Social media is a powerful tool for businesses to use in their marketing strategies. It can help spread the word about your brand and connect you with potential customers. In this blog post, we will discuss 5 ways that you can help inform your social media engagement strategy so that you can get the most out of your time spent online!
The social media channels that will work best for you will depend on the products and services that you offer consumers. If you are a B2B company, Linkedin will prove the most useful social media platform, but it never hurts to have a Facebook page and Twitter account.
If you sell to everyday people, have a think about the demographics of your target market. You’ll find younger consumers are more active on Instagram and Tictok, while the older generation is more active on Facebook. If you are producing great content but getting little engagement on social media, you may be using the wrong social media channel for your business.
With that said, social media is an unbelievably useful resource, and if your company is not yet on social media, we highly recommend that you sign up for a business page on the appropriate platform. It is a way for you to communicate directly with your customers and market your business directly to them – FOR FREE! All it will cost you is your time.
We know that managing your social media is a full-time job, and it can be really daunting for someone who hasn’t had much experience in using social media, let alone crafting an engagement strategy that can build brand awareness and drive results for your business.
To make it easier for you, our team has put together some tips that will help you boost engagement on social media:
5 tips for building a strong social media engagement strategy
Tip 1: Get your employees involved
Building engagement is never easy when you do it alone. It might be cheesy, but it’s true what they say, teamwork makes the dream work. When you have a team behind you who are willing to engage with your content on social media, get involved, and contribute their own ideas, things start to get a lot easier.
A great way to get your team involved is to host weekly brainstorming sessions where your team can share their ideas. Make sure that you have someone oversee your social media account so that the tone of voice remains consistent.
Encourage your employees to engage with the content your company posts by liking, sharing, and commenting on your page. You can also make employees administrators of your business page so they can help reply to messages and comments that come through your business account and as well as inviting their connection to like your business page. This is a great way to grow your network.
With some careful planning, it’s not hard for any employees to get involved in creative ways that will engage your social media followers.
Tip 2: Be consistent
It is essential to your social media strategy that your content be consistent in your messaging, tone, and graphics so that your branding carries through in everything you do. You should also try to post regularly. We recommend you post at least three to four times per week if you want to build strong engagement.
That being said, you should remember to show your human side. When you post on social media, you are speaking as the voice of your company so remember to inject some personality and humour into your posts. You don’t want to sound repetitive. A great way to do this is to create a persona of your business and think through that persona when you communicate with your followers.
Although you want to be consistent in your branding and tone of voice when it comes to crafting your content, it is important to mix things up and take a few risks. It’s OK to have an opinion about something and voice it. If you are a specialist in your field, try to be insightful and provide content that adds value to the lives of your followers.
Posts that highlight your employees and their achievement is a great way to build engagement with your audience. You could also post about your customers or clients and the latest projects you have been working on. Don’t try to sell your products and services all the time, as you are less likely to build engagement that way. If you keep giving your followers the same sales pitch, they will get bored quickly.
Whatever you do, just make sure you stay topical and true to your brand.
Tip 3: Know your audience
Understanding your target market is crucial to any marketing strategy but particularly one that is aimed at encouraging them to engage with your business page on social media. Knowing who your audience is and what they like will help you to craft engaging content on topics that speak directly to their problems in a language they understand.
Getting to know your audience may take some time. It’s important to do your research, but you may already have information about your target market that you didn’t know about. Gather what information you have about your current customers and pool this information with your social media analytics. We will discuss this in more detail later, but you can find this information on the analytics tab on your Facebook and Linked in business pages.
Find the commonalities in your audience, e.g. Are they mostly of a particular age, gender, marital status, economic status? Where do they live and how? What social media channels, based on their demographics, are they most likely to use? What are their habits, concerns, and interests? And finally, how are they engaging with your content. Which posts have generated the most engagement for you in the past?
All of these things will help you form a stronger social media engagement strategy that speaks directly to the needs of your target audience and adds value to their lives. Remember, it is not about what your followers can d for you; it is about what you can do for your followers. When you start approaching your content with your audience at the centre of it, you’ll find engagement begin to soar.
