For many people, social media platforms are an integral part of their day to day lives. For businesses, social media is the most important arena for their marketing to land. If you want to ensure that you are earning the maximum ROI on your social media marketing campaigns, here’s what you need to do.

Image by Nattanan Kanchanaprat from Pixabay

Identify Your Goals

Before you embark on any marketing campaign, you need to have a good idea of what your specific goals are. These goals won’t just help you decide how to proceed with your campaign, they will also give you objective measures for the success or failure of your campaign. If you have recently started your own business, you will need to understand your business’s objectives before creating a marketing strategy. For example, a Michigan LLC will require a different social media campaign than a large enterprise.

Of course, with any marketing campaign, you can take it as read that you want to increase exposure, boost sales, reach new audiences, etc. You can set yourself more specific goals in these areas, such as achieving a certain percentage increase in web traffic. But you should think about what else you want to achieve, especially in terms of metrics that are specific to social media marketing over other forms of marketing.

For example, you could set yourself the goal of increasing your overall number of followers by a certain amount. Alternatively, you might go for something even more specific, like generating a certain number of likes or comments on your content.

It’s up to you to decide on the right goals for you, but you should put some serious thought into them. Choosing the right goals at the beginning of this campaign could have a huge impact on the success of the next campaign you do.

Identify Your Audience

With any form of marketing, the more you know about your audience, the easier you will find it to market your business to them. Different groups of people will respond to different media, mediums, concepts, and messages. Social media adds another layer of complexity to this because each social media platform is vastly different from its competitors.

For example, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and Reddit are all social media platforms that you can publish your marketing content to, but the kind of content that works on one platform will not generate the same response on the others, assuming it can be published on there at all.

Depending on the objectives of your campaign, you might be looking to produce a campaign that will appeal to groups of people who haven’t used your business before. If that’s the case, you will need to ensure that your messaging is targeted at them, rather than your usual audience.

Choose the Right Platforms

There are lots of social media platforms that you can market your business on, with each platform having its own audience, nuances, and features. A common mistake that businesses make with their social media marketing is to try and target all of these different platforms simultaneously. The mere thought of this will have any social media manager breaking out in a cold sweat – we’ve yet to see the mythical social media marketing campaign that can be put on any platform and perform just as well!

Instead, you should be crafting marketing media and messages for one platform at a time. This enables you to work closely with your social media manager rather than having them work for you.

Remember, they are the expert, and you should place value in their skills and knowledge. If you don’t, why have you appointed them as your social media manager?

In order for your social media marketing to be as effective as possible, it needs to be paired with organic interactions. In other words, deploying your marketing to a social media platform should encourage users of that platform to visit your business page and to interact with you.

You don’t need to respond to every comment left on your page, but you do need to have your accounts managed by someone who understands how to respond to these comments when they do.

Hire People Who Understand the Platforms

We touched on this above, but it is a point that bears repeating. It really doesn’t matter how good your marketing materials are; you can have the best and most memorable slogan ever devised coupled with a breathtakingly genius visual accompaniment, but if your social media manager doesn’t know what they’re doing, you will never be able to deploy your campaign to its full potential.

A good social media manager doesn’t just use social media themselves, nor can you take an experienced marketer and appoint them as the social media manager on a whim. You are looking for someone who understands essential marketing principles and has a good working knowledge of how each individual social media platform operates.

The purpose of a social media manager is to ensure that even when you aren’t running active marketing campaigns on the platforms, your social media accounts are still interacting with other users and ensuring that your business is active on the platform.

Promote Off-Platform Content

Your social media marketing shouldn’t just consist of content made specifically for each platform. You should also use it as a way of directing people towards your websites and services. While campaigns are running, you can expect to have more visitors than usual checking out your social media profiles.

Posting links to content you have published to your website or elsewhere is a good way of turning even more of that traffic into paying customers.

Even outside of campaigns, posting links to relevant content will keep your business in people’s minds and will enhance the value of your profile to visitors.

Social media platforms are perhaps the most important arenas for digital marketers today. If you want your social media marketing to earn you a maximum ROI and carry your business to the next level, you need to make sure that it is targeted and backed up with other relevant content.