walls of your industry.
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Simplify the Engagement
Taking a proactive social approach is not easy. Your eyes and ears must be all over the place, and your fingers must always be on the keyboard, ready to respond to some of the concerns your social media connects have.
But that’s not how things are supposed to be. Not when there are tons of tools and platform that you could use today to simplify the whole process.
You have platforms such as patchwork quilt to grease your social media engagement. But as your business grows, and find that you also need to grow your team, these platforms lose their effectiveness.
It’s at this point that you may want to also check out with social media management tools. Look for tools that can cover all bases of a solid social media marketing strategy. From social responding to social scheduling to routing inbound queries, to publishing your content, the social media marketing tool you choose must be multifaceted and capable of helping you handle a wide range of your social media marketing activities.
In other words, figure out how to use tools and the latest technology to simplify the whole process of engaging your prospects on social media.
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Learn From the Best
You don’t have to come up with an original idea or strategy on how to achieve success on social media. Not you can learn from companies that have had tremendous success on these platforms.
Study their approach and break it down into small chunks you can replicate bit by bit. As difficult as it may sound, there exists a long list of companies that have proven that they’re capable of consistently churning out mindboggling social media posts the online community can never get tired of.
Find the best of these companies and jack their strategy. Find out how they do it, and run with it, giving it your own spin along the way.
A classic example of a company that’s managed to pull this off is Tesco mobile. They’re the masters of witty banter. They’ll never let a comment pass without jumping on it with a witty rejoinder.
In so doing, people have started to associate Tesco with a funny personality – and to say the least, the strategy appears to have worked for them.
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Enhance Engagement through Social Media Marketing Campaigns
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQfZPsCVbTU
Great social media content can only propel you so far. You have to figure out how you’ll be encouraging your followers to engage with your content.
The first thing you’d want to do is to keep everything succinct. Don’t force your followers to swallow huge chunks of content.
Even more important is to use a plain language that everyone can understand. You may be tempted to use industry jargon or serve your followers with vocabulary-laden content that’s more likely to fly over the head of a majority of your social media followers.
But the fact that some people may find it hard to understand you based on the language you’ve used means you’d have failed as a marketer. Everyone needs to understand what you post, and it’s upon you as a marketer to make sure that they do.
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Be consistent and distinct
Don’t follow the same path everyone is following. Instead, create something that only your company will be associated with. Even where you’re replicating another company’s strategy, you have to make sure that you’re giving it your own unique flair that only your company can be identified with.
In other words, your company has to reflect certain values and qualities. With social media, you’re given a platform to introduce your brand to the world. You have to make sure that you’re not only doing it in style but in a manner that will leave a mark in the world of marketing.
Also playing right into your online success is consistency. Every single one of the posts you make has to reflect a certain quality.
This should inspire both trust and loyalty among your followers. For instance, you have to be more consistent with the number of times you post on social media. Come up with a schedule and be sure to stick to it to the end. Don’t drop off social media, only to come back weeks later hoping to find your customers intact and patiently waiting for you.
Your customers should know when to expect your next post. This principle holds across all social networks, including Twitter, Instagram, SnapChat, and Facebook.
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Create a reliable Brand
Assuming you’re creating a new brand, there’s a fair chance your brand will elicit a lot of skepticism. In a world that’s populated with con artists and scammers, you have to work on winning the trust of your online followers. Give them a reason to trust you.
You can start by adding a human factor into your online presence. Your followers have to feel like they’re interacting with a human being with feelings and all that. If anything, they want to be sure that you’re not just trying to sell them snake oil.
Every time you’re exploring a new market, make sure the content you’re generating is one that verifies your brand authenticity. If you’re a manufacturing company, walk your followers through the manufacturing process. You can also talk about your location and everything that confirms you’re a real business.
Post reviews and client testimonials, and most importantly, get an influential figure in the society to vouch for you. This is also where you leverage the power of social influencers.
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Track Your Metrics for Analysis
The first thing you do while marketing on social media is to devise a solid plan on how you’re going to handle it. The next thing you’d want to focus on is how you’ll be tracking the performance of your campaigns. You want to make sure that you’re tracking everything correctly.
You can start by identifying the goals you have. Make sure you have a few things in mind that you want to accomplish at the end of it all. You’re not just running the campaign on a humble. You have goals and objectives that drive almost everything that you do.
If you plan to make, say, $2000 every week in sales, that means your goal is to make about $300 every day in sales.
The next thing you’d want to do is to analyse both your social media and website metrics. Analyse your organic traffic, referral links, SEO ranking, and everything else. You have a vast array of social media management tools to help you out with this.
