The easier it gets to connect digitally with your customers, the harder it becomes for your business to be visible out there. For the new category of information seekers – millennials who are the early adopters of digital transformation and Gen C who are always connected, search and social media is core to their lifestyle.
More power to consumers!
Social media is their voice, and now a platform for brands to compete to get a share of this voice. Despite criticism, social media remains the voice of the online generation. So, how is your business adapting to the changing consumer attitudes and behaviors? If you don’t have a social media communication strategy at hand, it’s time you must start considering one.
Here’s a list of key tactics that will help strengthen your brands’ social media strategy this 2019:
1. Represent Your Brand Identity and Values
Be it any social media platform, each channel has its own unique voice. While Instagram, Pinterest and Snapchat work best for a visually appealing voice of a younger target audience, Facebook helps in building relationships with a massive user base, LinkedIn engages B2B and B2C businesses and Twitter works best for the time crunched and on the go engagers. Every platform is representative of a different audience and perceptions.
On top of this, your presence on any of these should reflect your brand’s image and values. For instance if you are a local coffee house owner known for exotic Ethiopian coffees then you can experiment with your Instagram account with stories and posts to deliver the exclusivity and aromatic experience through different coffee menus, freshly brewed coffee visuals by playing around with the color, tone, imagery and captions.
Not only this, every conversation or engagement on your social media accounts should be in line with your core company culture and ethics. Customers love brands for their authenticity, accountability, quality of service and great communication at every touch point. So, you should start with choosing the right platform for your brand to deliver the right messages in the right context to your target consumers.
2. Apply The Integrated Communication Approach
Every new campaign that you plan to kick off for social media should resonate with the value proposition that you promise to your customers across all channels. It should be consistent, coherent, generate a conversation and an awesome customer experience throughout the journey. Your messaging on social media should not mislead or confuse customers making it hard for them to understand what the campaign is about.
Come up with your most important communication objective and audience insights so that your creative team can plan a strategy that best represents these objectives suited to this target audience for different social media channels.
3. Simplify The Process With Automation
There are a variety of social media management and marketing tools out there that can make your life easier than ever before. Utilize these technologies according to your business needs to
Tools like Hootsuite, Buffer are independent social media automation tools that help you schedule bulk posts in advance across multiple social media channels at a time.
Not only this, they provide a great dashboard for monitoring streams of content and lists that you would like to engage more with, as well as generate insights on social media metrics to help your teams understand the social ROI and how to improve on existing strategies.
4. Invest In Paid Partnerships
Evaluate the possibility of associating your brand with a face that can influence your audience in positive ways. It not only bolsters your brands value but also adds a sense of credibility to it. This, as a bonus, motivates consumers to take a desired action or eventually make a purchase from you.
Though, a paid partnership can be a costly affair and should only be invested in if you have the budget for it. It is not mandatory to team up with a popular public face, rather you can also partner with social media influencers and bloggers known for specific niche categories to improve your brands reach.
5. Measure Strategy, Learn and Improve
Data analytics has the power to uncover opportunities like never before. Monitor your analytics dashboard and drill down deeper to understand key performance areas and answers to questions like – what kind of content works well and what doesn’t? What times are the best times to post, engage and roll out a new campaign? What is the overall sentiment? How do users behave and interact with your posts and ads? What is your turnaround time to respond to your followers? Are our offerings suited to consumer interests and behaviors?
By learning this, you can control what to put out next and recommend ways to improve your current social media marketing tactics based on what your consumer expectations.
6. Be Creative and Unique
Delight your customers in different ways to generate more engagement, loyalty and word of mouth referrals. Create an editorial calendar with a unique theme around every month or quarter depending upon your planned campaigns or new product roll outs. You can also re-purpose old content and share infographics, gifs, boomerangs, videos, blogs or listicles appropriately across the channel. Another way of staying on top of your game is by keeping your audience engaged with giveaways, contests, polls and hashtags.
Not to forget, the fruits of an effective social media strategy take time and patience. It’s not an overnight solution to build online presence and engagement, but it keeps evolving with changing consumer, technology and market trends. A smart social media strategy that involves a multi-channel approach centered on adding value to the consumers is the way to go in 2019! What do you think?
