This blog post was originally published on November 11, 2021 and updated on May 5 2023.
Information in this blog post was obtained from LinkedIn, PR Daily, NBC News , YouGovAmerica, Vimeo, DesignRush, and Time.
Social media marketing is extremely challenging to navigate, but crucial to the building of you company's brand. Brand development through customer engagement sets high-performing companies apart from the rest. Whether you are a business-to-business marketer or a consumer-driven business using social media as your engagement vehicle is critical. Below are some tips to help increase the success of your marketing strategy and create more brand loyalty. Remember, the greater the brand loyalty, the higher the profits.
1. Boost Your Social Media Strategy
From a small company to a large multinational corporation, social media marketing can be confusing and difficult to navigate. According to the article in LinkedIn called marketing strategies are key to making social media easier to navigate. Since there are over 2.5 billion social media users every company must have a salient and flexible strategy. According to the article, here are seven key ways to boost your social media strategy.
1. Taking a Multi-Channel Approach
Social media marketers must take on a multi-channel approach in reaching for the prospects and customers ensuring that each platform is used in unique ways to encourage users to follow your brand, across the services.
2. Investing in Influencer Marketing
Relying on the idea shared most brands rely on the sponsored content created by the social media influencers to build their strong connections with the target audiences.
3. Engaging Commenters as Quickly as Possible
Encourage your target audience to engage with your content in meaningful ways. You should have a social media monitor who reacts to the user comments because the faster you react to the comments the more likely it is that the users keep engaging with your content on a consistent basis. By reacting in a unique manner you go on to improve your brand sentiment for your target audience.
4. Amplifying Reach Through Look-Alike Audiences
You can also easily upload a list of email addresses of the best customers and Facebook can search up people of the same demographic and psychographic makeup. You can then run specifically designed ads to drive the viewers to your website. It helps to have an organic social media following as well.
5. Strategy Success Through On-Platform and On-Site Measurement
Analytics is the best way for understanding if the social strategy is working successfully or not. Use the on-platform metrics like the follower growth, engagement and distribution work best for the same along with the measurement of on-site performance.
6. Creating a Clear and Unique Brand Identity
Developing a strategy that articulates a perpetually clear and unique brand identity in novel yet subtle ways by using multimedia content to tell a cohesive story.
7. Searching for Creative Ways to Delight People
The average person shares positive customer response with others. By finding similar creative ways to delight the customers, our social media users to build an organic following through amplification and word of mouth is more endearing.
Using these seven strategies will build a social media strategy into a powerful marketing tool for any size company!
2. Engaging Gen Z
Great companies are using social media to reach target audiences that are normally hard to engage. Gen Z customers are usually very difficult to engage but are plentiful on social media, so engagement with them is critical to success for some companies. According to PR Daily's article called "How to win over skeptical Gen Z audiences on social media," there are 3 ways to reach this hard but sought-after target audience.
1. Commit to Empathy and Understanding
If your brand wants to avoid getting labeled as inauthentic on social media, you have to genuinely get to know Gen Z users and observe how they use social media. Ideally, you should hire a Gen Z team member to help identify what sort of messaging sounds the most relevant and authentic.
If your brand is inserting itself in a political conversation just for the sake of publicity, Gen Z-ers will know. Just ask Pepsi and Kendall Jenner. What was intended to be a timely and politically relevant commercial ended up being highly controversial. As Gen Z saw it, Pepsi was trying to involve itself for the sake of capitalizing on a moment—not because the company cared about an important social movement.
2. Meet Them Where They Are
This is Marketing 101. For millennials, Instagram and Facebook were the platforms of choice. For Gen Z, it’s all about TikTok. In fact, Gen Z makes up more than 60% of TikTok users. Make sure your brand has a presence on the platform to target these digital natives.
A Microsoft study suggests you have eight seconds to capture Gen Zers’ attention. Use that time wisely, and don’t push content that is overly branded. Gen Z will see heavily branded content as overt and distasteful. Consider your brand’s purpose, go where the Gen Z-ers are, and aim for authenticity.
