Social media marketing.

Every company sets goals.

Not every company sets SMART goals, with “SMART” being an acronym that stands for the following (courtesy of Cultivate Advisors):

Let’s dig into what each of those words means:

• Specific – Outline precisely what you want to achieve with your content creation and social media activity. There’s no “we’ll post it and see what happens” when you set SMART goals.
• Measurable – Don’t send something out into the social world and live in blind hope that you’ll get a response. Measure everything. Did a campaign work? Did it fail? If it failed, then why? If it worked, what made it so great?
• Achievable – Shooting for the stars is an admirable philosophy, except when it leaves you lost in the vastness of space. In other words, a small local business can’t assume it’s going to get the brand recognition of a multi-national company with a few social media posts. The goals you set have to be goals you can achieve.
• Relevant – Relevancy is all about asking why. Why does your social media campaign matter to your business? Why should your target audience care about what you post? If what you put on social media platforms isn’t relevant, people aren’t going to care about it. And if people don’t care (or respond negatively), your strategy isn’t relevant to your company’s goals.
• Time-Bound – Some people use “Timeliness” for the “T” in SMART, but the idea is the same. Any goal you set for social media marketing needs a start and end date. In other words, you can point to the goal and say, “This is what I want to achieve, and this is when I’m going to achieve it.”

Let’s think about what the average business (i.e., one that doesn’t really use social media) tends to do when it decides it wants to get social.

The company sets up a few profiles on the platforms it knows about, which usually means Facebook and Twitter. After taking some time to acclimate themselves to how these platforms work, they do the sensible thing and check out their competitors. This step is a great start because what competitors do and say (as well as how they respond to their followers) can indicate what another business needs to do and say to reach people.

With this “competitor analysis” completed, the company starts posting the same type of content, doing little more than copying, tweaking, and pasting posts. They expect the same response as they saw on the competitor’s channel, but they end up getting nothing.

Why?

Because the scenario we just described isn’t a real competitive analysis. It’s a plagiarism job, the likes of which would have any self-respecting schoolteacher stamping a test with a big fat “F.”

A real competitive analysis starts the same way as our little scenario – locating and checking out the profiles of competing businesses. But from there, you go digging into the data to figure out who follows your competitors, why they follow, and what your competitors fail to do that could help them (or better yet, you) to grow an audience.

You’re looking for the various strengths and weaknesses each account shows you, with the accumulated data you gather highlighting the opportunities that are waiting for you. Think of competitive analysis as forming the key that opens the social media door, while the strategy you create is the thing that gives you the strength to walk through that door.

Imagine that you’re a pirate sailing the high seas. With your parrot on your shoulder (and your peg leg just about holding up), you pull out your map and see the classic “X marks the spot” scenario. The map shows you your destination (that’s what the big X is for), but it doesn’t show you something that you really need to know – where you are right now.

Our point is that having no idea about your starting point makes it impossible to get to where you need to go. You’ll find yourself lost in the vastness of the open seas, without a clue which way to turn so you can set sail toward that big “X.”

In social media terms, most companies have at least some sort of presence on a social media channel. They’ve set up profiles because they know that over 4 billion people use social media, and they can’t afford to miss out on marketing to over half of the world’s population. But to create a strategy that sails their social ships right into the view of the people who need to see them, they need to know where they’re starting.

In other words, what are they doing right now that’s helping (or hurting) their ability to get to where they need to go?

If you can answer that question, you can start charting a course to the treasures of engagement, traffic, and sales that social media provides.

During the early days of social media, it was pretty easy to figure out what channels to use because there were only a few available. Once you had accounts on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, you were set up to start talking to people in the B2B and B2C spaces. While that’s still true today (to a certain extent) there are a lot more players in the mix as we get deeper into the 2020s.

