With around 3 billion active social media users in the world, this platform poses to be one of the biggest marketing tools to reach and engage with your target audience.
Social media carries immense potential to help businesses generate leads, improve sales, enhance brand recognition and loyalty – all this, at decreased marketing costs as compared to traditional advertising methods.
Hence, as a startup founder, the first marketing avenue you should look at establishing is your brand’s social media presence. Don’t know where to begin? Here are 5 basic tips to help you get started and boost your social media marketing strategy –
Define a Strategy
A lot of businesses make the mistake of creating an account on every social media platform and adopt a blanket approach to manage them. Sadly, that is not how it works because your followers on Instagram and LinkedIn are bound to expect different things out of you.
You need to first assess which platforms are best suited for your business basis your target audience. The idea is not to be present everywhere but to maximize the channels you are present in and offer communication tailor-made for each platform.
For example, Instagram should be used to post inspirational content whereas Twitter can be used to spark conversations or manage customer queries and complaints. Facebook on the other hand is one platform every brand needs to be on as it comes with SEO benefits.
Post Engaging Content
The kind of content you post to interact with your customers is what will set you apart from competition. Engaging content refers to content that is valuable, relevant and shareable.
Visual content gets shared more than text-oriented ones so make sure you hire a talented graphic designer to help you create such content. Secondly, try and integrate as much animated content as it is likely to get grab more eyeballs than static posts.
Apart from using visuals and animated content, also use hashtags wherever possible, drive user-generated content, collaborate with influencers and host contests to keep engagement levels soaring.
Be Responsive
Social media is an engagement tool. Don’t be that brand that just posts on its page and is not aware of what its customers are saying or asking them.
Being a tool that gives customers direct access to your business, you are expected to give faster responses. So, make sure you respond to all your customer queries and complaints and offer them a seamless customer service experience. This helps in improving your brand image and loyalty.
Set Aside Budget
While most of your posts on social media will be organic, it is important to set aside some budget to promote your posts as well, for better reach. Moreover, with the rise in competition, social media giants like Facebook have made major changes to their algorithms that invariably give more visibility to promoted posts.
So, before you get down to boosting posts, make sure you define your marketing goal (create awareness, generate leads, drive traffic among others) and target audience basis which you can choose the platform you wish to display ads in.
Track Performance
The best part about social media are the real-time insights it gives you access to and as a business if you are not investing time in tracking your brand and analyzing its performance, you are surely not making the best use of this medium.
With the presence of so many free monitoring tools, social media monitoring has become easier than ever. It is important to constantly analyze how your posts are performing and how your fan base is reacting to you in order to better your efforts and go up the ladder.
