What does social media involve?
Over the past 10 years, social media has grown more and more popular, drawing over 1.71 billion users to Facebook alone. Marketers have realised that this increase in online community has become a fantastic opportunity for marketing online, to an even wider audience than traditional marketing techniques. The platforms that will be most effective depend on your industry and whether you’re a B2B or B2C company.
A captive audience
72% of adults who use the internet also use social media sites on a regular basis – this means that you have a captive audience to market to. Social media platforms give businesses the chance to increase brand awareness and engagement with potential customers, as well as generating a greater following and promoting offers, products and services.
Social media is most definitely the MVP when it comes to your marketing strategy. It is one of the most powerful ways to reach your prospects, and better understand their requirements in real-time. Let’s take a look at the 10 tactics to implement in your social media strategy for 2019.
1. Carefully select your metrics
Too many marketers focus on the end goal, generating leads. Ok, bold statement, I know, as that is what it is all about, right? Of course, it is but in order to have a successful social media strategy you need to think outside the box.
Social media isn’t going to make you hit your target of 1,000 MQLs in one month, but it is going to help you get there. All your directors really care about it is how you are increasing the pipeline and not how you do it. Utilise social media as much as you can in your strategy but don’t make it your sole focus.
2. Combine your content
Your social media platforms should be an extension of your website. This includes your content. It’s better to create one great piece of content a month to promote across all your channels, rather than lots of small pieces. Your social media should be a highway for your content, providing enough clickbait to drive traffic to your website.
3. Cull your channels
Don’t overdo it. Social media isn’t about being available on all channels, it’s about being relevant and fresh.
Identify your highest performing social channels and focus on them. We only really use LinkedIn and Twitter as that’s where our target audience engage. We tend to ignore the rest. However, test, test, and test again until you are 100% sure you are posting on the right platforms.
4. Select your audience
In order to know which channels, you should be promoting on you need to know your audience. Inside and out. Identify the journey of your social leads – where do they come in from and what do they do next.
The beauty of social media is that you can define the audience you target based on a variety of demographics, interests, location and more. Ensure that you tailor your offering with the audience that will respond best to it.
5. Engage with your audience
Ensure you are monitoring your social media so you can engage with your audiences. After all, you are humans behind the machinery, and that’s important for your leads.
Acknowledge mentions, retweets, and likes. Engage with your followers from your social platform – you never know what might come out of it!
6. Integrate with other channels
Social media is one cog in your marketing machine. For your strategy to work most efficiently, it’s best to integrate your marketing across the board.
You need to have a handle on the content that is being posted on which channels, at what time and who the audience is. Make sure you’re promoting different pieces of content, all relating back to your end goal.
7. GIF wrap it
Believe it or not, GIFs are a great way to connect with B2B audiences. We are human at the end of the day and humour is very appealing when used in context.
According to a study by the Email Institute, campaigns with embedded GIFs saw a 26% rise in click-through rates. That’s huge!
Use GIFs in your social media marketing to promote new products and services or show how they work, promote events and webinars, and link to your recent blogs and articles.
It’s also a great way to show off your brand personality and culture. Give your followers a Friday laugh or Monday motivation.
8. Use emoji’s wisely
Emoji marketing is a dangerous game. Like GIFs, they are a great way to create brand personality and instil a touch of modern to your posts.
However, use them incorrectly or overdo it and you quickly go from strong and current, to cheap and tacky. Use emoji’s where appropriate, to connect with your audience on a different level, just remember to keep it to a minimum!
9. Create a greater customer experience
Social media marketing is a unique part of your digital marketing strategy as it provides the opportunity to interact directly with customers and potential customers. You can ask and answer questions, generate conversation, and encourage interaction through competitions, sharing links and other media. This creates familiarity with your audience, which can eventually translate into sales. It also allows others to boost your credibility – ie. As other customers share your posts and their great experiences of your products or services, it acts as free additional marketing and brand awareness.
10. Follow up your social media leads
When it comes to the different marketing channels available to us, social media runs is one of the only channels that runs in real-time. Identifying leads as actual people, where they work, their background is a great tool for lead generation.
Seeing these results in real-time is a very powerful way to interact with potential buyers. 98% of sales and marketing leaders see value in social selling. So, it really is the place to be. After all, the average person spends 2 hours a day on social media.
But once you’ve created all your exciting social posts, uploaded and automated them, how do you track ROI? Let’s take a look at what happens after the click:
Identify their first visit
It’s important to identify your leads first visit to your website. Particularly if the source is social media. It tells you a lot about your leads: what they have interacted with and what channels they resonate with. After all, this is the foundation to tailoring your leads journey and sales pitch.
