Social media is a great platform for building your brand. The large audience base means you can reach very many people without spending large amounts of money.
However, Social media will not work for you if you do not pay due attention to certain pitfalls while promoting your business. Such pitfalls include lack of proper planning, not knowing your target audience well, not targeting your messaging appropriately and not paying attention to your competitors.
A small mistake can hurt your brand building efforts, pay attention to the pitfalls below, avoid them at all costs and watch your brand flourish.
- Lack of proper planning
Like any other marketing strategy, you need to plan your social media marketing strategy. The strategy should clearly outline what your goals are. Let them be realistic, for instance, you want to get 1000 followers on your Instagram page per week. Is this achievable? You can use tools like the new service for auto follower Instagram to help you achieve this. Do not over complicate your goals and be careful about the number of goals you have within your strategy, the fewer goals, the better for you. Have in place a way to measure the success of your activities against the goals set.
- Not having a clearly defined target market
Do you have a proper understanding of your target audience? Where do they live, what age bracket are you targeting, where do they live, what do they like to do for fun, what are their needs, what is their income level amongst other things?
If you don’t have a clear understanding of your target market, you will be marketing to everyone which doesn’t make sense.
- Not having a proper understanding of social media channels
Do you have a proper understanding of the channels you are going to use? Different social media platforms cater to different demographics, for instance, Instagram is a great platform for visual products while Facebook is better for content heavy marketing. Trendy brands whose target market are younger audiences would do great on Instagram or Snapchat.
For video bloggers, YouTube and Snapchat will provide a good platform. For brands targeting corporate or Fortune 500 companies, Linkedin is a great platform. For sponsored posts Facebook is good, but for more engagement due to lack of clutter, Instagram is better.
List down the different channels and make sure you have a proper understanding of what they can offer your brand before launching your marketing campaign on them.
- Not paying attention to messaging
Please note, while it is a good idea to put the same content across all your platforms, tweak the messaging appropriately for the different channels. For example, the Instagram language may need to be more artistic in order to engage with the slightly younger demographic. The more ‘serious’ Linkedin audience may prefer more straight to the point data heavy messaging. Once again this comes down to understanding your audience and channel.
Your messaging should reflect your brand identity. Don’t oversell, leave out the fluff, audiences are capable to making the important decision to purchase without you pushing content down their throat, avoid bad grammar no matter the audience you are targeting, you never know who may come across your post.
Use video and picture content especially if it will help your audience understand your product better, include ‘how-to’ tips if the product requires that. Video engagement in Social media is very good, ask the successful vloggers. Picture quality needs to be good and well themed, so as to attract the relevant attention.
Be consistent in posting and don’t ignore feedback from your audience. The whole purpose of social media is to network, if you ignore your audience, there is a competitor somewhere who is on your page watching what you are doing wrong and they will snatch up the audience you took time and effort to get.
- Not utilizing data
A big part of social media is analyzing the data from your campaigns, yet most people don’t take time to do this. Analyzing data will give you a good indication of what is working and what is not. Likes or comments on your post are not an indication of a successful campaign. A good indicator would be if you are translating the leads into sales.
Engagement analysis is the best indicator for a successful campaign. Engaged people are more likely to transform into customers and return customers while at that. Pay attention to the number of unique users who have seen your posts, how many clicks do you have on your page, are they linking to your company website. Are people engaging with your posts and did they react well to them, you can get this information by seeing what they are saying in the comments.
Also, check how any organic likes you got from the campaign. An organically grown online community is a good indicator of the success of any campaign.
- Ignoring your competitors
Do you know who your competitors are? Do not ignore them, what are the up to? We are not saying that you should steal their ideas but learn, learn from their successes and mistakes and build upon them. Use the internet search engines like Google to find out who your competitors are. Use social media competitive analysis tools to give you an indication of what your competitors are doing.
Check out their pages and see the kind of content they have and how they are engaging with their audiences and what kind of feedback they are getting. You can then avoid some of the pitfalls to improve upon your social media strategy.
Final thoughts
The success of your social media marketing campaign will depend on your level of attention to the details listed above. Benchmark all your activities so that you can track and improve upon everything you do. It is possible to succeed in social media marketing by avoiding common pitfalls and being attentive to what needs to be done.
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