What are your primary goals in your social media marketing outreach, and are you hitting those goals? If your return on investment (money, time and energy) isn’t what you’d hoped for, have you identified your biggest challenges?
Most companies are focused on increasing awareness of their brand, and that’s something almost 70% responded in a survey as their top priority. Coupled with that leading objective is to increase their audience – a natural progression from goal one to goal two. Social media marketing is a key part of that and also brings a number of other advantages including:
- Content promotion
- Engages the community
- Establishes loyalty
- Customer education
- Industry insights (including insights about competitors)
With a heightened level of understanding about your target audience, you’ll take a smarter approach to content creation and have more knowledge about the preferred social media channels through which that audience gains a better understanding of your brand.
Top Challenges
While there are best practices to consider in developing a robust social media marketing strategy, there is not a one-size-fits-all means to success. There are some common pain points among companies when it comes to achieving success in social media. See if any of these look familiar to you:
- Difficulty measuring ROI
- Social strategy is out of alignment with other company objectives
- Difficulty monitoring what competitors are doing
- Content creation struggles
- Identifying and segmenting target audience is flawed
- Consistently publishing content through the wrong channels
Many of the challenges you face may be due to a lack of understanding of your target audience and perhaps an overall unfamiliarity with social media as it relates to being a marketing tool. Fortunately, there is a way through this obstacle.
Getting Assistance
Making positive strides might include doing more research, asking more questions and engaging with your followers on a more consistent basis to get a better feel for what consumers want/need.
Whether it’s a B2C or B2B scenario, your followers go to your social media pages for a source of information about something that might be of value to them. In many ways, it’s an education tool, either about specific products or the industry as a whole. Continually feeding them information that is useful will yield results.
To get a head start on the process, consider marketing professionals to assist you. At SJC Marketing, we’re committed to creating marketing strategies that move people. We achieve that through years of experience as designers, writers, marketing specialists and social media strategists focused on providing our clients value. Let’s discuss a plan that will make a difference in your social media outreach.