Social media is the most extensively used medium by individuals and businesses alike. That means you will face a lot of competition if you use it specifically for your business promotion purposes as you can expect a lot of your competitors already using this platform for the same notion. You will need to beat this competition in order to do well in your business as well as reach out to your targeted audience as well as that of your competitors in the most effective way.
In order to do that, you will need to:
- Know your audience and their demands as well as
- Your competitors about what they are doing and are about to do.
If you know about them both it will help you to make your future plans accordingly, so that you can ensure that your audience gets what they want and at the same time, you stay way ahead of your competitors in your business marketing efforts.
Knowing your audience
It is not an easy and quick job to know about your audience. You will need to research on them and try to find out the demographics that includes:
- Location
- Age
- Religion
- Ethnicity
- Gender
- Income
- Marital status
- Education level
- Number of children and other factors.
All these facts will help you to know about the buyer personas as well as the medium they prefer.
Ask questions to them
after you have identified your audience you will need to probe deeper to know about their behavior buying history and pattern. For this you will need to ask a few questions to them.
- You must know about their likes and dislikes
- Their motivation
- Whether or not they are career oriented
- Whether they follow a trend or not
- How sociable they are as Instagram followers
- Whether they love and seek attention as these kinds of people will do anything to get more likes.
You can take help of different tools available out there that will help you to locate and know about your audience in a much better way. In addition to that these tools will also help you in tracking and monitoring keywords that are related to your business and are used by your audience in case they look for businesses similar to yours.
All this will ensure that you deliver your audience just the things that they want in the right way and at the right time. This will ensure that you are seen by the audience and they act just as you want them to. Chances are, they will want to know more about you and your business making a trip to your website thereby increasing the footfall.
Know your competitors
In business in you want to succeed then you will have to know about your competitor not to their skin but from deep inside. This is another time-consuming and laborious process that will need a lot of effort and research from your side. You will literally have to ‘spy’ on your competitors, though the term ‘spy’ is not the best one to use but there is nothing detrimental in it.
All you have to do is take a close look at your competitors and try to find out:
- Their approach
- How they are using social media
- How they are faring in it and
- About their future plans.
You must also focus your research on other relevant and important aspects of their social media usage such as
- The time and frequency of posting their content
- The type of content they usually post
- The results that they achieve
- The quantum of their followers
- The rate of their growth and others.
When you know about all these facts, you will get a fair bit of idea about what you should use in your social media marketing campaigns as well.
Measuring the results
Off and on, if not often, you will need to measure the results that you achieve from your business marketing campaign. This will help you to know:
- Whether your efforts are paying off
- Whether your business is moving in the right direction and
- Whether there are any immediate changes required to make in your efforts.
This will help you to get the highest return on your investment of money, time and efforts.
Apart from measuring the success of your efforts, you will also need to measure the number of visits you are getting to your site from the social followers. You can use helpful tools like Google Analytics to measure these things and get valuable insights and metrics.
- This will enable you to make the best out of the social media channels for your business benefits.
- You can then analyze the report that you will be provided by this tool based on the number of visits you are getting each month from each social network.
- This analysis will help you to know which particular network is working best for your blog or business and therefore focus on that and spend more time on it to reap the optimal benefits from social media.
You can get this report from Google Analytics under acquisition, all traffic and channels.
Apart from Google Analytics, you can also use different other statistical data to measure the success of your marketing campaigns and the number of traffic to your website. You will get helpful data from Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest as well as from the tool that you are currently using to schedule your posts in different social networks.
The best social media strategy
You will need to craft the best social media strategy in order to drive more traffic to your site. The best way is to reply to the comments or mentions that you receive in your different social media accounts. Monitor these accounts and look for all those comments related to your specific brand.
This will portray to your users that you are active on social media. This will actually encourage more engagement. A simple thank you for a comment made will take you a long way and increase your site traffic by a considerable margin.
