This show is for you whether you are new to social media marketing or need a better strategy. We will cover everything from platform tips to content creation to best practices to help you build your brand awareness with customers. Welcome to Marketing and a Mic. We’re here to give you various digital marketing tips, trends, and helpful guides to help your business get results. By the end of today’s show, you’ll have a clear roadmap on how to manage your social media best, connect with prospective customers and generate revenue for your business.
Social Media Marketing Strategy Basics
This means making sure all your social media platforms are set up around your brand and industry. This includes filling out your social channels completely using all the features available to you. It also means setting up your business for success by doing your research.
Research Your Audience, Your Niche, and Your Content
Think of this step as your social media onboarding. This is the preparation before you launch.
Your Niche: What do you want to be known for? Once you establish this, make sure your messaging and content are centered around it.
Your Audience: Knowing your audience is the key driver in developing content that resonates with them. Do they prefer clicking links or watching videos? Would they rather see educational posts or more humor-based? What’s their age range, what job positions do they hold, and are they mostly local? Knowing this will help you understand exactly whose following your brand and how to build a better relationship with them.
Your Platforms: Rather than being on every platform, figure out which are better for your business. It’s better to do a great job on specific platforms than spread yourself too thin and not be effective anywhere. If your demographics are on multiple platforms, research what content does better where.
For example, we have clients where the same post will perform well on Instagram but fall flat on LinkedIn. The moral of the story here is not all platforms are created equal. Narrowing down your audience may take some time, and this is where it’s important to study your current metrics. Every 30 days, look at your content to see if any tweaks need to be made. What was your best and worst content? What’s missing the mark? What’s getting the highest engagement, and so on
Your competitors
Make a list of 5-10 competitors and poke around on their social media handles – yes, social stalking is called for here. Scroll through their content to get a sense of what’s working best for them. This will give you a better understanding of the tone and messaging that’s working well for your type of customer. This is not so you can mimic what they are doing, but rather to help give you a launching point of what seems to be working well in your competitive space.
Grow Your Following
This can be one of the hardest exercises in social media, but one that shouldn’t be neglected. It’s easy to get into the Field of Dreams mentality of “If I Build It, They Will Come.” However, with social media, your brand awareness depends heavily on your consistency and how often you interact with others. Develop a weekly engagement plan – it could be as little as 15-20 minutes a day or an hour a week that you dedicate to the following:
Best Practices to Help Grow Your Following
- Find your niche, and stick to it consistently
- Align content with your brand niche
- Post regularly using various types of content. Regularly means aiming for once a day. This could be in the form of feed posts, stories, reels, and so on.
- Find ten industries that align with yours and follow them
- Like, comment, and share content from these ten industries regularly
- Find 10-20 hashtags that are popular with your brand and your local service area
- Engage, follow, and use those popular hashtags
The key is: to post, engage, and share. Repeat.
Know Your Hashtags
Hashtags play a different role on each platform, but one thing is for sure: they are consistently used as a search tool. It’s a great way to help widen your audience base. Did you know you can follow specific hashtags? On nearly all social platforms, you can follow a popular hashtag which helps to insert your business into these like-minded faces and get even more content ideas. #SocialMediaMarketing has over 18M posts on Instagram. You can even look at some other niche industries that you like, and it will show which hashtags they follow.
TIP: #SocialMediaMarketing casts a wide net with 18M posts, which is saturated. This is where niche hashtags and local hashtags can be your best friend.
Local hashtags: There are so many hashtags for local communities and cities that you can utilize in your content.
For example, there are over 280,000 active posts about #birminghamal, which happens to be another hashtag people follow. Simply adding #birminghamal to some of your posts will give you visibility to all those local people who search content based on that specific hashtag.
Niche Hashtags
Niche hashtags are popular hashtags centered around your industry. #hvaclife is a very popular hashtag in the Heating and Cooling industry. However, it’s important that your distinct hashtags that are also in line with what your customers are searching for. Although #hvaclife is popular, I doubt customers do any searches by #hvaclife. Instead, consider searching for hashtags that will align with what your customers care about. #homerepair or #airquality might be more in line with customer searches.
TIP: Don’t use or create hashtags without researching them first.
For example, you may think #humpday would be a popular hashtag for Wednesday. However, if you do some digging, you’ll discover it’s not necessarily used as a reference to the middle day of the week.
Invite People to Your Page
This can be a little time-consuming, so if you can’t actively do it yourself, assign this task to someone who will. If you’re just creating your page, invite as many followers as you can out the gate. Every month, make it a priority to invite more to your page. If you are actively following the process above, where you’re consistently following and engaging with other pages, inviting them to yours will seem a lot less invasive. This is another reason why it’s important to follow and engage with others if you want to grow your own page.
Your Content: Best Practices
Establish a coherent style and an easily identifiable theme. Use hashtags and create a branded hashtag. Forge partnerships with influencers and other brands. Image/Video dimensions: 1080 x 1080 for feed posts and 1920 x 1080 for stories and reels
YouTube
Do your keyword research. Develop content that aligns with your brand’s unique niche. Use graphic and editing styles that subscribers can easily recognize. Image/Video dimensions: 1200 x 628 or 1920 x 1080 graphic size.
Create a consistent publishing schedule. Encourage employees to share content. Add variety to your content mix. Image Video dimensions: 1080 x 1080, 1200 x 628, 1920 x 1080, 940 x 788.
Schedule time for daily Twitter activity. Participate in Twitter chats. Tweet content that provides real value. 1-3 hashtags help with the search. Image Video dimensions: 1080 x 1080, 1200 x 628, 1920 x 1080, 940 x 788.
Use CTA features to help increase customer communication. Forge partnerships with influencers and other brands. Develop content that aligns with your brand’s unique niche. Video/image dimension sizes: 1200 x 628 or 940 x 788.
Streamline Communication
There are so many features available to customers to reach out and contact you. And guess what? Customers are using them more and more. Create auto-replies to quickly respond to customers who contact you through messenger or WhatsApp. On Facebook: Create saved replies and FAQs to respond to common questions. Make sure all saved replies include a CTA button to customers can be redirected quickly to your website to a staff member. Assign important inbox messages to team members for follow-up. Finally, make sure you are driving traffic to your website. Social media is one place you want people to engage with your brand, but it should also be viewed as one key part of your marketing funnel. Remember you want to utilize ways to get potential customers to your website. To drive traffic to your website, make sure you share blog posts, post product links, various services pages, and event contact or appointment pages. For Instagram: Set up an Instagram bio link tool in your profile to make your images clickable to outbound links.
Wrap Up
So that’s our social media guide to help you develop and maintain a clear social media marketing strategy and not miss connecting with your potential customers. If you need help with your social media marketing strategy, we’ll love to talk with you and see how we can help. Don’t forget that our podcast also goes live on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and LinkedIn, and you can catch the replay on Instagram. You can also subscribe to our YouTube Channel for more resources to help your digital marketing plan.