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Measure your Return on Investment (ROI)
Despite what’s happening or the situation you’re in as a company, you want to make sure you’re well aware of how the numbers are coming in. Keep in mind that you’re not just investing money, but time as well.
So are the returns you’re getting worth the time, effort, and money you’re pumping into the project?
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Be Sure to Incorporate Videos into your Content
Videos tend to do so much better on social media. It kills the ennui of scrolling down a long list of text content.
With videos, you can easily convey your messages and tell your brand story in a manner that’s both entertaining and informative. It’s here that you might also want to take advantage of social media influencers by getting one of them to make an informative or promotional video for you.
8 Social Media Marketing Metrics You Should Be Monitoring
Social media will give your brand more exposure through free or paid ads. Already, we have touched base on how to level up your social media marketing campaigns. However, how will you know whether your campaign is successful or needs improvement?
There are many social media metrics that you can use gauge the performance of your marketing campaigns. Monitoring them all can be tedious and time-consuming. Let’s dive in and look at the essential social media marketing metrics that you should be checking on a biweekly or weekly basis.
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Volume
Volume is the first and most important social media metric that you should measure. Unlike some of the other metrics we will discuss later in this section; it’s pretty easy to monitor this metric.
That is, what is the size of conversation about your campaign or brand going on Facebook
Volume is a perfect indicator of the audience’s interest in your brand and what you offer. This is based on the fact that it’s human nature to discuss things that we love or hate. Rarely will the audience discuss your brand if it means nothing to them.
Despite the simplistic nature of this metric, there is more to it than just counting the number of wall posts and tweets accrued in a given period. You should go deeper and take note of the number of messages about your business as well as the number of people talking about you.
Track how both changes over time to know if the social media marketing campaign is headed in the right direction. Facebook Insights has an invaluable metric dubbed “people talking about this,” which tracks how many unique users on the platform post something on their account about your business.
Track the number of days or times when the volume is high or low. Use the information to tweak your campaigns accordingly to continue cranking up engagement levels.
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Engagement
Engagement social media marketing metric is closely related to the volume metric discussed above. It seeks to give insights into how the target audience participates in conversations about your company. What are the specific actions they take to engage with the topic or spread your content?
Virtually all social media platforms allow users to comment or share content. For instance, Twitter users can retweet tweets they relate with and feel would benefit their followers. On Facebook, users can share posts to spread the content to other people who probably don’t even follow the brand.
Engagement level is gauged by looking at the number of likes, replies, and comments on a post. The higher the engagement, the better it shows that the audience finds the information relatable.
If photos garner more likes than infographics, post more photos and devise ways to improve the infographics to spur engagement.
As you evaluate the level of engagement, keep in mind the primary goals of running the social media marketing campaign. Do you aim to generate more interactions (comments, likes, shares) or spread the message to expand your audience base (retweets and posts)?
Make sure that you focus on a metric that contributes positively to attaining the set goals. If not, the campaign will come down crumbling and result in a wastage of time and money.
Identify content that generates the most engagements and focus more on them. Don’t make any assumptions. The perceptions and needs of social media users are very unique; you may be surprised by what kind of content a section of your audience interacts with. So, be open to tweaking the campaign to match the audience’s interests.
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Share of Voice
Share of voice is a powerful metric, yet most brands don’t track it. It aims to uncover how conversations about your brand or products/services compare to the conversations held about your competitors.
Knowing how your competitors are fairly on a social media platform will enable you to develop better plans to knock them off the top position. The information gathered will also enable you to develop ways of endearing your brand to their followers.
Look closely at the percentage of overall conversations about your niche solely focused on your brand compared to the main competitors on your watch list. In the Don’t focus your energies only on identifying weaknesses in the competitor’s marketing strategies. Also yearns to learn from their successes.
Because social media conversations are visible to everyone, you can measure the impact of a conversation by looking at the number of likes and comments. Compare the numbers with similar conversations about your brand to know how to proceed.
The worst mistake you can make when doing social media marketing is becoming a copycat. Fight off the urge to do exactly what the competitors are doing to get more sales or engage with the target audience.
Instead, it would be best if you only used their strategies for inspiration to create more robust strategies in line with the audience’s expectations.
Hire a renowned social media marketing agency to do the competitor analysis for you to free up your schedule. Communicate the brand’s goals with the team to enable them to come up with the best strategies.
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Reach
As the name suggests, reach is a social media marketing metric that gauges the spread of a conversation on a platform, be it Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. It will give you a clear understanding of the context of the content that you post.
How far is your content reaching? How many people got your message? The answers to these questions will enable you to estimate the potential audience size.
