Social media marketing is too big to ignore for any brand looking to engage with their customers online. With around 270 billion spent on social advertising alone in 2023, the world of social media offers masses of potential for getting your brand seen where your audience spends their downtime.
Though it’s certainly possible to see a lot of sales traction from social media, you’re going to be up against some stiff competition when vying for people’s attention and guiding them into the next stage of your conversion funnel.
If you’re investing in social media and want to make sure you’re getting the best possible return on your efforts, here’s four easy ways to improve your social media strategy and make sure you’re on the right track.
1. Make Sure You’re Distributing Resources to the Right Channels
Every major social media channel boasts a sizable audience. However, that doesn’t mean you’re going to get the same kind of engagement no matter where you market your business.
The nuances of different social media platforms in terms of core demographics, the types of content you can post, and other variables mean that certain brands are better suited to certain platforms. It’s crucial to make sure you’re targeting the online spaces where your brand has the potential to thrive, and avoiding ones that will only be a wasted investment.
Some of the core things to consider when you’re deciding how to distribute your resources across different platforms include:
- The key user demographics of different social platforms and how well these align with your buyer personas.
- The kind of content your customers tend to respond to, and how well different social platforms facilitate this.
- The main goals of your social media strategy, e.g sales, networking, community building, and brand development.
- How well your internal resources will meet the standards of a social network, e.g your ability to produce quality images, video, and text-based content on a regular basis.
When you put the work into understanding how well different platforms already line up with your social media strategy, you’ll remove a lot of future guess work involved in optimizing your strategy in the future.
2. Leverage the Right Tools
When you create a business account on any major social platform, you’ll automatically have access to some rudimentary analytics tools that will show how well your content is performing with your user base. However, there are many more aspects to your social media strategy you’ll need to develop if you want to out-perform your competition and reach your full potential.
Various social media tools exist to help you with things like integrating social media touchpoints with your customer relationship management, capturing potential leads, communicating with your active customers, and more.
More and more, social media tools like Highperformr are also being configured to apply AI to social media tasks, such as generating social media content and highlighting engagement trends over time.
When you augment your social media strategy with the right tools and resources, you’ll have a more detailed understanding of your audience’s wants and needs, and what brands like yours need to do to succeed on various platforms.
These findings will help you keep up a pattern of constant improvement in your social media marketing, and ensure you’re making informed decisions that will maximize your odds of success.
3. Review Your Goal-Setting
In smaller businesses where one or two marketers have to cover several different roles, it can be easy to approach your social media strategy with a vague idea of success markers, and the direction you should be heading in to achieve them.
Even if you have more specific and measurable goals behind your decision-making, reviewing the way you approach objective-setting can be a very effective way to improve your social media strategy and ensure your marketing efforts are heading in the right direction.
Using the SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound) framework as a checklist, you can audit the goals you’ve been working with and make incremental improvements. When it’s done right, this will ensure your goals are pushing your brand to maximize its potential, and allowing you to effectively track your progress towards certain milestones.
Here are some examples of social media strategy goals using the SMART framework to help you get an idea of what you should be aiming for:
- Increase website traffic from social media by 30% in the next quarter.
- Generate 50 new high-quality leads from LinkedIn activities in the next 6 months.
- Increase average engagement rate by 15% over the next three months.
- Reduce average response time to customer queries on social media by 10 minutes in the next year.
When you review your objective-setting and make a few optimizations, your entire social media strategy can benefit from a clearer sense of direction and more effective reporting as you track whether or not you’re on target to achieve your stated aims.
4. Embrace AI and Automation
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ll be at least somewhat aware of the impact AI and automation is having across different business sectors, including social media marketing.
While there’s a lot of quick-fix gurus and ill-advised experiments out there, there’s no denying that AI has huge potential in optimizing efficiencies, improving a brand’s output, and more on social media.
It’s likely that some of your competitors are already using AI as part of their social media strategy. If you don’t want to fall behind, it’s essential to get over the teething problems, embrace it alongside other brands, and use it to improve your strategy.
Some of the ways AI tools can be applied to your social media strategy include:
- Saving time for content writers by using generative AI to create posts tailored to various platforms.
- Using tools like ChatGPT and Gemini to feed in information about your brand, and ask them to generate an original content calendar.
- Training and integrating AI-powered chatbots on your social media channels to reduce the time customers have to wait for a response.
- Using AI-powered analytics to recognize trends in your social media engagement data, highlight the kinds of posts that perform with certain buyer personas, and forecasting rates of engagement in the future.
While AI can’t do all your work for you, its potential to unlock new efficiencies and take work off your hands can be an excellent way to ensure you’re hitting more of your targets sooner.
To get an idea of how these functions and more can work in real-world scenarios, sign up to Highperformr for free today!
Forging a Stronger Social Media Strategy
Social media is fast-moving and fiercely competitive, but by making the right optimizations to your social media strategy, you can give your brand a much better fighting chance.
We hope these pointers have given you some useful ideas of how to invest your resources, get equipped with the right tools, and work confidently towards stronger results for your brand on social media.
