In our next installment in our ‘Summer of Zoz’ blog series, Executive VP of Digital Marketing and Analytics, David Wilson provides insights into marketing strategies for social media and expanding your company reach. With evolving marketing landscapes, we explore the top tips and strategies to create organic and paid growth.
Tactics for Social Media
Social Media Strategy
To be successful on social media you need to start with a strategy. A social media strategy outlines your social media goals, the tactics you will use to achieve them, and the metrics you will track to measure your success.
Brand Identity
Social media platforms like Instagram and Linkedin are the first places that prospective customers and employees go to research and vett a company.
Making sure that your social media profiles are updated has never been more important.
It’s important to have a consistent brand identity, making sure the profile describes your business and that the links in your profile consistently work.
On Instagram you can use the highlights features to showcase different products, events, company background, and more.
Lands’ End uses their highlights to shine a spotlight on their products here:
The B2B equivalent of highlights is how HubSpot has their Instagram page set-up. They focus on Products, Customer Success Stories and Company Culture. Hubspot knows that people interested in working at HubSpot or with Hubspot will check out their social media profiles and want to get a snapshot of the services and successes.
On Facebook, different brands will use their header image or CTA button to promote different customer behavior. Here you can see how Nike integrated shopping directly onto their page to promote sales:
Slack uses their header on Facebook to publicize an upcoming event to boost enrollment and awareness.
Audience Segmentation
Are your social media followers potential customers or are they just people who like your content? A common mistake that many businesses make is thinking that their followers and customers are the same. They typically are not. It’s vital to look at the audience data that each social media platform provides and compare it with the profile of your customers.
For example, if your ideal customers are men 55+, but your Facebook demographics look like the graphic below, then you need to adjust your content and messaging to appeal more to your ideal customer profile.
Messaging
What are you sharing on social media today? The most successful brands on social media are not just pushing their products and/or services. They are engaging and educating their community. Successful accounts are using different types of content to tell their story and use a conversational tone of voice that is very human.
Below is an example of what a content mix could look like for a brand. Notice the emphasis on videos and photos because we find that these posts have the highest engagement rate.
Boosted Budget
Organic reach across the social media networks has been steadily declining for several year. According to a study from Ignite, organic reach on Facebook was about 2.2% in 2021. That means for example, if you have 652 people who follow your page, only about 15 of them will see your post.
The numbers were higher on other platforms, 5.3% on LinkedIn and 9.4% on Instagram, but the fact is that to reach your target audience on social media you need to pay to do that in 2022.
The most common strategies businesses use to expand their reach are boosted posts and ads.
A boosted post is when you pay to amplify one of your existing posts to reach your followers, a recommended audience, or a targeted audience. Below are a few examples of boosted posts are:
An ad, especially on Facebook and Instagram, look similar to boosted posts but they contain a “sponsored” label to indicate that they are an ad. They also often have more features than a normal post, such as links, CTA buttons, and product catalogs.
BOSTON, MARS