With more platforms comes more choices, with those choices mattering, as this chart from HubSpot displays:

This chart shows us that the tides of opinion are changing when it comes to which social platforms help companies to achieve their business goals. Measuring data between 2020 and 2021, it finds that 25% fewer marketers believe Facebook is the most effective platform (though it still comes top with 62% of marketers saying that it’s effective). We see similar declines for Instagram and LinkedIn, both of which are stalwarts of the social game. Plus, newer players, like Snapchat and TikTok, are becoming more effective for businesses as they evolve.

So, what does this tell us?

If you think it’s telling you to ditch Facebook and LinkedIn for the newer wave of social media platforms, you’re not necessarily right. What this really tells us is that there are a ton of channels out there, each with its own audience. It’s your job is to figure out where your people hang out so you can communicate with them. That’s a huge part of social media marketing (which NEWMEDIA helps you with), and we’ll dig deeper into what each of these channels offers in just a moment.

For as much as we talk about social media marketing being different from search engine optimization or paid ads, the truth is that they all come down to the same thing – the quality of your content. Provide content that people care about (and want to share) and you’ll succeed, but write a load of guff that doesn’t connect and nobody’s going to care about your social media presence.

The question you need to answer is, what type of content should you share with your social followers? Part of the answer to this question lies in who your followers are, i.e., who are you talking to, and what type of content are they likely to consume? But we also get some insight into the most effective types of content to share on socials from these stats (courtesy of Sprout Social):

This survey of marketers tells us that over half (54%) say that video content is extremely effective on social media, with about the same number (53%) pointing to images as being the most effective. Stories and live videos each have about a quarter of marketers throwing their weight behind them (26% and 25%, respectively), while the traditional text-based post has 30% of marketers pointing to it as a top performer.

If we take these stats alone, we’d assume that visual content outperforms textual content, though it’s not quite so simple. The reality is that the research you do (both into your customers and the platforms you use) reveal what type of content to create. NEWMEDIA does that research and handles the content creation aspects of succeeding on socials on your behalf.

Have you ever tried to go on a diet?

If you have, you know that most people start their diets feeling very excited about the future. They create meal plans and build exercise routines, all with the aim of shedding a few pounds. The problems arise a month or two into the diet when everything starts to feel like a chore, and the diligent calorie counting they’d done up until that point goes out the window. An extra treat here and a large meal there devolve into the new normal, and before you know it, the diet is out of the window and all of that hard work is for naught.

It’s a bigger problem than you might think, with Scientific American pointing out that about 80% of people will be back to their pre-diet weight within 12 months of shedding their pounds.

You’re probably asking how any of this relates to social media.

Simple – it’s all about tracking.

Diets fail (eventually) because people get sloppy and stop tracking their progress. In some cases, that’s a result of overconfidence (“I know what I’m doing now, so I don’t need to track”), whereas other dieters fail because they get tired of the grind and simply stop paying attention to what they eat.

Similarly, a ton of great social media marketing campaigns start out strong before trailing off because the marketers don’t do enough to track results. With social media changing constantly (just think about the number of new platforms that have emerged over the last decade), you need to stay on top of your campaigns by keeping on top of analytics and making changes as and when needed.

Otherwise, you end up like 80% of dieters – proud of your initial efforts but lost when it comes to maintaining your momentum.

Earlier, we shared stats that showed you that most marketers don’t know anywhere near enough about their audience. No matter where you looked, over 50% of marketers (and in some cases, closer to 70% or 80%) couldn’t tell you what their ideal customers’ interests, hobbies, pains, or buying intentions are.

Social media marketing doesn’t just help those that know what their audiences look like to target posts and ads to specific demographics. Every social media channel is stat-rich, with your profile (and the analytics that lie behind it) being key to teaching you more about who engages with your brand. That’s information you can take to the bank, both when using social media and in every other area of your business.

If people don’t know who you are, they can’t buy from your business. You need a way to invite people to take the first step in their buyer’s journey, which means teaching them about who you are and what you do. Marketers know that social media is ideal for creating brand awareness, as this chart from Smart Insights shows:

Over two-thirds of marketers (70%) say that it is their top goal for social media marketing, beating out those who name lead generation (59%) and growing their brands (46%) as their big goals.