3. Form Connections Using Live Video
Gen Z prefers openness on social media and genuine (not performative) content. This gives your brand a chance to harness the power of video, a medium designed to imitate in-person interactions and face-to-face connections. More than 80% of consumers would rather watch videos than read social posts.
Capitalize on user-generated content when you can to form connections with consumers. By reposting user content and commenting through your brand’s lens, you can actually save your video production budget while building rapport with Gen Z audiences.
Gen Z-ers are on a quest to make the internet more real. This can be a great opportunity for your brand to dig deep into its own mission and vision. If you’re in touch with what drives your brand, it’ll be easier to generate authentic content and earn the trust of a very perceptive generation.
Using those strategies should help you to reach the hard to reach Generation Z customers and engage with them.
3. Favorite Social Media Hacks
The last way that you can increase the success of your marketing strategy is to use these social media hacks identified by PR Web put together a group of experts that identified their favorite social media hacks. Here are 3 hacks all companies should employ.
1. Facebook Groups
CEO of Black Chateau, Desireé Duffy, says that Facebook's focus shift to groups made it easier to engage target audiences organically. "Facebook recently shifted their focus to groups and made it easier to share within them," said Duffy. "Social media marketers can take advantage by posting to groups to get more organic traffic and engagement. Be sure to post in groups related to your topic. For example, we market books and therefore join and share in book-related Facebook groups."
2. A Diverse Feed
According to Keri Lindenmuth, marketing manager at KDG, having a creative, up-to-date feed goes hand in hand with backlinking. "Switch your feed up," says Lindenmuth. "Backlinks to your website are helpful, but that shouldn't be all. Post videos; add hashtags; share pictures of your team; tag other companies or media outlets; and get creative with graphics that announce sales, share testimonials, or celebrate holidays."
3. Visually-Engaging Content via Canva
Stacy Jones, social media expert at Hollywood Branded, says that Canva is great for creating social media content. "Our number one hack is Canva," says Jones. "It allows us to create amazing social media content for our agency and clients. With this, you can automatically resize content from a square design to one that is vertical or horizontal, which is great for creating organic material across your many social platforms."
Using any combination of these strategies and hacks will make your business an emerging force on social media and a brand with great customer loyalty and influence!
For more information about ways to create a winning social media strategy check out this post by Reed Knitter.
References
Gupta, R. (2021, November 6). Ways to boost the social media strategy. LinkedIn. Retrieved November 8, 2021, from https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/ways-boost-social-media-strategy-ripun-gupta/.
Snyder, J. (2021, October 18). How to win over skeptical gen Z audiences on social media. PR Daily. Retrieved November 7, 2021, from https://www.prdaily.com/how-to-win-over-skeptical-gen-z-audiences-on-social-media/.
Time. (2015, May 14). You now have a shorter attention span than a goldfish. Time. Retrieved May 5, 2023 from https://time.com/3858309/attention-spans-goldfish/.
PRWeb. (2021, October 27). Social Media Experts Share Their Favorite “Hack” For Better Organic Performance [DesignRush QuickSights]. PRWeb. Retrieved May 5, 2023, from https://www.prweb.com/releases/social_media_experts_share_their_favorite_hack_for_better_organic_performance_designrush_quicksights/prweb18291913.htm.
NBC News. (2017, April 5). Pepsi pulls controversial Kendall Jenner ad after outcry. NBC News. Retrieved May 5, 2023 from https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/pepsi-ad-kendall-jenner-echoes-black-lives-matter-sparks-anger-n742811.
Golum, C. (n.d.) Live video stats: What consumers want. Vimeo. Retrieved May 5, 2023 from https://livestream.com/blog/live-video-statistics-livestream.
YouGovAmerica. (2021, 6 April). Target Gen Z with a social mix. YouGovAmerica. Retrieved May 5, 2023 from https://today.yougov.com/topics/resources/articles-reports/2021/04/06/target-gen-z-social-mix.
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