How to Improve Startups’ Social Media Marketing

So you are thinking of ramping up your brand’s social media presence with a solid campaign aimed at improving customer engagement to spur your business’ growth. You have a Virtual Assistant ready to aid you in boosting your business’ visibility. Among these VAs or Virtual Teams are content writers, graphic designers, and other specialists who can create wicked content with storytelling. It’s going to be great and compelling! But wait! There are a few more things you can include in your recipe for social media success to make it better, from the strategy and planning phase to the assessment or debriefing phase. Check these out:

Crafting Customer Personas

This is a step above the ordinary demographic statistics. Crafting customer personas entails parsing a wide range of data, from surveys to personal interviews, and picturing the people who your campaigns are addressing. Personas are the summation of what you know about your audience: who they are, their socioeconomic brackets, age and gender, their concerns and needs, what they aspire for, even their hobbies and preferred social media platform. With this more human image of the people you’re trying to connect with, you and your team can hone your messaging better, making it more resonant with their concerns. Forbes’ article on the subject neatly outlines the process, which can be of great use to any business or marketing team.

Assess the Effectiveness of Each Platform and Act Accordingly

Use social media analytics platform to gauge whether your strategies are working. For Instagram, you can use tools like Owlmetrics to measure follower engagement, growth, click rate. If one platform is working better than another, you can suss out why this is happening. Maybe some platforms better work for certain audiences, or you need to fine tune your messaging to better suit each platform. For example, Facebook’s pages and messaging system makes generating purchases more convenient, but Instagram’s focus on pictures and videos might make it better at generating brand awareness.

Tie Company Goals and Social Media Marketing Objectives Together

Make sure your social media marketing team isn’t operating detached from the rest of the business. Otherwise there might be conflicting messages. Your social media team needs to know what’s happening on the ground, it might make for good content. And you don’t want them to give out inaccurate information. Your content and marketing plan need storytelling to be truly compelling. And the story you tell must be aligned with, and must convey, your brand’s values. This will show audiences your brand’s identity and what makes it different.

Convey Clear Opinions on Crucial Subjects

If your company is concerned about sustainability or the environment then go ahead and post at length and in depth about the subject. Show them what your brand and your team is passionate about. So your business will seem actually human instead of some dull bland cardboard cutout corporate juggernaut. People will genuinely appreciate this drive as well as the insight and information you provide. It will attract people who share the same perspective. Even win converts to the cause (if your content is compelling enough).

Be an Early Adopter for New Social Media Platforms

Want to take the lead? Set up accounts on fledgling networks. You’ll never know if these will make it big or generate a niche but dedicated audience. You can also reserve the right catchy social media handle that will catch people’s attention.

Attend Conferences to Stay Up to Date

These platforms are meant for networking, so you’ll have to do some networking yourself to stay ahead of things. Forging vital connections is key, after all. Having your ear on the ground by attending social media conferences will connect you with influencers and peers. You can hear what’s up on the grapevine, get an inkling of the latest trends, and access to juicy insider information.

Takeaway

Social media is important for SMEs and startups. Business owners cannot treat it like an afterthought. Rather, they should realize that it can give them the edge they need in ever more competitive marketplaces. Many are already growing wise to this. Big corporations have huge budgets for their campaigns. Likewise, smaller businesses have agile and clever operations with in-house teams who are in touch with their activities and well connected with their customer bases. Now is not the time to be tepid, or to stick with outdated models, or misleading social media marketing myths. It’s time to take the plunge, because this can be a real difference maker for your brand!