Competitor research
You need to target the right people. Find your competitors and let them do the research for you – just look at what they are doing. Go to each of their main social media platforms: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Pinterest.
You should also look at how many competitors there are, so you know how hard it will be to get your own company accounts noticed and followed. Pay attention to see how active your target audience is, and what posts are engaging most with audiences.
Content curation
Social media content curation is the art of filtering through all the interesting content across the web and sharing the most relevant (to your company and its target audience) news, articles, videos, infographics, and other posts across your own social media channels.
The process of finding, organising and sharing online content has become conventional and is practised by the best mainstream social media marketers.
Reverse engineer your competition’s top content
Why not let your competitors do the work for you? Using their successful content as a guide, you can reverse engineer something that works for your company and your audience. At least if you use your competitors as a starting point you’ll have a head start in the content creation race.
A great reverse engineering campaign follows these simple rules:-
- Google your primary keywords to identify your competitors
- Look at their backlinks (to see which are the best performing competitors)
- Analyse the content of your best-performing competitors
- Analyse your competitors’ other marketing campaigns
- Establish which keywords your competitors are targeting
- Decide what type of content you’re going to imitate – and how you’re going to make it unique (and better)
Create fine-tuned payload content
Make sure your content is high-quality and shareable by following these golden rules:-
- Create high-quality content
- If sharing content, ensure the validity of the source (i.e. be on your guard against sharing ‘fake news’)
- Try to add value to a topic or subject with the content of your post
- Keep your audience demographics in mind when creating your post
- Use infographics, images and gifs – don’t just post boring text
- Explore and exploit the day’s trending topics – if they’re relevant to your subject / audience
- Be funny, smart and original
- Wherever possible, use uniquely created video content
Get people subscribing to your Email Newsletter
Nowadays, under GDPR, you can’t just email anybody. You’ve got to have a reason for contacting them, and the best reason of all is that they’ve signed up to your newsletter.
But how do you get people to sign up?
- Make sure there’s lots of call-out boxes offering them a chance to subscribe – don’t be subtle, and remember they won’t go looking for a ‘subscribe now’ button so it’s on you to show it to them multiple times
- Offer them a freebie for subscribing – from a free eBook on a vital part of your service, to a hefty % discount off one of your services; make sure there’s a reason for them to subscribe
- Offer part 1 of the series free alongside a call-out box offering the remainder of the series for subscribers. For example, it could be a 5-part series on how to effectively use Google Ads, with parts 1 & 2 free to draw people in and the remainder of the series only available to subscribers.
Unlock the power of multiple platforms
You can — and should — repurpose great content across multiple platforms. Have a great blog post or video? Post it everywhere!
While you can post the same content on multiple platforms, it’s essential that you should customise it for each platform you’re repurposing it for.
Facebook posts should not have hashtags, for example, while tweets should have a few and Instagram posts should have a lot. You’ll also need to be more concise on Twitter, and have a more professional tone on LinkedIn. Content going to Pinterest and Instagram should only utilize high quality images.
Repurposing social media content doesn’t mean copying and pasting great statuses into your scheduling tool (though, technically, you can do this). Instead, update the content that worked so well when you share it again. You’ll almost definitely get stronger results on your second campaign if you share a new version of the original content instead of an exact duplicate.
Examples of how you can do this include:
Update older high-performing blog posts with new information, and announce the updates in your social media posts when you share it.
Pull several different great single lines from blog posts, videos, or interviews that you’re sharing. Each time you share the content to social media, use a different quote as your tagline.
Automate content sharing
Although good social media will take up some of your daily working time, it shouldn’t take up all of it. How can you maximise your efficiency and still get great content created and shared? By using automated software, obviously.
- There are a great many automated social media tools available. These include Hootsuite, Buffer, SproutSocial, HubSpot, Social Oomph and Social Flow: to name just a few. Each tool will have unique features of their own, but essentially they all allow you to schedule social media posts in advance and monitor your accounts when someone mentions your brand or leaves a comment.
- You’ve worked pretty hard on that blog post or creating that infographics to go on your website blog page. Why not ensure that it’s going to be seen by your friends and followers on social media? If you use WordPress, this is pretty easy to do since there are more than enough plugins that allow you to add social share buttons onto your page, or automatically post on social media whenever you publish a new article.
- While you don’t want to be the person who is flooding your fans’ feeds with the same link to a recently published article, there’s also no rule saying that you can’t post that multiple times. In fact, the most effective corporate Twitter users tweet multiple times per day.
Scale up your targeting
Social media is fun, easy, and a great way to be creative while offering a glimpse of your business activities but to do it really well, you actually need to develop a strategy that’s more than just posting / re-posting content over and over again.
- Use Quizzes and Polls – This is an excellent way to get audiences to reveal their preferences and behaviour, which essentially is the basis of your market research strategy. And there are plenty of tools to help you figure out your audience. In particular, Facebook and Twitter have easy-to-use poll options meant to engage in market research in your posts. They’re not only excellent engagement tools, but they’re also essentially free market research opportunities that can easily lead you to build buyer personas for digital ad campaigns.
- Understand How Your Product Ties in with Different Platforms – You’ll want to use a platform that really meets the needs of the particular types of products you offer. It’s a good idea to choose the top two or three and focus on those. One example of how to figure this out is by reviewing the actual demographics of each platform, too.
- Use Analytics Tools – By now most of us know how amazing Google Analytics is, but there are other tools out there that can help you figure out where you stand. Social Crawlytics and BuzzSumo are genius tools that help you to find your audience just by entering a URL or search term. They allow you to find out where your audience is and also how active it is. With BuzzSumo you can actually enter in a search term, and you’ll immediately find the sharing and engagement details on the most popular articles on that particular topic.
- Engage Authentically – When you’re working with social media and trying to maintain and build an audience, it’s important that you’re careful about how you’re working with your audience by their preferences. And in a lot of cases, less is more.
These are just a few of many ideas of where to start targeting your audience for your social media digital marketing campaign. Relationships are everything, and with any social or marketing strategy, this will be the thing that makes customers remember a business, stick around, and talk about it.