10 Proven Social Media Marketing Tactics For Your Startup

Social media platforms are an important part of customer acquisition strategies for businesses, helping create brand awareness and enhancing sales. Having a great social media strategy is important for startups to create meaningful, lasting relationships with customers. An effective social media presence can help you have a better launch and ongoing sales. By using various social media marketing tactics, you can gather the reader’s attention and encourage them to share your posts with their network, enabling you to reach a wider audience easily. Here are six proven social media marketing tactics, that can help you to maximize the benefits of this platform to the maximum.

• • Having a social media marketing plan:

    Before you start creating your company’s social media profiles you need to have a detailed social media marketing plan that drives your focus and keep you on track. Your marketing plan should have clearly-laid out goals, which are attainable and measurable. You need to define your primary goals for becoming a member on social media networks like brand awareness, generating leads or customer acquisition.

    You should have a clear idea of the channels you will focus on and the audience personas, with a short-term and long-term vision. Your plan should also have the flexibility to incorporate any changes if required. In the plan, you should even include the metrics you will use to assess the success and see whether you have been able to achieve your goals or not.

• • Choosing the right social network for your business:
    

    As a startup, you will have to decide on the social platforms to join. Creating a profile on a particular social network consisting of billions of users, but not having your user base, wouldn’t be useful to you. Choosing the right social networking platform will depend on factors like the target age group of your audience, your marketing goals and the nature of your services.

    If you wish to reach the masses, Facebook is an excellent platform. Twitter supports one-to-one customer engagement, and LinkedIn is useful for finding business partners and global networking. You can use YouTube to create brand awareness among a large customer-base by sharing quality videos.

• • Investing time and money in social media marketing:
    

    For a startup, the whole team needs to invest sufficient time in posting a company’s content to spread the word and create brand awareness. If everyone just spends a couple of minutes a day sharing and liking, there can be a substantial effect on ROI from the posted content.

    Though social media is a free medium, investing money in it can help you get desired results. There are social automation tools that can increase the efficiency of your social media marketing efforts. You can even spend in ads to get new followers.

• • Having an editorial calendar:
    

    A social media calendar is a highlight of what events are important for your company and what you are going to post over a specified timeline. Planning social media posts in advance allows you to share quality content with your audience on a consistent basis.

    Before preparing an editorial calendar, you will have to consider your marketing goals and the events that are coming in the upcoming days or weeks. Analyze what worked for you in the past and what your competitors are posting. Learn from their successes and try to find out the loopholes which you can fill when planning out your new calendar.
    Before you decide to post on social media platforms, you need to find out what your audience likes by conducting a social media audit and referring to the analytics. You also need to decide on how often you will post, ensuring you are not bombarding your audience with irrelevant posts.

• • Sharing a variety of content consistently:
    

    Content is the most important aspect of social media marketing. Your startup needs time to grow and develop, so does your fan following, requiring posting content on a consistent basis. You can build engagement by sharing content which is informative, unique and valuable to your target audience.

    1. You can include a variety of content in addition to the text-based content like infographics, images, videos, etc.
    2. You can share blogs and articles written by you as well as those written by the industry leaders and influencers to get more views
    3. By posting user-generated content, you will be able to convey that you care about your customers and value them
    4. By focusing on marketing your podcasts, which are quite trending these days, you can get more listeners
    5. Running social media contests and giving freebies to the winners can drive engagement
    6. Self-explanatory visuals, charts, and graphs can be used for better reach
    7. By sharing the best quotes with your audience, you can not only inspire them but also boost your brand
    8. Live videos can be used to share a real connection with your audience. Research says that live videos are watched 3x longer and shown more in News Feed
    9. You can share about your webinars and also upload their videos
    10. Clients’ testimonials can be shared on your social profiles. Instead of a text-based testimonial, you can even record them as videos

• • Developing an online community:
    

    As a startup, it is important to build an online social community, where you can interact with your audience and establish a strong brand presence. Adding people to get your numbers up won’t work until you gain likes from those who are genuinely interested in your offerings.

    Developing an online community of fans who like your brand and follow you can pay off tenfold. You can gain a fan following by keeping positive interaction and going the extra mile for serving your customers. By interacting with your clients on a continuous basis, you can understand their needs in a better way, enhance their satisfaction level and get feedback for improvements.

• • Cross-promoting your social accounts:
    

    Cross-promotion refers to utilizing one social media platform to promote other social media networks. It can help you to leverage the benefits of your fan following on one platform to build your following on another platform.

    You can send a tweet to your Twitter followers asking them to like your Facebook page if they are a member there. You can even promote your startup among friends by sending a Facebook request to like your page.

• • Using recommendations on social media:
    

    As per the Nielsen study, 92 percent of the consumers around the world trust recommendations from friends and family, above other forms of advertising. Your startup can, therefore, harness the power of word of mouth on social media channels in different ways. For example, you can offer an incentive for referrals like freebies, discounts, reward points or gift cards. You can even request your happy customers to send you referrals. You can provide memorable customer experience, to make your clients talk about your brand on social media.

    For a startup, influencer marketing is a cost-effective tactic. You can leverage the benefits of influencer marketing by finding someone who is influential among your target audience and encouraging word of mouth. By approaching prominent public figures, bloggers or speakers in your segment, you can put across your marketing message well beyond your own audience.

• • Serving customers through social media:
    

    As a startup it is important for you to be in touch with your clients, respond quickly and incorporate their comments and suggestions in your offerings, as they influence your company’s reputation. This can be done easily and cost-effectively through social media channels, which is equivalent to providing services to customers via e-mails, phone, or chat.

    You can use social media management tools to search for the mentions of your brand and address all types of comments, whether positive or negative, based on the urgency of the issue. By addressing customers’ issues on a timely basis, you can present yourself as an engaging brand that cares about its clients. Even if they don’t have issues, you can reply to their comments, feedback and the thoughts they share. Instant answers to their posts can have a positive influence on your brand.

• • Analyzing and evaluating results:
    

    Social media trends keep on changing and the ways to impact audience change with that. By continuous evaluation, you can incorporate the latest trends in your social media marketing strategy.

    It is also important to know which techniques worked well in your efforts. Analyze which posts gained more likes and shares, which time works best for you and which platforms were able to outshine. This will help you to gather more understanding of the market and get more leads.

Conclusion

There are many organic and cost-effective methods of reaching your audience on social media that can give a boost to your growth, promote your business effectively and drive word-of-mouth and brand awareness.

While the above social media marketing tactics can help the startups jump-start their business, it is always good to think outside the box. Don’t be afraid of experimentation; you just need a little courage to break the mold!