When it comes to social media marketing, the numbers really don’t lie. Even if you have a gazillion fans but a major portion of these are not converting into actual sales and site visits, your campaign would not be deemed effective. According to a recent report by Ascend2, there are a number of staple strategies that are proven to work and there are some that simply don’t. The study also notes down a number of effective strategies that can help you maximize the potential of a social media marketing campaign as well as give your content strategy as boost.
The best strategies and the most difficult obstacles
The study looked at what 687 currently working marketing practitioners, executives and business leaders had to say about social media marketing. The study revealed that most of these professionals believed that the most important objective of social media marketing is to improve customer engagement. The survey then listed ensuring optimum web traffic as the second most important objective, while boosting sales revenue was the third most important goal for these professional. In terms of challenges and obstacles, these professionals found dealing with the limitations of their staff as the biggest challenge, followed by an inability to measure ROI and not having an effective strategy to deal with these problems in place.
The most important objectives to remember
Most important objectives your company would need to achieve in terms of strategic opportunities would be to increase content reach, improve customer engagement, increase sales revenue and website traffic, and to increase lead quality. In terms of strategic threats, staff and budget limitations, an inability to measure social ROI and a lack of social marketing integration and organizational commitment would be the most challenging obstacles to overcome.
The most effective tactics to use
Tactically, the most effective strategies these companies believed in were the creation of article/blog post/video/audio content/research/whitepaper, appending them with social sharing buttons and the administration of branded social networks. However, the most difficult tactics in this arena were the creation of high quality content, while ensuring advertizing through social networks and administration of content sharing sites.
How to boost customer engagement
Content creation has been the most effective strategy to ensure customer engagement. It includes the creation of whitepapers, audio and video content and even blogs. Even though social sharing appears to be all the vogue these days, companies need to realize that customers will not come to their site and share stuff from there unless the content there was actually good.
Once your site or blog has come to the customer’s notice, it becomes even more important to keep the customer interested in your site; and providing relevant and timely content is the best way to do it.
Company size and staff limitations
A smaller company is more likely to have multitasking staff. Large companies are able to hire specialists to manage their social media marketing campaigns though their social media reps often cannot communicate their brands’ needs as effectively through their campaigns. However, the problem with RoI (return on investment/influence) remains the same.
Of course, there are not any one-size-fits-all solutions to this particular problem. Hence, companies do need to acknowledge their own strengths and weaknesses and create their own goals to optimize the effectiveness of social media marketing for themselves.
