As of 2019, nearly 3 billion people have an active account on social media. Over the last few years, these numbers have kept on increasing and social media experts believe it won’t be long before the entire world population will be using social media in their daily lives.
Social media has taken a major chunk of the global marketing share, covering almost every type of internet user even in the most distant and obscure parts of the world.
In order to drive value, create impact and effectively achieve your business goals, you must have a thorough understanding of your target audience and the social media platforms they use on their daily cyber interactions.
Pitching the right audience requires unwearying patience and a carefully vetted approach so the message is not only heard but repeated and propagated. The right audience can mean the difference of a prospering business with growing revenues, and a business that dies in its infancy.
In this article, we will share 7 tips you can use in your social media marketing to effectively address your business and increase your social presence on the web. But before we do that, we have listed some reasons to consider social media marketing to pitch your audience.
- Social media offers innumerable opportunities to promote a business, get exposure and generate leads.
- These are powerful channels for marketers to create two-way conversions with potential customers
- It not only allows marketers to find the right audience but build a strong business relationships based on trust and transparency.
- Being an extremely versatile channel, social media allows marketers to conduct online marketing in ways that were impossible before.
- Social media marketing often implies other online marketing techniques such as SEO and PPC.
- Understanding your target audience, what their buying preferences are and how they react towards your products gives the marketer a clear insight about the strategy that will drive results.
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Hashtagging Your Content
Whether you are local, regional, national or spread across the world, like every industry you will have certain buzzwords and phrases that represent your business activity, stirs up the audience and increases your social visibility. Hashtags in social media are special elements that serve as an impetus to these goals, propagating content and influencing new trends.
They play a crucial role in developing the interest of your target audience from social media platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. Moreover, hashtags categorize your content with respect to their relevancy and help your brand become a voice for that particular topic.
To implement them effectively for pitching your audience, it is vital that you design your own hashtags with your brand name and other industry-specific keywords which have high social search volume. While there is no limit for hashtags in social media posts, using them indiscriminately can also have detrimental effects on your social plate. There are plenty of tools online that offer free analytics and hashtags suggestions such as Hastagify.me.
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Creating Your Content
Many marketers often mistake the response their social media handles get with the number of likes/follows they have. In reality, your social media marketing is only as good as your content. According to an infographic published on FME extensions, social media is responsible for 3.2 billion visual share daily.
While profile designs, new strategies, and PPC ads help in amassing thousands of followers, at the end of the day your potential to generate sales from your social media accounts will go only as far as your content takes you. Using the right mix of textual, visual and graphical elements is vital to your social media campaigns especially when your products depends on it. For starters, always makes sure you give your customer organic, qualitative, visually rich and interactive.
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Picking the Right Social Media Channel
All social media channels are not cut from the same cloth and while some users may prefer one, others may not even know it exists. Knowing which platform is right to pitch your brand has a deciding role in your digital marketing stratagem. It not only saves the time and resources of the brand but improves their accuracy in penetrating the productive segments of their target niche.
For example, a business that sells its legal consulting services will do a lot better on LinkedIn just as a brand that sells designer Tees will get a better response on Instagram and Facebook. If you’re not sure which target group you need to focus your efforts on, you can start defining your buyer-persona to determine the ideal segment for your products. Once you have statistically validated your personas you can easily match them up with social media usage and decide one or multiple social media channels to start your campaigns on.
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Post Timing
While social media is one of the most lucrative platforms to pitch your brand, posting content whenever you feel like it isn’t enough. Some times are better than others and may give your far greater edge in capturing your audience than a random time of your choosing.
Timing is imperative in social media marketing. It directly affects the engagement of the post and gives it a higher chance of becoming viral on social media.
The best strategy to get the most out of your social media content is by pacing your activities in a timely order that uplifts your outreach. Every region has a different time of its peak hours so make sure you pitch your target segment when the tide is high. A higher amount of traffic elevates your chance of being noticed and brings greater leads through your posts. Many social media platforms such as Twitter offer built-in features to schedule posts which allow marketers to tweet several times a day and capture maximum leads. You can also use third-party applications such as Hootsuite that give you a central dashboard to manage all your social media handles.
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Keeping a Track on your Progress
Tracking your progress is an excellent practice that helps determine the current level of your activities. It also makes an important metric in your social media marketing model. Without knowing how well your current strategy is performing you cannot identify your success rate, maintain a competitive edge or move forward towards your future goals. Therefore, it is crucial to observe analytics and use different integrated tools social media networks offer to track the company’s progress. Once you have an idea which practices performed the best in a particular time span, you can use the result to identify the audience type that shows greater affinity towards your products or services.
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Knowing What Audience is About
A good social media marketer understands what the audience demands. Being aware of what your customers seek, gives you deeper insight into their buying patterns. This enables marketers to offer unique and sounder propositions through a multitude of marketing practices. But pitching what your business has to offer should reflect a clear and transparent agenda that aligns with your business goals. This helps the business to pinpoint its key response areas and build more robust social media strategies to improve those specific sectors.
A good marketer must also know how to utilize the latest trends to engage its audience, choose the right social media channels based on product or services, and entice the audience by producing relevant and compelling content.
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Use Paid Campaigns
Compared to traditional social media marketing (SMM), paid social media advertising is quite different and involves a range of aspects that you need to consider first. However, with paid SMM you can amplify your reach, enhance your targeting, introduce specialized content, capture the mobile market and fit almost any budget.
Paid SMM allows you to narrow down your target segment and bring maximum exposure towards those customers that are more valuable to your business. It also helps stimulate purchase decisions by adding Call to Actions (CTAs) such as, “Shop Now”, “Sign Up”, and “Contact Us” in remarketing posts.
By adding targeting parameters, you can easily filter up to the potential customers based on demographics and many psychographic factors such as hobbies, interests, personality, and even brand loyalty. This yields higher results in shorter timeframes and gives the brand a push it needs to bring its products and services into the limelight.
Summary
- Make sure you do your research to identify your prospective customers. You can visit different pages and make notes on their social media behavior to determine the best approach.
- Use hashtags to gravitate your audience. You can create a list of keywords and use them as hashtags for your posts. Add a combination of keywords that include your brand name.
- Being relevant is the key. Don’t expect a good response if you are approaching your target audience with a hard pitch. Create content that is informational, welcoming and entertaining at the same time.
- Give attention to your customers by opening conversations and responding to their queries. Responding timelessly gives your prospects the value of being noticed. Try to be a solution provider than a salesman.
- Be consistent. Establish a voice that remains the same. Make it authentic, sincere, but always make sure that you’re always providing value and not just trying to chit-chat or waste their time.
- Consistency is a major determinant of your social media marketing success. Make sure you establish a voice that is authentic, intelligent and sincere.
- Don’t hesitate to spend a little extra when it means getting results faster. A good kickstart won’t hurt your budget and will pay-off in the long haul.
Author Bio:
Mirza Irfan is a Lead Writer at FME Extensions. He has a passion for helping people find innovative solutions in digital marketing and has written numerous blogs on science, technology, digital marketing and business strategy. A writer by day and a reader by night, you can find him on LinkedIn.
