While there is no denying that social media has enormous potential for marketers, social media marketing isn’t an easy win. With over 42% of the world’s population actively using social media every day and many organisations apparently succeeding with their marketing efforts, some businesses get the impression that Marketing Services is an easy route to riches. But this is far from the truth. Success in social media marketing takes a lot more than setting up a business page and throwing a few advertisements around.
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In this post we look at 5 common social media marketing strategy mistakes that you need to avoid if you want to succeed in competitive social spaces.
1) Failing to Research Your Target Audience
Time and time again, businesses embark on creating social media marketing strategies based on false assumptions about their target audiences. Often, businesses base their assumptions on old, historic data which is no longer valid or even relevant.
Online behaviour can change rapidly, especially in the realms of social media. Think about how quickly new social platforms such as TikTok have gained massive worldwide audiences and lots of media attention in a very short space of time.
Businesses should use every resource available, including various social media analytics and demographics tools, to derive accurate, representative insight into those they are aiming to reach. It can be beneficial to create a number of representative audience personas to put virtual human faces on representative examples of your target audience.
2) Not Setting Realistic Social Marketing Goals
It may be surprising, but many organisations embark on social media marketing campaigns without clearly defining exactly what they aim to achieve. Is it increased sales, greater brand awareness, more visits to a website, or maybe building a social media audience?
Importantly, your social media marketing goals must be realistic and they must be measurable. Avoid vagueness and specify some realistic numbers that can actually be attained. Always start small as this is far more achievable and provides a basis from which you can grow. Another reason to start small is that achieving specified goals is great for motivation. It is important to get in touch with Expert Social Media Marketing Services that can guide you through these attainable goals, and assist you with achieving these. A reputable marketing service will also implement a tailored plan to fit your business needs and help boost your social media growth.
3) Failing to Identify and Assess the Competition
You should never embark on a social media marketing campaign without having determined who your competitors are and what they have been up to on social media. Analysing social media competitors provides invaluable insight that can be beneficially used to formulate strategies that will beat them.
Take a look at all of their social channels and assess what they’ve been doing, how long they’ve been doing it, what their audience looks like and more. Assess the quality of their output, the articles they are writing, the videos they are creating, the memes they are sharing and the advertisements they are running.
One of the key aims is not to steal the details of their campaigns, although these can be useful, it’s to determine what’s working for them and what you can learn from their apparent successes.
4) Monitoring the Wrong Metrics
We’ve already stated how it’s important to define realistic, achievable social media marketing goals. In order to assess progress you need to be analysing your campaigns to determine whether you are heading in the right direction. Data is the lifeblood of online marketing and you need to be looking at the right metrics to assess your campaigns and overall strategy.
While ‘likes’ on Facebook and Instagram are nice to receive, do they reflect social media marketing success? Vanity metrics such as ‘likes’ are interesting but are not always relevant. More useful social media metrics include: reach, engagement and clicks. And for e-commerce businesses the bottom line is generally sales and leads.
5) Inadequate Resourcing
Social media marketing isn’t simple and it isn’t cheap. Many organisations fail due to inadequate allocation of appropriate resources. Some businesses fail by making the one person in their organisation who knows a little about Facebook responsible for their entire social media marketing strategy.
To succeed in social media marketing you need the right people with the right skills and experience along with adequate funding. You will most likely need to spend some money on tools that will help with the previously identified requirements such as audience and competitor research. You also need to be realistic about timescales and make certain enough time is allowed to achieve desired results.
Social media marketing is challenging but the rewards from success can be huge. Taking the time to put together a realistic social media marketing strategy that avoids common pitfalls provides the foundation for success.