Most rookie content marketers think so simply about content marketing, such that they only need to create new content and share those to their social networks, then voila, people will already be interested in buying their services or products. The truth is, making conversions via social media will take time, just as with many other digital marketing methods, and usually, with this approach, the content goes nowhere.
However, taking your time to master the art of social media advertising will prove to be worth it. On average, people from all over the world use social media for at least two hours and twenty-seven minutes per day. For 80 per cent of consumers, social media ads led to their purchase decisions.
In 2021, 77 per cent of social media marketers rated this type of marketing as somewhat to very effective, so if you haven’t been taking social media advertising seriously, it’s time to level up your skills as a social media marketer.
Challenges in Social Media Marketing
Firstly, be aware of the challenges you might deal with along the way. Here are some:
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Lack of Cross-Department Collaboration
One of them is the lack of social media marketing team’s lack of connection across other departments. Before, the social media team was always given less importance compared to other teams, as they were usually just managed just by one person, or sometimes even non-existent.
But nowadays, the social media team is equally important as other departments. For your business to flourish, you will need to proactively create connections between social media marketing departments and other departments, including customer services, sales, research and development, human resources, etc. in developing marketing goals.
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Wrong Social Media Platform
Identifying the right platform to market is challenging for rookie social media marketers too, not doing enough research to see where their target audience is most active and not clear about their goals. It can be costly to invest in the wrong platforms, especially when you use paid ads.
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Directionless Content
It can also be challenging for content marketers to understand their target audience. Most often, they create and post content first before they identify their target audience, veering into a directionless path. Usually, this affects the credibility of their brand. Or even if it gets the audience engaged, because it doesn’t tailor to the audiences’ needs, it would still be unable to get leads.
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Changes in Online Engagement Tactics
Moreover, unless you are using paid ads, organic social media engagement is very crucial so that your audience will still be aware of your business. The challenge lies in the ever-dynamic online world, which changes in engagement techniques every now and then. When you can’t keep up with the trends, you may end up losing both leads and audiences.
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Meeting Consumer Expectations
Along the way, you will also find it difficult to meet consumer expectations. People nowadays choose brands that stay close to their values, which is why it is important to carve your identity from the start and take a proactive approach to establish your identity all throughout.
Tips for Social Media Marketing
Now that you are aware of the challenges that can get in the way of your social media marketing efforts, let us delve into how you can make your socials successful.
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Increase Quality Score
“Quality score” is termed differently in other social media platforms. In Facebook, it’s called “relevancy score,” whilst Twitter terms it “quality adjusted bid.”
Moreover, on Facebook, the higher the engagement in their post, the higher the quality score. This leads to more impression share and lower cost for every engagement, whilst on Twitter, the more relevant, resonant, and recent the posts are, the higher the quality adjusted bid. This means more ad impressions at a lower cost.
To put it more simply, higher quality score leads to higher ad impression share at a lower cost for every engagement. With low quality score, it’s vice versa. You will get a low ad impression share and higher cost for every engagement. Content is either unicorn or donkey—unicorns perform better than all other content and are in the top 1 to 33 per cent; donkeys are underperforming content and at the bottom 97 per cent.
To know whether your content is unicorn or donkey on Twitter, use Twitter Analytics to determine which of your content gets the most engagement. Then, you can post the same content organically to Facebook and LinkedIn so that you can identify which of them receives the most traction. Having determined the unicorn content, you can then use them as paid Twitter, Facebook and Instagram Ads.
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Have a Clear Audience Target
Your audiences aren’t all the same from income, preferences, values, to interests. As abovementioned, without a clear audience target, your posts will be directionless, risking your brand’s credibility. Make sure you know who your ideal customers are, your buyer personas, existing customer base, ad analytics, and email subscriber list.
To make this process easier, use social listening tools to get insights which can help you dig into people’s conversations around your brand, niche, and product. Taking into consideration their sentiments and pain points, you can develop your campaign goals and content clearly.
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Post Unicorn Video Ads
Don’t just rely on images and text; get onto video-making too. At a low cost, your video can already gain thousands of views. Videos make consumers more likely to remember you. Just make sure to promote your unicorn videos; that is, the best-performing, that you have posted on your website or certain social media platforms.
As much as possible, make your video understandable even without audio. Amazingly, 85 per cent of Facebook videos are watched without their audio. Finally, try to make them really memorable, short, and customized to your target audience.
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Use Other Social Platforms
Aside from the major social media platforms, you can also explore other least-used networks, such as LinkedIn, Hacker News, Medium, Digg, Reddit, and more. All these can add a huge amount of traffic to your site, especially when you get a lot of upvotes.
There are still so many strategies for improving your social media advertising strategies. Legend DigiTech experts can help you nail the social media world and gain a lot of conversions over time.
