After the release of Meta’s Threads this year, it’s time to have that talk about social media. No, not about your screen time or your late-night scrolling, but about how to maximise its usage as part of your marketing strategy.
It seems a new social channel becomes popular year after year, so it’s important to find out which channels will work best for your business so you’re not wasting time, and money, on fads.
If you feel your business might be too niche, then what you should know is that in 2023, an estimated 4.9 billion people use social media across the world. So it does not matter if you’re selling organic food for chinchillas, you’ll find a potential customer.
As a Surrey marketing agency, we manage digital campaigns that include social media marketing, day in, day out. In this article, we’ll guide you in choosing your social channels based on your needs, and how to align them to your business goals, and to your target customer. To help with the marketing we also provide web design and build services inhouse.
Understanding your social goals.
You need to understand the outcome you’re trying to achieve before you look at how to make it.
It’s important that you have a clear view on what it is that you want to achieve from your channel and post, and how that will positively impact your business.
For example, you may be a skincare brand that has an ecommerce website and you may be looking to showcase your products to a new, wider audience through social media. This would then lead to them coming to your website to browse the stock thoroughly. And with strategic planning, they’ll convert into a customer.
In this case, your goal would be driving traffic to your website and so you would look for channels that could provide you with that opportunity, such as Facebook Ads or Instagram Shopping.
There are plenty of other basic goals that can help you understand the direction of your social strategy such as brand awareness, generating leads and providing customer support.
Something like providing customer support is less about new customers, and more about retaining existing ones. Such as Pretty Little Thing’s Messenger Tool which is designed to connect with customers on their order needs.
Either way, you need to be clear on what it is you want to achieve when an audience member sees your ad, post or feed.
Get to know your audience.
If you are familiar with your value proposition, you will know who your audience is when it comes to who you will market your product or service to.
It’s easy to make assumptions about your audience and their social habits. You may think that Tik Tok is for teenagers, and LinkedIn is for adults in suits, but it is good to understand a bit more in depth so that you can optimise your content, and choose the right channels to reach them.
Creating buying personas is one of the best ways to come up with your target audience. If you haven’t got target personas, a quick and easy way to start is base one on your regular customer, one on your best customer and one where you would like to venture out to (get a bit creative). You will want to know their goals, buying habits, social media usage and more.
Email marketing tool, Lemlist, has a lot of information on how to create a B2B buyer personas these can be used for a B2C audience and made simpler if you wish: The ultimate guide to defining your B2B target audience.
For quick mockups, Statista.com is an amazing information site that has a bank of statistics that can help you on current audiences demographics so that you can be sure. But more importantly, it’s effective to use first party data. This can include your current Google Analytics demographics, the social media following and research of brands you aspire to be like, and real life current clients/customers.
A/B testing social campaigns with different looks and tone of voice can also help you figure out what platform, or content, is being the best received by certain audiences. All platforms will have a way of looking into these types of analytics.
Once you know your audience you will need to move on to which platform will suit their needs, wants and align this with your goals.
Platforms and their uses.
If you’re a social media veteran, you might think that Facebook is super user friendly, right? Well, the reason why they are so user friendly is because a lot of work goes into those platforms to make it that way.
Getting to know the platforms and their features well will prepare you for creating a strategy that works for your audience and social goals, seamlessly. Then, you can use all the tools provided to maximise the outcome of your campaigns.
Below is a table of relevant platforms in rank order of monthly active users (in millions):
| 2,9582 | |
| YouTube | 2,5142 |
| 2,0002 | |
| TikTok | 1,0511 |
| Messenger | 931 |
| Telegram | 700 |
| Snapchat | 635 |
| X (Twitter) | 556 |
| 445 |
These figures are great, but there are a few things to look out for when it comes to choosing what is right for you.
Just because it has a high monthly penetration of users does not mean that it will work well for your business. For example, if you’re marketing SaaS solutions to business owners, you are unlikely to use Instagram, as it’s more informal and uses images rather than text.
LinkedIn is a platform not on that list, but has over 922.3 million global members and is known for B2B connections and marketing. Despite it not making the user list, it perhaps has more potential for reach in the software industry than Instagram.
Each channel will have varying costs, features, benefits and limitations. You must make sure that the channel you choose will work alongside your marketing budget.
Once you have decided the platforms you would like to use, you will need to start thinking of content.
Work with your resources
Large companies have dedicated teams purely for social media marketing, and even us, a Surrey marketing agency, have dedicated marketers to take care of clients’ social accounts.
As much as social engagement is important, don’t spread yourself too thin. If you are a one-man-band, or SME, and are looking to start social media marketing, choose up to 3 channels so that you are not overwhelmed with large amounts of content to create.
To make this easier, use any blogs or articles you’ve written as inspiration for social posts, have your accounts fully set up before posting and keep a content calendar that can backlog plenty of content for you to post even if you go on holiday!
Managing social channels seems like a lot of fun, but they take a lot of effort if you want to stay on top of trends and build a loyal following.
Is posting on social media good for business?
As a Surrey marketing agency, we are experts at helping businesses grow on social media. Online communication avenues will constantly be growing and changing as we enter further into a digital world. Whether it’s Tiktok, Instagram or even Discord, your social presence is an important pillar as part of your marketing strategy in order to increase brand awareness, retain customers and find new ones.
Need some support? – Social Media Management Surrey
Our Surrey marketing agency offers an array of digital services, including help with monitoring and setting up social media channels. If you are interested in working with our in-house team, or have any enquiries, please don’t hesitate to get in touch. For more information give us a call on 01252 413 757 or email us at howdy@wearethunderbolt.com – we are always happy to help.