Social Media Tips to Fuel Marketing Success

Some business owners question the value of social media as a tool to fuel marketing success. Indeed, there are reasons for this skepticism. For one, it takes time for social media marketing campaigns to deliver results, unlike traditional advertising, where your reach is guaranteed based on the users of that media channel. Another issue leading to skepticism is the rapid decline of organic (unpaid) reach on social media, as social media platforms prioritize paid campaigns and use their algorithm to limit your reach. Despite this, social media has great potential. It lets you develop brand awareness, build relationships with potential customers, and drive sales. However, it doesn’t come easy to every entrepreneur. That’s where this post helps you learn how to use social media to fuel marketing success effectively.

If you’re finding it tricky to get what you hoped from your social media strategy, it’s worth using a few social media marketing tips to help you rock your performance. Once you do, you should see much better results with your campaigns. While this still takes time, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t improve your social media marketing with these tips.

Social media marketing tips that’ll fuel marketing success

1. Do your research

Doing your research is vital for any marketing strategy or tactic if you want to succeed, and that’s especially true for social media. With the explosion of social media platforms, ubiquitous changes in how they operate, and the fickleness of users, determining which platforms to use, how to use them, and how to optimize performance is a moving target. To fuel marketing success, take the time actually to know your target market so you know where to post, when to post, and what to say. The more you know ahead of time, the better off you’ll be. You’ll see better results. Below are some stats to help you decide which platforms might work best for your target market (of course, be aware that changes occur almost daily based on user preferences).

To determine what to say on social media, consider researching your competitors to see how users react to the content they share. Which images and text gain the most traction? The least traction? Also, research the content posted by companies that gain a lot of engagement. How can you modify your content based on this information?

Timing is another critical aspect when you want to fuel marketing success. Which days perform best? What time of day gains the most engagement?

Research doesn’t just apply to your market. If you’ll be using any tools, resources, or third parties, it’s worth researching them, too. Before using Ascend Viral, for example, check out an Ascend Viral review or two. The same can be said for any other tools and resources you think about using.

2. Set up a calendar

Countless people believe that social media marketing is just posting as much as possible, though others only post every once in a while. Neither of these approaches will give you the results you desire. You’re better off sticking to a consistent schedule to make sure you can start engaging followers.

Don’t just be general and say you’ll post on specific days, though. Analyze your analytics to figure out the best time of day to post, which content resonates best with your target markets, and more. That way, you can create a social media content calendar that actually helps you fuel marketing success.

Below, you can see guidelines for how often you should share content on each social media platform (of course, Twitter is now X).

As you might assume from the recommended posting frequency, you can’t expect to adopt every social media platform as part of your strategy unless you have nearly limitless resources. Crafting quality content, including images, videos, and text, takes time. Choose a few social media platforms that best fit your market, then ensure you can deliver the amount of content you need to meet the guidelines shared above.

And, speaking of quality content, you can’t just post any old crap on social media and expect to get results. You need to share quality content that provides value to your target market.

3. Set up goals

Before you roll out your social media strategy, it’s worth taking the time to create marketing goals. This helps you focus your strategy and implement the right steps to achieving your goals. Make sure these are SMART goals: specific, measurable, actionable, realistic, and time-based.

Don’t just set goals for conversion, which we call a terminal goal. Yes, conversion is what matters in the long run, as it provides income to pay your company’s bills, pay back investors, and generate funds to grow, but conversion doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Instead, conversion is the end of a process that begins by creating awareness of your brand and building positive attitudes toward it. Hence, you need SMART goals that reflect actions across the consumer decision-making process.

4. Monitoring, building insights, and adjusting

Once you established the SMART goals relevant to your marketing program, you need to monitor key metrics that help you understand whether your actions meet those goals. We call them key performance indicators or KPIs because they directly relate to success. For instance, follower counts are generally considered vanity metrics because there’s no direct relationship between higher follower counts and anything leading to conversion, which is likely your ultimate measure of success. Meanwhile, reach is a KPI for most firms, as the more people who become aware of your product and its attributes, the higher your sales potential. And, while followers might learn more about your products, the algorithms used by social media platforms such as Instagram result in only about 10% of your followers actually seeing your post. At the same time, reach is the total number of users who see your post.

Here’s a great post that addresses the issue of KPIs specifically related to your website.

It’s not enough to monitor KPIs. You must analyze the data to glean insights you can use to optimize your performance. For instance, it’s really nice to know your conversion rate has increased over the last month. Still, it’s more valuable to understand that your conversion rate is better among women or among those over 65 than to know you have increased conversions. Armed with these insights, you can adjust your social media strategy to either focus on increasing reach or engagement among those in the group with higher conversion rates or focus more on other groups to improve the conversion rates among them.

Social media marketing tips: wrapping up

Given the importance of social media marketing, it’s vital that your approach is right. There are countless areas to focus on, and it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by them. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be able to see quality and results.

With the right social media marketing tips, there’ll be nothing to worry about. By putting the time and effort into this, you shouldn’t have a problem improving your social media marketing.

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Hausman and Associates, the publisher of MKT Maven, is a full-service marketing agency operating at the intersection of marketing and digital media. Check out our full range of services.