Yes, every digital marketer’s goal is to have a large audience or following across multiple social media platforms. But reach does not exhume all the details about the campaign. It’s only effective in supercharging your campaign when analysed against other metrics such as engagement and volume.
Concisely, we recommend using the reach metric as a denominator in your overall social media measurement equations. Reach is useful in contextualizing other social media campaign engagement metrics.
Otherwise, if you focus solely on expanding your reach, you may not get many results in terms of sales, especially if the audience is not interested in your brand.
The point is you should evaluate reach alongside other valuable metrics such as replies, retweets, and clicks. For instance, divide the total number of clicks and retweets by reach then multiple by 100 to get a near accurate estimate of your campaign’s engagement percentage level.
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Influence
You probably have heard about influencer marketing and how it helps brands increase their exposure and sales on social media platforms. In the context of measuring the performance of a social media campaign, influence is measured by who is talking about your products and services and the impact of their conversations on other metrics such as engagement and sales.
There is no shortage of tools online that you can use to measure social influence. Unfortunately, it isn’t easy to pick the right one as each tool has its way of measuring the data. But one thing that cut across them is that audience size does not always translate into more influence.
A brand can have thousands of followers but a low influence on a platform. The value of the influence is reflected by the results achieved. Most brands realize this too late after hiring a macro influencer with millions of followers and getting no results.
Understanding that a celebrity who has many followers or friends doesn’t necessarily mean they can encourage their followers to take a particular action. That’s why it’s important to look at similar projects they have done in the past to gauge their capability and suitability to your campaign.
The review of previous projects will enable you to estimate their level of influence on a particular social media platform. Use it to know which influencers to collaborate with and set the goals and milestones.
Don’t do the review manually, though. Use tools such as PeerIndex and Klout. They assign an influencer score to every influencer to help you gauge their online social capital and potential to influencer their community of followers.
Another term related to this social media marketing metric is kinetic influence. Simply put, kinetic influence will enable you to pinpoint which influencer is participating in the campaign as expected and evoke conversations about your brand.
The ideal brand advocates or brand ambassadors are those whose message reach is amplified by other people who are part of your target audience and not just those with the highest number of followers.
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Most Engaging Social Channels
Besides gaining more exposure online, you should also structure your social media marketing campaigns to increase your website traffic. You want the followers who come across your post to click on the link to visit your website to learn more about what you offer.
Therefore, it makes sense to monitor the most engaging social channels. Focus on them by creating custom marketing strategies to increase traffic to your website. Study how the audience interacts with your content to know which areas or which type of content format to create more of to keep them engaged and interested in your brand.
While at it, check the website bounce rate on Google Analytics. A high bounce rate signifies that the audience doesn’t find the website content relevant to their needs. That’s a bad sign that Google could use to downrank your website.
Note that the longer the visitor stays on your website, the more likely they will buy before existing. You will also get more opportunities to encourage them to purchase the product or service if they dwell more on the pages.
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Response Rate and Time
Communication is the key to success in eCommerce. The target customers quietly monitor how your brand communicates with customers and use that information to make buying decisions. 40% of customers that post complaints on social media expect brands to respond to them within one hour.
Based on the above statistic, you need to take customer service more seriously to scale up your business via social media marketing.
Continuously monitor your average response rate and time across social media profiles. If you take more than 1 hour to respond, you probably need to hire a community manager to do the heavy lifting for you.
Ensure the manager has the necessary skills and expertise to protect your reputation and credibility. Remember, it only takes one negative review to ruin an excellent reputation, especially if it goes viral.
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Social Channels Revenue
Every digital marketing strategy implemented should contribute positively to the growth of your business, both in terms of exposure and sales.
So, it’s important to put a figure on the social channels you market your brand on to know if they effectively generate revenue.
If you are a social media marketer, you can encourage the clients to extend your contract by stating the specific amount of revenue you earned from each social media marketing campaign.
The same can be replicated on other marketing processes such as email marketing and programmatic advertising.
Set realistic goals before you embark on doing the campaign to benchmark the performance of each targeted social channel. Be willing to make adjustments and seek help from professional social media marketing agencies if you are stuck or don’t know how to respond to a particular trend or report findings.
The Final Thought
The most important part of any content marketing strategy, including social media, is having some metrics in place to help you with measuring the effectiveness of your strategy. So with every new idea, you give a try, be sure to track it down to the finer details.
Are you getting the results you’ve been looking forward to with your content or social media marketing strategy? If not, let the proficient teams at MediaOne Marketing help you out. No one knows how to build and maintain a thriving social media presence better than us. For more information, be sure to contact us or read more of our blog posts.
