Social Marketing Approaches
Ophelia Gurin
Jump into this comprehensive guide for crafting an effective social media marketing strategy from scratch. We offers insights into defining goals, selecting the right platforms, and measuring success through key metrics.
This form of marketing requires you to use social media management skills and tools. Just as you prepare other aspects of your marketing strategy, you need to have a plan for your social media marketing.
Social media strategy planning starts with your goals. Whether you want to expand your team, build a larger following or a more active community, taking the time to define your social goals is the first step to reaching them.
This means companies need to experiment with messaging and content when approaching customer care. For example, does your team have a protocol for handling @-mentions and comments? Do you have templated responses to FAQs? Does your brand promote user-generated content and hashtags? Your customers can be your best cheerleaders, but only if you give them a reason to grab the megaphone.
Any combination of these goals is fair game and can help you better understand which networks to tackle, too. When in doubt, keep your social media marketing strategy simple rather than complicating it with too many objectives that might distract you. Pick one or two and rally your team around them.
Bonus resource: A great deck can bridge the gap between raw social data and direct business value. Use this presentation template to pitch a compelling vision for your next campaign, initiative or annual strategy.
Making assumptions is bad news for marketers. Both leaders and practitioners can disprove assumptions from the valuable insights social data provides. With the right tool, marketers can quickly research their audience. No formal market research or data science chops necessary.
Social media demographics and stats like the ones above are great for understanding where your target audience lives, but it's also important to understand the nuances of each social network so you can decide where your business needs to be.
When Meta released Threads on July 5, 2023, the social network received over 100 million registrations less than a week after its launch, making it the most rapidly downloaded app ever. The launch of Threads sparked conversations about its role in the fediverse, or decentralized social media.
But, for now, Threads is a text-based social network that users can sign up for through their current Instagram account. Users can post on mobile, but Threads is also available on desktop. Threads are great for brands who already have Instagram accounts because the sign up process is pretty seamless.
LinkedIn is a network laser-focused on business trends and networking. LinkedIn is a goldmine, especially for anyone networking in the B2B space. Looking to get in touch with an influencer, marketing manager or CEO? Chances are you can find them here.
There are so many benefits of using LinkedIn marketing beyond networking, including content distribution and lead generation. We also have a guide for LinkedIn best practices so you can get full advantage of those benefits.
Pinterest marketing is insanely popular, especially among Gen Z and Millennials. Over 465 million people use this visual pinning platform every month to find inspiration and their next purchase. Pinterest is noted to be one of the best networks for social selling. Like Instagram, Pinterest thrives on imagery and inspirational content where products serve as the proverbial centerpiece.
TikTok reached 1 billion users in September 2021 and remains one of the most popular apps in the world. Along with its viral trends and niche communities, the short-form video app is known for its hyper-personalized algorithm that keeps users scrolling for hours. TikTok marketing has changed the game for brands, allowing them to connect with customers in an entirely new way.
Do your homework on your existing social media audience and focus on networks where your core audience is already active. You need to do further analysis before you can determine what your real-world social customers actually look like.
There are plenty of other sources of valuable audience data to supplement your social media insights. This includes your Google and email analytics, your CRM, your customer service platform or even your best-selling products.
An effective social media marketing strategy is rooted in numbers. That said, those numbers need to be put into context that aligns with your original goals. Conduct analytics reports regularly to convey the story behind the metrics and see if your efforts match up to your vision.
No surprises here. Your social media marketing strategy hinges on your content. At this point, you should have a pretty good idea of what to publish based on your goals, audience and brand identity. You probably feel confident in which networks to cover, too.
From graphics to Reels and beyond, many brands rely on the same content formats and creative touches time and again. These themes can help you become more consistent and zero in on a content strategy that makes sense.
You should also consider taking advantage of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies and automation so you can serve and engage with customers when your team is offline, which leads us to our next point.
Over half of marketers plan to use customer self-service resources like FAQs, forums and chatbots to grow their social customer care strategy. Nearly half of brands say they will use AI and automation to handle basic customer inquiries and tasks.
As social algorithms evolve, organic content has an increasingly tough time reaching the majority of your audience. The last thing you want to do is ignore those who do engage and lose out on sending more people down your marketing funnel.
Doing social media marketing right starts by being diligent about your data. You can be reactive in the short term to get the most out of your running campaigns, and then proactively use these takeaways to inform your next strategy overhaul.
To guarantee that you get in front of as many customers as possible, monitoring your growth is a major must-do. With Sprout, social reports can clue you in on everything from your top-performing content to how engaged your audience is. These reports are crucial for accountability and guaranteeing your numbers continue to tick upward.
Monitoring customer service metrics like average reply time, average wait time and response volume can help your social customer care team identify what is working well and spot opportunities for improvement. Marketers are using social media customer service software to elevate their support strategies and get the most out of their tech stack.
Social marketing seeks to develop and integrate marketing concepts with other approaches to influence behaviour that benefit individuals and communities for the greater social good. Social Marketing practice is guided by ethical principles. It seeks to integrate research, best practice, theory, audience and partnership insight, to inform the delivery of competition sensitive and segmented social change programmes that are effective, efficient, equitable and sustainable.
The core of social marketing is its audience orientation - listening to the people whose behaviour you want to change to understand what people want and why they do what they do. Such audience research is used throughout the social marketing planning process to understand the specific needs, desires, beliefs, and attitudes of target audiences, and use these insights to develop effective strategies.
Target populations are segmented. Segmentation is the practice of dividing the target audience into approachable groups. In marketing this segmentation is done not only based on demographics (such as age or gender), or geographics (such as, where they live), but also psychographics (such as attitudes, values, and beliefs) and current behaviour. The segments are then used to develop strategies tailored to the unique wants, needs, resources, and current behaviour of differing market segments.
Persuasive communications are designed and delivered to promote: the product benefits, features, price strategies, place components, and benefits they will gain from changing their behaviour. Social marketing recognises that communication (i.e., promotion) is only one element of the marketing mix and that products, behaviours, placement, and pricing are equally important to achieving the objective.
Careful pre-testing. Social marketing activity undergoes careful pre-testing and piloting where different kinds of interventions and messages are tried with the target population, and then the most effective ones are selected.
Often the most stubborn social issues are affected by multiple behaviours. For example, obesity is caused by a lack of exercise and increase in sedentary lifestyles, in combination with poor diets high in saturated fats, simple carbohydrates and sugar. And, for each of the different behaviours which need to be changed to successfully tackle obesity, there will be different barriers and motivations. Therefore, to help prioritise and identify a clear behavioural goal, at the start of social marketing programmes the behaviours are often prioritised based on 1) what impact a specific behaviour will have on the social issue; and 2) what is the likelihood of being able to influence the population to adopt the desired behaviour. The aim is to select one behaviour which will have the greatest impact on the problem being addressed, and which also has a high probability of being adopted by the target population.
Social marketing offers a unique system for understanding who people are, what they desire and then creating products, services, messages and strategies to meet their desires, whilst at the same time meeting the needs of society. Through the social marketing process and key principles, social leverage points and tipping points can be identified - the points where people and communities believe that there are enough benefits to outweigh the barriers, or that the benefits matter more than the barriers (exchange).
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