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Social media marketing is becoming an integral part of many B2B and B2C businesses’ marketing strategies – and for good reason. When most people think about why businesses choose to promote their products and services on social media, they typically say it’s to raise brand awareness. While this is true, there are several other important reasons why social media marketing can be a useful tactic in your overall growth marketing strategy.
For B2C businesses in particular, social media can create an additional sales platform for interested customers, such as TikTok Shop. Contrastingly, for B2B businesses, social media can be used to build trust with their customers by sharing content such as case studies and testimonials. The specific social media marketing tactics that will most benefit your organisation will depend on the products and services you offer.
Nonetheless, here are 4 proven strategies that every business should understand.
Social Media Marketing Strategies
Combine Organic and Paid Content
There are certain businesses, for example, in the beauty industry or the FMCG (Fast Moving Consumer Goods) sector, that will instantly see results from using paid social content on their social media channels. This is because they can use paid advertising techniques to reach a highly specific target audience based on their ages, interests and shopping habits.
REFY Beauty is an example of a beauty brand that uses both paid and organic social media marketing techniques to promote products such as their cream bronzer. Their organic content educates customers about the benefits and ingredients in their products. For example, they share detailed makeup tutorials, sharing how their cream bronzer should be used to achieve the best results.
This style of content helps customers trust REFY’s beauty expertise and continue engaging with the valuable content they share. On the other hand, their paid social content regularly focuses on improving customer conversions, particularly among those who have shown interest in their products but have not yet purchased. Paid social media content can reach a wider audience than organic content, helping REFY expand its customer base.
Platform-Specific Content
It’s common for businesses to choose a number of different social media platforms to share their content across. This is helpful for several reasons. Firstly, there will be a large proportion of your target audience that don’t have certain platforms, like Instagram, but they will have alternatives like TikTok. By choosing a number of different platforms, businesses can reach a significantly wider audience.
A second reason is the functionalities and features that each platform offers. Meta, which owns Instagram and Facebook, has vast paid advertising capabilities which are far more detailed than other platforms like LinkedIn.
Finally, certain types of content perform better on some platforms compared to others. Choosing to share content across more than one platform helps businesses to share a variety of different content forms, increasing their chances of a better engagement rate and performance. For example, single, static images are highly discouraged on platforms like TikTok, where audiences look for entertaining and bite-sized content. Alternatively, LinkedIn is a platform created for industry professionals, which is why informative, highly valuable and branded content sees better engagement metrics.
If you’re a business at the beginning of your social media marketing journey, and you’re unsure about which platforms to choose, start by researching the platforms that you know your target audience uses. A customer survey or simply asking your audience what platforms they’re most present on can give you an accurate idea of what platforms you should be prioritising.
Engage With Your Audience
Successful social media marketing doesn’t just come down to the platforms you choose and the content you post. Now more than ever before, it’s important for businesses to use their social platforms to regularly connect and engage with their audiences. This could involve responding to comments and messages, creating polls and questions for customers to answer, or even getting involved with trending or relevant content.
Engaging with your audience on social media is important for building trustworthy and personal relationships with individual customers. When it comes to making purchasing decisions, this emotional connection they have established with your brand can be a clear advantage over your competitors. Businesses that consistently engage with their audiences on social media also build a community of interested and returning customers, which improves brand loyalty. An easy way to interact with customers and your audiences on social media is to host live events on TikTok, especially useful for FMCG businesses.
Not only can your live be accessed by loyal customers, but also prospects who have never heard of your company, but will be shown the live if they have interacted with similar content.
Social Listening
Social listening involves monitoring public conversations and mentions about your brand, as well as your industry and even your competitors. One element of social listening is sentiment analysis, where businesses review and categorise the mentions that audiences are making about their brand. Businesses will create a report that outlines all the positive, negative and neutral mentions, which helps them conclude the average sentiment of their business.
Aside from analysing how their customers feel about their brand, social listening also involves trend spotting, where businesses use social media to identify emerging topics, trends and customer needs so that they can create content that their audiences care about and respond well to. Sometimes completed as a separate technique, competitor analysis is another component of social listening. By regularly reviewing the performance of competitors on social media, businesses can identify gaps in the market and successful content types that other businesses are seeing success with.
Social media can be a tedious process if it’s completed organically, which is why there are a number of different tools that make the process quicker and easier. Some of these tools include Sprout Social and Brandwatch. One of the most valuable takeaways from social listening techniques is that businesses can understand how well – or not so well – every area of their businesses is performing with customers.
Often, social media platforms are networks where customers feel they can be honest with their reviews and opinions of a business. Although sometimes it can be difficult to hear, businesses should see this as an opportunity to improve what customers aren’t satisfied with and strengthen customer loyalty as well as overall sentiment.