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As a business, one of the basic skills you need to excel at is your social media marketing strategy. There's nothing worse for a brand than having a strategy that doesn't align with current social media trends and practices, it makes the brand come off as irrelevant, old-school, and makes the audience turn away from the brand. Hence, keeping all the changes that have happened in this pandemic-driven 2020, here are 20 tips and tricks to optimize your social media branding.
- Set a Goal
It's important before introducing any campaign that you set up a clear goal that you aim to achieve through the campaign. Decide whether you want to drive traffic to your website, gain more social followers, get more engagement, etc and then create a campaign relevant to those goals.
If your goal is unclear, even if your campaign succeeds it won't make you feel satisfied. In this age of digital marketing, if you don't have a clear set of goals to work on, you may as well close shop and go home. To meet the competitive market demands, you need to aim for the highest, and that can't be done without aligning the right set of objectives.
With a proper goal in mind, the next step is to create an elaborate plan to fulfill that goal. You need to choose the right platform to get you the engagement you're looking for, the audience you're seeking, and the goal you're aiming to achieve. Instagram is best when it comes to targeting millennials and Gen-Z, Facebook is better suited to boomers, LinkedIn is perfect for you to reach professionals, and so on. Choosing the right platform can make all the difference for you.
Our content creation depends on our levels of creativity and this creativity can often suffer through blocks that can negatively influence our content quality. But your brand can not suffer through this human error. Hence, in order to tackle this issue, you need to create a content calendar beforehand. Not only will this ensure you have content ready even during creativity blocks, but it will also ensure you have everything prepped even during a rainy day when sitting down and creating fresh content isn't possible.
To promote your social posts, you need to use specific campaigns, and even that depends upon your needs. For a lot of brands, the priority is to come up with a good organic campaign to collect a good amount of following before they can proceed to paid campaigns to attract new traffic. Organic campaigns are necessary as they're more authentic as the audience themselves comes to the brand after looking at their content. Whereas paid socials are a means for the brand to sponsor their posts to reach the audience. But no matter their means, they're both important for your brand to succeed and in the 2020's saturated era of branding, it's necessary to invest in such campaigns to attract the audience
If you want your brand to be visible on platforms like Google, you need to create a blog to promote your branding further. Then, you can present these blogs in different creative ways in front of your audience through your social platforms like Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, etc. These creatives can be presented in the form of videos, carousels, or stories.
If you already have a bunch of blogs either published or drafted, repurpose the content in the blogs according to 2020 and future trends in order to increase your authenticity among the masses. If I came across a mainstream blog today that brags about 2017's trends, I wouldn't follow its information for gaining knowledge about today's trends. Why? Because internet algorithms are constantly changing and with them, the trends in every marketing niche.
For the sake of providing valuable information to your customers, your blogging strategy needs to always have the option of repurposing in order to stay on top of the game.
Storytelling is the future of marketing, and you need to learn how to use it as a content marketing strategy in order to gain audience likability. Stories let you build emotional connections with your audience and turn them into loyal customers. And one effective way to make this storytelling be memorable is by using all the visual design tools available at your disposal and coming up with creatives that appeal not just to the audience's aesthetics but also define the theme of your brand.
There are too many brands available in today's world, and in order to stand out from them, you need to be good with your communication strategies for your audience to come to you whenever they face trouble. Prioritize your audience engagement and make sure you reach out to find new traffic and convert them into leads for your brand.
Keep up with the industry's big news and share it with your followers. Sharing the latest news and trends is one of the easiest and fastest ways to gain authenticity and provide value to your followers. Just make sure the information you're providing is true and doesn't take away your credibility. The world is quickly growing and introducing new features, policies, and changes that your audience would love getting to know about, and it's your job to provide it to them.
GIFs, Memes, and Emojis are another form of connecting with your audience and drive engagements to your posts. It's what will connect you on a personalized level with your followers. Moreover, social algorithms love emojis and memes and the use of those will definitely promote your content quality.
What's the best way to connect with the audience while also raising the standard of your brand aesthetics? User-generated content. Ask your audience to contribute to your creatives or better-yet, feature their fan-art on your socials. This not only makes your account look human, it will also drive engagement to your user's page that will increase likability for your brand.
When it comes to this era's socials, influencer marketing is the priority for every brand. Influencers are people that are your audience. By investing in a good influencer campaign, you will ensure your brand gets sponsored by a person with whom your audience already resonates and trusts.
People love getting free stuff, so your job as a brand is to produce relevant merchandise that will be loved by the people. After giving away merch, you can ask people to post review stories which you can then repost on your feed as testimonials from your customers. Providing people with value products for free will make them come back to your brand to buy those products from you once they observe the products' benefits.
As we discussed above, social media algorithms are repeatedly changing, and it's important for your hashtag game to change with it. Currently, Instagram has changed its hashtag algorithms to only be related to tags relevant to your posts, or else the platform discards the authenticity of your post. Hence, your hashtag game needs to be aligned with the changing algorithms for you to find the right target with the right accuracy. Using at least 3 hashtags on your posts is a must, no matter the platform you're posting on, the rest depends upon the platform and its policies regarding hashtag use.
What provides value to your consumers is showing them the benefits they can get from your products. Hence, a stream of how-to videos can showcase exactly what features the audience can get from your products and make your brand more valuable as you'll be helping the consumers find solutions they might struggle with otherwise.
Testimonials are very important as they speak of customer experiences and what they've been able to earn through your brand. One kind of testimonial we've already spoken of when we talked about giveaways, apart from this, you can post reviews on the products the customers have bought and commented about, you can also do a follow-up text chain after shipping products to customers to get to know their opinions and experience and then post their comments in your Facebook/Instagram stories. These testimonials urge further customers to buy from you.
A/B testing includes all the copies, CTA, creatives, captions, etc that you post on your brand. The testing involves observing what has worked best for your brand and what you need to improve. Once you get this idea, you can introduce more ways to deliver your message to your followers.
One of the best ways to engage with your audience is by going live on your socials. 2020 has further defined the value of live sessions, what with the pandemic lockdowns limiting other forms of face-to-face interactions. In live sessions, you can either hold Q&A sessions and answer audience queries or collaborate with other brands/influencers that the audience would like to see you interact with. Going live is a major tool that every brand needs to utilize to the max.
News jacking is another form of sharing current industry trends, except it needs a more creative approach. In this strategy, you can create either humorous or other tones of copies that highlight a piece of current events or trends while also bringing your brand to the limelight and ensuring your relevance in the marketing world.
There are a lot of different social tools available to make your data measurement job easier for your social media accounts. These include Hootsuite, HubSpot, Google Analytics, etc. It's important to measure and analyze your social media results to study what you're doing right and where you're lagging to improve your strategies and campaigns. Your engagement rates, shares, likes, retweets, interactions, impressions, etc all need to be analyzed.
These were the major tips and tricks for you as a marketer in 2020 so that you can come up with the best strategy to make your brand stand out in your audience and succeed. Although strategies differ from one company to another, the basic outline on how to come up with the right strategy remains the same. And that outline can be figured out once you go through the tips to follow for your social media accounts, given above. Do you have any questions? Please feel free to comment.
Author Bio:Kamil Riaz Kara is a content contributor at BeMainstream and associated with digital marketing for the last six years. Presently working at Digital Eggheads, a digital marketing agency in Pakistan.