As promised in the ‘B2C or B2B’ article, we’re taking the leap into the wild west of social media marketing. With so many platforms, strategies and multimedia, there’s endless exploration and it’s virtually impossible to cover everything. But hey, what’s the harm in trying? We’ll ask some questions through which we can explore what social media marketing is, its many different guises and how to execute & adjust effectively for the best results. Let’s go!
What are you trying to achieve?
Brand awareness? Engagement? Sale conversions? This changes everything, from the platform you use for each campaign of your social media marketing to the tone of voice in the content you’re creating.
While LinkedIn would obviously be a fantastic place for a professional tone in B2B marketing, Instagram is a great platform for building brand persona with more fun, casual B2C marketing. This is important to consider as it impacts the way consumers perceive you and your market position (are you a high-value luxury brand or an affordable, accessible-to-all brand? You can present your persona through social media marketing).
What are you marketing?
If you’re marketing an upscale restaurant, you’ve got a license to be visually-driven with your content. If you’re marketing insurance, on the other hand, you’ll have to be a bit more creative with generating exciting content (as I said in our Easter article, that’s something the KAYBE team loves). For that reason, it’s important to focus on the right platform. While it’s best practice to be present and active on all mainstream social media platforms, it’s important to consider how the channels you’re using will effect the success or failure of your social media marketing campaigns.
It’s not just about the way you present your products/services, though. There’s also the critical understanding of your target audience. Considering the demographics of each social media platform, how does it align with your target audience? For example, the age range of active Facebook users is significantly older than that of Instagram or TikTok.
What’s your approach?
One important thing to remember when creating social media marketing content is that you’re placing the content in a space in which consumers don’t always want to be sold to. Therefore, in order to be less intrusive, utilising ‘soft sell’ marketing, such as sponsoring social media influencers to deploy product placement within entertainment-led content, can allow a much more affable appearance for your brand
Since you can’t profile, filter or segment your content like you would for email marketing (although it’s safe to assume that your followers/connections on social media platforms will be interested in your brand), you need to be a bit more generic and universal with your tone of voice, approach and even the products/services.
What are your KPIs?
Are you trying to attract attention and gain awareness or are you trying to gain engagement from prospective customers? As discussed earlier, you need to consider what you’re trying to achieve. From there, you can assess your performance by analysing key data metrics such as reach and engagement.
While it can be useful to consider a wide range of metrics, taking your goals into account – and creating targets – allows you to develop a more effective strategy. If your aim is to get website visitors to read a blog post, you’re going to measure success by metrics such as ‘time on page’, whereas you’d measure success for a product page by conversion/click-through rate. Likewise, with social media marketing, if you’ve set the goal of increasing your brand awareness then you want to focus on KPIs like how many users you reached, whereas you’d be focusing on your engagement and click-through rate if your goal is to drive traffic to your website.
How can KAYBE help you?
Social media marketing is usually – but not always – focused on the ‘awareness’ stage of the marketing funnel; right at the top. Even if your social media marketing is outstanding, you still need to execute in the ‘engagement’ stage in the middle of the funnel to ensure you convert those engaged customers into sales (right at the bottom of the funnel).
Fortunately, KAYBE’s team of experts can help you in every stage of the funnel; from increasing brand awareness & building persona to earning customer engagement and then converting sales. We’re able to execute effectively across all industries in both B2C and B2B marketing, so why not speak to us and find out exactly how we can boost your business?
