Social media marketing remains the most engaging—if not the most effective—technique in your business arsenal. Sure, your customers spend every day socializing with each other online, but this creates a perfect opportunity for you, as a brand, to inject yourself into the conversation.
According to Ambassador, 71% of consumers who have had a good social media experience with a brand are likely to recommend it to others. This overwhelming majority will not only help secure customer loyalty, but get the word out to friends and family who may be prospective customers.
Engagement is at the heart of any good social strategy. In order to ensure both customer retention and lead generation, your strategy should depend on three things:
- How well you know your audience.
- How often you communicate with them.
- Whether or not your social presence is helpful, charming, and attractive enough to make it all worthwhile.
Keep reading to learn the 7 keys to an effective social media plan that will engage your customers and improve your brand equity as a whole:
1. Get to Know Your Social Media Audience
Whether you’re posting ads, asking for opinions, or sparking debates, it’s especially important that the message you’re sending and the language you’re using is aligned with your audience.
Make sure you know exactly who they are and what they expect to hear. Spend some time studying how they communicate so that you can address them in their language as naturally as you can.
If you already have a large following, use a social listening tool to understand their demographics, online behaviors, and consumer expectations. Alternatively, you can spy on niche competitors and their followers.
The more information you collect, the better. Some patterns will eventually emerge, allowing you to build ideal customer personas and define your target audience.
2. Share Only the Best Content
Content is the single most important element in every marketing strategy.
Make sure that you’re creating “10x content.” This term, coined by Rand Fishkin, describes “content that is 10 times better than the best result that can currently be found in the search results for a given keyword phrase or topic.” This means you should strive for original, informational, entertaining and thought-provoking material that will provide a highly unique value to the consumer.
Content must also be personalized to your audience’s expectations and diversified from time to time. This can be done by sharing blog posts, articles, infographics, gifs, and videos.
Post frequently, but mind the social norms of posting. Every social network has its own unwritten rules on spamming, so find a balance between inconsistent posting and too many posts.
3. Keep the Conversation Going
Chat with your audience, but make sure to tie the conversation back to your brand.
Given the nature of social media, you can talk to your audience about anything—even if it’s not niche-related. However, attention spans are short and you don’t have too much time to waste. If you’re engaging in a casual talk with your potential customers, then you should at least try to make them interested in your brand. Indirectly, of course.
A social media conversation with your audience should serve a fourfold purpose:
- Generate new comments and likes to place yourself higher on newsfeeds.
- Humanize your brand through opinions, ideas, witty comments, and jokes.
- Build trust with your audience by showcasing your brand’s authenticity.
- Allow yourself to meet your audience first-hand and see what they think of you.
4. Cut Through the Noise with Contests
Nothing can boost social media engagement as quickly as contests. Because these posts create a certain sense of urgency, the audience is incentivized to take action.
In exchange for participating, most brands offer discounts, coupons, and freebies, but no matter the reward, a contest should be time-sensitive.
The idea is to create buzz around your brand so that as many new people as possible can hear about you in the shortest period of time. For a winning combo, you can invite your audience to post and share their user-generated content that promotes your brand and reward the best one.
5. Make It More Playful with Quizzes
Alternatively, you can engage and retain your audience with quizzes.
Quizzes can also be a powerful marketing tool through the opportunity to collect data directly from your audience.
Using a simple online assessment software, you can create a quiz that can be shared on social media. Users may be incentivized to take a personality quiz, and in return, they are prompted to submit their email address for use in email marketing. You can also review results and learn more about your audience’s psychographics.
A quiz is a powerful data collection tool allowing you to obtain audience insights. Brand strategy can be adapted from this data, allowing you to improve accordingly.
6. Take a Stand on a Social Issue
Social media provides a platform to make a difference. Use it.
According to Clutch, 75% of people are likely to do business with a brand that supports a social issue important to them.
Your general brand strategy, be it on social media or offline, should take a stance on burning issues such as climate change, industrial pollution, and social injustice.
With 71% of people thinking it’s important for businesses to take a stance on social movements, this is not a time for your brand to stay quiet.
7. Stay Responsive 24/7 with Chatbots
With social media’s heavy influence on commerce, It’s only natural that customer service should be available on social as well.
According to Smart Insights, 63% of customers actually expect companies to offer customer service via their social media channels.
Such service would have to be available 24/7 and across devices, of course. Anything less would defy the purpose. Fortunately, chatbots are here to help.
“Customer service has been the most popular use case for social media bots. Their ability to answer high-level customer queries without involving agents is particularly attractive, giving customers what they want and helping to lower costs.”
In order to readily assist your customers 24/7, you should consider investing in chatbots to create a more efficient buyer journey.
Conclusion
The better you know your target audience, the easier it will be to engage them in the right way. No matter the channel, marketing relies on content to provide value to the consumer, so start with that. Contests, quizzes, a social stance, and customer service will help you with the rest.