If they have engaged with your social media, it’s vital to find out the topic of the post, as this is key to what happens next.
Follow up with relevant content
Once you have identified where your leads found you, it’s then time to move onto what interests them. What was the bait that made them engage? This is the starting point of their journey. Identifying the topic or content piece that initially piqued their interest provides an insight to your leads interests, pain points and objections in the future.
Ply them with useful, relevant content around the same topic to keep them engaged. It sounds like a lot of work in the background, but in fact when this process is automated, it’s as simple as A B C!
Using IP tracking software to identify your social leads, combined with an automation tool such as GatorWorfklow, allows all the hard work to be done automatically.
It’s all about the response
71% of qualified leads are never followed up with. Be part of the 29%. Follow up your social leads, and follow them up successfully.
Generally speaking, its all in the timing. Leave it longer than 5 minutes to make contact and you reduce your chances of taking it further by 10 times. And by making contact, we don’t necessarily mean call them up asking for a meeting. We mean through your content. As above, send them relevant content based on their interests. This goes for all your leads not just social. But always keep in mind that they originally came to you through social media: this is your bridge to them.
Increasing your nurture touch points to six times increases the likelihood of contact by 70%. Automatically add your social leads to a relevant and current nurture programme to warm them up for sales and prove that social media is an important part of your marketing strategy.
To find out the best social media marketing methods are best for you, download our whitepaper here.
Incorporating Social Media into your Email Campaigns
The rapid rise of social media over the last several years has given marketers a new tool for consumer engagement. Social media has become so prevalent that at some point marketers even believed that email marketing would fall behind it. Social networks like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn offered a new way of communicating with buyers, giving marketers the ability to tap into the ways consumers shop and how they make purchase decisions.
But, instead of leaving email behind, top performing marketers realised that social media and email marketing were, in reality, complementary. Email marketing enabled marketers to craft email messages, and social media enabled audiences to share the contents that were in the emails. This challenged leading companies to create a different kind of marketing approach – one that would embed more social media sharing capabilities into the email marketing mix.
A global survey of social networking users found that 46 percent of respondents frequently shared online content. This means that if we give audiences the opportunity to share our content, they might just do so. By placing a social sharing button in our emails, our audiences can take advantage of sharing engaging content with their social peers.
What is social reporting and where does it fall into place?
Social media reporting means making smart choices about the kind of tools and metrics to select when implementing a social media/email marketing strategy. By tracking key performance metrics from each channel, we are able to optimise our email marketing efforts, and when we know which elements are working and which ones aren’t, it becomes possible to duplicate more of what’s bringing in positive results.
Choosing the right social media reporting platform helps us isolate specific metrics. Things like how many times the “follow us” button or “refer to a friend” button was clicked on in the body of the email. These kinds of metrics can all be tracked. The more innovative we become about incorporating social media elements into our emails, the more successful we will be at reaching a broader customer base.
Key takeaway
Companies that report on their social media efforts have a better understanding of how to incorporate email marketing with social media. According to Merkle, 42% of social media users are checking their inboxes at least 4 times a day compared to 24% of non-social media users. This means that we have to ensure that we have a sound strategy when it comes to email marketing and social media.
How effective is your email marketing strategy? Are you incorporating social media capabilities into your emails to reach a broader social media audience
Helpful Social Media Browser Extensions
You know that feeling of mundanely repeating the same task? Whether it be copying and pasting URLs or clicking the same series of buttons repeatedly, and then one day someone introduces a keyboard shortcut or browser extensions which does the task for you. And it changes your life, suddenly the world seems like a better place.
Well, we’d love to share some of our life-changing browser extensions for social media with you, so you no longer have to get hung up on those little tasks you keep coming back to.
Boost your social posts with a fun animated GIF. GIFs see an increase in engagement and are a great way of expressing emotions, people love them, but they can be tricky to find. This fab extension allows you to search through the massive gify.com library and to snap up a shortened URL for the perfect GIF.
This is a brilliant hashtag extensions to analyse hashtags before you include them in your posts, it even has a hand colour coding system which allows you to calculate whether the term is overuse, good, great or unused.
Quickly snap a shot of your screen, edit and animate as you wish.
Share via Pinterest simply by clicking the Pin It button, this extension makes it vastly easier to share images via Pinterest. Clicking the button will open up a window with all the images on the web page, simply select which one you which to share and bingo, easy as that!
Name the colour of any of the colours you see in your browser.
