Marketing

How to build an effective social media marketing strategy in 2022 and beyond

Impactful and creative social media campaigns can drive strong outcomes. To cite an example, J. Paul Getty Museum of Los Angeles challenged their followers to recreate historic works of art using objects and people in their homes. The resulting engaging, and often hilarious, images went thoroughly viral on social media, and mainstream media houses also picked up on the insane ways people recreated art works. For instance, a painting of an appaloosa by George Stubbs was recreated hilariously with what looks like a spotted lounge shirt. Retweets: 10k+, likes: 25k+. Another unique campaign was by Apple - the “Shot on iPhone” campaign. Apple encouraged iPhone users to shoot unique photographs and post them on Instagram with the hashtag “#ShotOniPhone” for a chance to be featured on one of their 10,000 billboards across the globe. This garnered over 16 million entries, making it one of the most ground-breaking campaigns on social media.

As you can see, Social Media Marketing (SMM) is one of the most powerful ways to reach and engage with your target audience, and it has grown exponentially in recent years. This is due to a shift in consumer behaviour, with people spending more time on social media than ever before. Currently, SMM is evolving at a rapid rate, and is expected that 2023 will see even more changes.

One of the most important aspects of a winning SMM strategy is to identify your target audience. It is important to understand their demographics, psychographics, and behaviours to create content that will resonate with them. The other thing about identifying your target audience is figuring out who you want your SMM strategy to reach. This can be a bit tricky because you need to figure out what kind of content will appeal to them and how often they will want to see it. Here we will see the key strategies for successful social media marketing.

Analyse the existing SMM landscape

Once you know who you are trying to reach, you can choose the platform that will be most effective for your advertising goals. Every SM platform is unique in its own right. Being aware of how each one works helps to know which platform is a good fit for your target audience.

The SM landscape is constantly changing. New sites are popping up and old ones are dying. It is essential to keep up with the latest trends and know how to capitalise on them. Facebook is still the most popular social media platform, with over 2.9 billion active users. It offers a variety of advertising options for marketers to choose from. Facebook offers a number of different ad formats, such as video ads, carousel ads, and canvas ads.

Instagram has over 2 billion active users, and it is also one of the fastest growing social networks. It's a great place for brands to advertise because it offers a variety of features, including built-in analytics, targeting options, and ad formats like video ads, photo ads, carousel ads, and more.

Although a professional networking platform like LinkedIn is not as popular with the public as other sites like Facebook or Instagram are, it does have some advantages over those sites for businesses. It has more than 800 million registered users, and its average user spends about 17 minutes per day on the site, which makes it an ideal place for companies to advertise their products or services because there is a good chance that their target audience will see them there. Twitter allows advertisements on Twitter itself or on other websites that allow Twitter content to be embedded.

Create a clear and consistent brand storyline across channels

A brand story is the backbone of a company. It is the story that defines who you are and what you do. It can be used to communicate with customers on multiple channels.

The idea of a brand story is to create an emotional connection with your audience. This can be done by telling your story in a way that strikes an emotional chord. The goal is to make them want to know more about your company or product so that they will become loyal customers or followers.

A good example of this would be Nike's "Just Do It" slogan, which was created in 1988 by Dan Wieden for their 30th anniversary campaign and has been used ever since as their motto for motivation and inspiration. They use it not just as a tagline for advertising but also for their employees as well as customers through social channels like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram too.

Influencer user opinion

Using an SM profile that has a high number of followers to influence general user opinion about a brand has become an absolute necessity today. Influencer marketing is one of the easiest and cheapest methods to establish a brand’s credibility and reach a larger audience.

Recent statistics say about 14% of Gen Z and 11% of millennials bought a product or service because an influencer recommended it. According to eMarketer’s data, more than 75% of influencers use Instagram as the platform for their campaigns. However, TikTok is slowly becoming a favourite among influencers.

SM automation

Managing an SMM campaign is quite a tiresome process. No matter how well-organised the marketing team is, it is humanly impossible to always ensure that we post, review, respond, and monitor social media handles in an optimised manner. This is where automation tools can help by improving agility*. 

Some SMM automation methods that can be implemented immediately are:

• Using chatbots to respond to users’ messages
• Automated scheduling of regular posts on various channels
• Getting notifications about SMM conversations about specific brands and topics on multiple platforms
• Identify and post during periods that have peak audience levels

As you are aware, social media marketing can bring a lot of benefits to organizations in terms of visibility and brand reputation. With a clear strategy, SMM can ensure business success. Hence, a future-focused and future-proof strategy should be adopted.

*For organizations on the digital transformation journey, agility is key in responding to a rapidly changing technology and business landscape. Now more than ever, it is crucial to deliver and exceed on organizational expectations with a robust digital mindset backed by innovation. Enabling businesses to sense, learn, respond, and evolve like a living organism, will be imperative for business excellence going forward. A comprehensive, yet modular suite of services is doing exactly that. Equipping organizations with intuitive decision-making automatically at scale, actionable insights based on real-time solutions, anytime/anywhere experience, and in-depth data visibility across functions leading to hyper-productivity, Live Enterprise is building connected organizations that are innovating collaboratively for the future.