Social media marketing isn’t just a tool – it’s essential in 2020. Here’s the ultimate 5-step guide to building your digital brand successfully.
Building a brand isn’t easy, but with social media, when it’s done right, you can significantly increase your brand awareness, grow your revenue, and create a substantial audience full of potential customers.
To put it simply, social media is one of the core elements in every marketing plan – and for a good reason. More and more marketers focus on social media platforms to entertain, inform, and guide their audience. They seek Facebook and Instagram growth to build an engaged audience. But you may ask, what are the benefits of social media in 2020, and why are they so important? Let’s find out together…
Why social media in 2020?
We live in a technology-driven era, and people are becoming more and more obsessed with their social media for that reason. Most people can’t even imagine how living without their smartphones or their Facebook and Instagram page would be.
Thanks to social media, we have a great opportunity as brands to put our name out there and grow our business – even when we’re locked down during times of crisis. There are so many active users on social media (3.8 billion to be exact, and this number is increasing), making it a problem for your brand to be absent. With paid ads, you can get in front of millions of people. And I know that because I am a victim of purchasing things online because of an advertisement. But this is not a problem because I was targeted based on my interests.
Before discussing paid ads, it is essential to understand that we have to build the foundations first. Social media content that beats the competition, customer service that understands the pain points of the consumer, and stunning visuals that attract the human eye are all necessary for this process.
When we have all this in place, we can explore some of the best actionable tips to improve our campaign further. What do you think? Will you give it a try?
Actionable Social Media Tips in 2020
1. Develop a social media marketing plan.
A social media marketing plan is all about what, when, and where to post. This simple idea can transform a mediocre campaign into a successful one.
These four steps will help you get the results that you want:
Step 1: You need to find your potential customers and analyse their behaviour. Figure out things like what kind of content they like to share online and who their favourite influencers are within the current niche. Answers to these types of questions will help inform the type of content you produce.
Step 2: Define your business goals and try to understand how social media can improve your journey. For example, let’s say you want to grow your leads by 35% by the end of the year. What kind of content or engagement do you need for your social channels?
Find the ways that your brand will have a competitive advantage. Perhaps it will be your excellent customer service, your exceptional visuals and accompanying call to action phrases, or through your discount codes. It’s up to you to decide where you will allocate your efforts.
Step 3: Investing time in social media can be rewarding, but we have to choose our platform carefully to avoid wasting time on channels that don’t have a high return on investment. Think about the number of people who will participate in the process and try to apply the best practices in every social channel you choose to add to your arsenal.
Step 4: Find the tools that will help you stay on track and measure your results. You must pivot along the way and change some of the strategies to make sure you are efficient. Having the right tools to help you understand what works and what doesn’t will improve your marketing game.
Remember that success is different for every brand, so don’t waste your time on other brands’ blueprints. Find yours and go all in.
2. Use a social media calendar
Nowadays, many platforms make your life easier by providing tools to schedule your posts and track them.
You can create the content you know your audience will love and use these tools to find the best days and times for posting. You can also schedule your post for multiple channels like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
Brainstorm your ideas and create as many pieces of content as possible. Create your copy for each one of them and align them across different channels on the calendar.
Use Facebook or Instagram analytics to map the best times and days, schedule and automate them to go live whenever most of your potential customers are online.
3. Work on your consistency
Consistency is vital when it comes to social media. Every influencer knows that, and now you know it too. Being consistent is not easy, and for the most part, a lot of businesses fail in this step. You can’t build a relationship with your audience if you pop up in their feeds every new moon. That’s not how it works.
They need to see you often and engage with your content. To achieve that, you don’t need to post 20 times a day. Some numbers are considered to be optimal for each platform:
• Facebook: Post 1-2 times a day
• Instagram: Post 1-3 times a day
• Twitter: Post 1-51 times a day (optimal is 15 times a day)
• LinkedIn: Post 0-1 times a day
• Pinterest: Post 3-30 times a day (optimal is 11 times a day)
Consistent posting is crucial for your success on social media, but keep in mind that you have to provide valuable content to have a highly engaged audience. At the end of the day, if you can’t keep it up with quantity, focus on quality. Ideally, you need both of them.
4. Create Facebook and LinkedIn groups.
Groups are a great way to improve your brand’s awareness. Every brand should leverage both Facebook and LinkedIn to build their brand. Creating groups in your niche or groups related to your brand can help to develop a sense of community. There, your fans and customers can interact, share their stories, and exchange opinions on your products or services. That is a tremendous testimonial for your brand.
Creating a group is a simple yet efficient way to start conversations and find the pain points of your customers, whilst adding value to their everyday life and providing offers tailor-made for them.
5. Go live on social media
One of the most underrated elements of social media marketing is live video. If you want to improve your game in 2020, increase the number of video content you produce. If you are willing to succeed, go live with your audience. You have to push the boundaries and take advantage of the social media trend that highlights live features.
The raw feel of live video excites the viewers who are bored with polished videos all the time. Having behind the scenes footage of everyday life in the company, live reactions from the staff, and informative Q&As can drastically improve customer interaction with the brand.
Over the coming year, more and more brands will start to use this feature. So you’d better add it to your arsenal as soon as possible, or risk being left behind.
Conclusion
In a saturated market like social media, having a competitive advantage over others is quite a difficult task. Every tip in this article focuses on producing great results for your social media campaigns. Remember that it is all about consistency and quality of content.
Find the pain points of your potential customers, engage with them, understand what they want, and give them value. Trust your analytics and pivot your strategies to improve every single mistake you make in your approach.
If you want to keep one thing from the article, it should be the following: “We don’t have a choice on whether we do social media. The question is, how well we do it.”
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