While social media marketing may seem relatively easy enough, believe me when I say, it’s not.
Tweeting about a sale you are having and one quick post on Facebook about your product is not enough to generate sales leads, no matter how many hashtags you’re using.
Digital marketing is, honestly, a lot like a science; it demands a lot of time, research, planning, experimentation, and resources. This can be tough for a business owner who is trying to juggle managing a business, serving customers, and developing a solid digital marketing campaign all at the same time.
Not all is lost, though. Throughout my years as a Digital Marketing Consultant, you start to pick up on some things that work, and a whole lot of others that don’t.
Listed below, you’ll find four timeless social marketing tips that your business can benefit from.
- Keep Your Business Objectives in Mind
- Specific
- Measurable
- Achievable
- Relevant
- Time Related
- Bring Out That Best Ad Copy
- You’ve got your Quality Score that helps determine the placement of your AdWords ad on a SERP.
- Google ranks your business website based on over 200 SEO contributions and metrics.
- You can bet that ads ran through a social media platform like Facebook and Twitter also have a quality score attributed to them.
- Watch How Your Social Media Ads Perform Closely
- Twitter Can Be Your Content Marketing Laboratory
It’s no secret that a business must set achievable objectives in order to survive. It enables team members to rally and focus on a specific goal or metric, helps to improve general morale and teamwork, while also pinpointing areas that offer opportunities for improvement.
The same is necessary when it comes to your digital marketing strategy. You need to match your business objectives with your social media marketing campaigns. If you don’t match these digital marketing strategies to a specific objective, it’s going to be challenging to understand how well your campaigns are performing.
One of the most cited ways to set these objectives is through the SMART system. When your goals are SMART, they are:
Again, I really cannot stress the importance of setting social media marketing goals with your overall business goals. Do you want to increase sales? Or perhaps just improve your company’s online reputation? Perhaps it’s more important for you to grow your brand or increase lead generation.
Whatever your objective may be, it needs to be specific.
Quality is important, and when it comes to digital marketing, pretty much everything is based on some sort of metric:
The last bullet point is especially relevant to the discussion at hand. For Facebook, marketers need to be aware of a metric known as Relevance Score, while for Twitter, that metric is known as Quality Adjusted Bids.
One of the best way to increase these metrics—thus increasing visibility and the click-through rate of your ads—is to grab that A+ ad copy that you use for your high performing Pay-Per-Click ads in your other marketing campaigns.
This easy method is effective as it not only saves you time by recycling quality ad copy that is proven to get results, but it keeps your advertising message consistent throughout paid search and paid social campaigns.
Everything moves at lightning-quick speed when it comes to social media. What is popular yesterday is old and busted the next. That’s why, when it comes to social media marketing, you simply cannot afford to adopt a “set-it-and-forget-it” attitude. This is especially true if you are using Twitter to advertise.
To keep your head above water, figuratively speaking, you need to become familiar with Twitter Analytics. You need to understand what metrics matter in order to gauge for success, namely, the engagement rate.
An engagement rate is influenced by the total number of times users have interacted with the tweet. That could be anything from likes, follows, retweets, replies, hashtags, or retweeting of embedded media, to name a few. Keep in mind, however, as time passes, these particular tweets will become less effective, buried among thousands of other tweets into obscurity.
This is where a refreshingly creative ad becomes a necessity. A good way to ensure that your ad content remains fresh is to create a few different variations of the same ad. This strategy is sure to gain you more impressions—roughly defined as the number of times a tweet has been seen through Twitter itself—and increase your engagement rate.
And while we focused primarily on Twitter, the same could be said about any other social media platform you are using for marketing. Always keep an eye on all metrics related to any social media ad campaigns you have running. Otherwise, you could be losing money or opportunities to improve on them.
By day, Twitter may mask itself as a premium method of generating leads. But by night, Twitter acts as a laboratory for gauging how well a content idea might work.
To illustrate how this works, let’s assume that you found an interesting image detailing something of note in your particular niche. You end up sharing it with your followers and see—through your Twitter Analytics—that this particular image has done really well, increasing your engagement rate higher than any other tweets you’ve posted.
Because of this tweet’s success, you decide to cook up a blog post that talks a little more in depth of what was detailed on the image. Finally, you notice that this particular blog – which grew from a tweet – did really well and was met with a lot of engagement.
The benefits that you reap from this one tweet aren’t limited. It may generate interest in your brand and may even get you a few leads. What this test teaches us, however, is that Twitter can be used as a content marketing laboratory of sorts.
