Social Media Marketing

Why Social Media Marketing Works

Social media marketing is a cost efficient, highly targeted way to reach audience members who not only interact daily on these platforms, but use them to self-identify their interests, job titles, and affinities. While tactics and goals differ depending on business type, here are five reasons you’ll want to add either B2C or B2B social media marketing to your marketing program:

• Creativity shines. Creative content stands out on social. Social media gives brands the space to step outside the confines of sales-oriented, traditional marketing. This is a unique opportunity to humanize your brand through emotion, humor, and tone, while still driving brand awareness and sales.
• It’s targeted. Paid advertising options let you segment audiences by demographics, location, interests, industries, and more.
• It’s clickable. From profile to posts or campaigns such as LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms, it’s easy to embed CTAs throughout the social customer journey that prompt users to download, install, watch, or buy something.
• Timing matters. Using Facebook Insights, Twitter Analytics, and other third-party monitoring tools, you can strategically schedule content to be published when your audience is most likely to see it.
• It’s measurable. When it comes to organic posts, impressions, clicks, and engagement are good indicators of content that’s resonating with your audience. Paid social media marketing campaigns have additional metrics like CPC and CTR, with the ability to place a pixel on your site for action tracking. You can even A/B test your campaigns manually, or programmatically through the platform to drill into what works best for your audience segments.

Eight Essential Social Media Marketing Tactics

When it comes to driving measurable, repeatable success on social media, there are some tactics that every brand should use as guiding principle.

Here are some of the most effective tactics for achieving social media marketing success:

1. Infuse Social with SEO. Dominate social and search by maintaining a robust social presence full of fresh and interesting content infused with your target keywords. Often, Google will rank your social sites along with your homepage, enabling users to easily find your company across the web, and allowing you to monopolize Google’s first page for your brand name.
2. Let headlines sell your content –create demand with actionable titles that include a target keyword for your thought leadership assets
3. Keep content lightweight and shareable. Infographics, flow charts, and checklists can be easily consumed by people as they scan their social media newsfeeds.
4. Make content portable. The most successful content should be easily emailed, shared, printed, optimized as the correct image size for a social post. Volumize this content by applying it to multiple mediums like social posts, landing pages, PDFs, etc.
5. Make social media marketing videos viewable without sound. Most social sites will automatically play videos muted. Use captions, image-based offers, subtitles, and other imagery and text to grab the viewer’s attention instead.
6. Activate your employees to produce thought leadership content and social expression. They are the experts about your company, after all. Reward them for blog posts or make social media marketing part of their job requirement.
7. Know your keywords. Social media marketing and SEO are tightly integrated. Infuse your social media profiles and posts with the target terms and keywords that matter most.
8. Be human. Social media marketing is the right place to show the human side of your company – that you not only offer great products, but employ dependable and affable people.