You could create a few avatars that represent your target market. When it’s time to write your content, you should think of them and how the post would be received and interpreted by them. Mimicking is a great way to build understanding, trust, and therefore engagement with your audience. What words and phrases might they use when speaking with a friend? Match the tone and language of your content to one that is familiar with their own and watch your engagement grow.
Remember to be friendly, helpful, light, and insightful in your tone. If the voice of your brand doesn’t align with your target audience, you might want to rethink it.
Target market research can be tricky and time-consuming, especially if you are already running a business and don’t have a lot of time to spare, so if you need a hand, our team is a dab-hand when it comes to in-depth research and can help put you on the right tracks.
Tip 4: Stay Current
Keeping up with current events and trends is important in any marketing strategy, as you don’t want to appear out of touch with what your audience is experiencing. Make sure you keep up to speed with the latest news and trends on social media to stay ahead of the curve and keep your audience engaged. The last thing you want is for your business to sound tone-deaf, particularly in regard to sensitive issues that appear in the news.
Our top tip for this is to be proactive in your content rather than reactive. If you or one of your team come across a breaking story or trending topic that is relevant to your industry have your social media manager, agency or member of your staff come up with an insightful post, short article, or comment that can be shared online or as part of your social media.
If you have time to create a live stream or video about the event, even better! Posting on your story is also a great way to stay current. If you have something to share but don’t want it to appear on your page for a long time, you can add it to a story that will disappear after 24 hours.
Keep your eyes on industry-relevant news or stories relevant to your local community by subscribing to industry magazines, business news websites, and local news outlets. Don’t forget to check the trends on Google. You can set alerts that will send you a notification if something relevant to your business is trending online.
Twitter is a great social media platform for current events. You can check which hashtags are trending and create content that reflects the current mood of your audience and users at large.
Tip 5: Check the data
Most people don’t realise this, but there is a wealth of knowledge to be gained from analysing your social media page data, as well as the data you gather about users who visit your website and who buy your products regularly.
Make sure you are not one of these people and that you put this data to good use. This will help you better understand your audience, the kind of content they engage with regularly, when and on what social media platforms. You can even conduct polls through your social media and ask the questions you want to be answered, directly to your followers. This will help you learn more about their needs and how you can position your company as the solution to the problems they face.
Once you have this information, you can use it not only to inform your social media engagement strategy but also other marketing campaigns and advertising. Let’s run through an example of how data can inform your wider marketing strategy:
- You learn that the majority of your target market drive to work, and based on the demographics of your audience, they are likely to listen to radio station X, as they drive their 9-5 job. You know then that if you place an advertisement on that radio station at 8:40 am and 5:20 pm you will reach the right people at the right time to influence their understanding of your company and what you provide. If you continue to place that advert for 3 weeks, you’ll begin to build brand recognition.
- Phase two of your strategy might be to use social media to engage your target audience. You learn through analysing your page data that your target audience is often active on Facebook at around 8 pm, so you schedule a post that builds on the advert that they heard earlier that day and provides more information about your offering.
- They might decide to follow your account, check out your website, or like a few posts. You can use social media to build brand awareness and trust in your company. You might decide to try and capture more email addresses as a means to market directly to your audience, so you offer a free downloadable pdf that provides advice on a topic that is relevant to your company as well as helpful to your audience. To download the pdf, they will need to submit their email address. Now you have another piece of data at your disposal and a potential customer that is a step closer to buying from you.
See how useful data can be when it’s put to good use. Understand this data will transform how you market and sell to your target audience. Conduct a data audit within your company to see what information you already have and come to some conclusions on how this data could better inform your social media engagement strategy and marketing strategy as a whole.
If you would like some help in crafting a smart marketing strategy that will take your potential and existing customers through a lead capture to conversion process then get in touch with the team at Azzurro-Blu. We’d be happy to walk you through it. Once you start marketing smart, you’ll see higher returns on your investment.
Our closing thoughts
We hope our tips have helped you to get more out of your social media, build engagement with your audience and grow your following. If you are still stuck or would like to discuss a social media marketing and management plan with one of our analysts, then reach out to one of our team. We have been working with a range of local and national businesses to grow their audience and engage with potential customers through the power of social media.
