Your posts are witty, you share interesting blogs and you regularly log in to your social media accounts, ready to answer comments. Even with all this attention are you finding your social media marketing strategy is falling short of your expectations? Gray Manufacturing faced some social media challenges that might sound familiar to you, read more about those challenges to see if you can identify.
Are you facing social media challenges in your marketing efforts? You might be making one of these common social media marketing mistakes:
You’re on Too Many Platforms. It can seem like when it comes to social platforms, the more the better. However, you’re better off focusing your energy on where your target audience is most likely to spend time. For instance, if you’re a B2C company, Facebook may be a better platform for your posts than, say, LinkedIn. Likewise, if you’re in an industry that’s more visual, you’ll get more engagement on a site like Instagram where you can post a lot of images of your landscaping projects or the weddings you’ve executed with your event planning company.
You’re Not Researching Your Target Audience. If you don’t know who you’re posting for, it’s pretty hard to know what to post. If you’re talking to 20-somethings about pursuing new educational opportunities, the messaging is very different than if you’re trying to get 40-somethings to go back to school. Tailor your posts to your exact target audience.
You Don’t Have Clear Goals for Social Media Marketing. Unless you know what you’re trying to accomplish, your posts are going to be all over the place. You’ll be sharing informative pieces on smart investing one minute, while you just can’t resist posting a pic of new golden retriever puppies the next. You round it out with a bit of wisdom from Lao Tzu. Unless you just happen to be a financial advising company for Buddhist veterinarians, this is probably a bad idea.
If you know you’re trying to encourage your social media followers to visit your website, or if you’d like to simply engage with them more in conversation on social media, it will help shape your posts and their purpose.
You’re Having a One-Way Conversation. Do your posts invite engagement? Make sure you’re thinking of social media as walking into a room of quiet people and starting a compelling conversation. You wouldn’t walk into a crowded room and make a speech or an announcement if you’re wanting people to talk back to you. Instead, you might ask a question, share some interesting information or invite them to share.
You’re Not Measuring Anything, or You’re Measuring the Wrong Things. When you set up your goals for your social media marketing strategy, you should also have metrics in place to determine whether you did those things successfully. They should be tied directly to the goals. If you want people to visit your website, don’t count likes. They’re meaningless if your goal isn’t getting more likes.
We hear from a lot of companies that they wish they could outsource their social media marketing. Well, guess what? At SJC Marketing, we’ve got our hand up. Whether you need a little guidance for a successful strategy or you’d rather just hand the whole thing over, we’re up. Contact us to get started.