We could never overstate the wonderful opportunities which digital marketing offers to marketers. The popularity of Internet and social media platforms have enabled quicker and more targeted ways to develop brand awareness , generate leads, and boost your bottom-line.
Even so, seasoned marketers realize that, despite its many benefits, certain marketing theories need to be debunked. Here are some examples of reality vs expectations that a marketer may often face:
More Likes & Shares = More Sales
For many reasons, these expectations are incorrect.
Firstly, shares, likes and reactions are good indicators of the ability of your content to engage your audience, not simply to make them paying customers. Your social media followers would still go through various stages of the purchase journey before actually contributing to your sales, and indeed the main impediment, of course, is conversion. Your social media content may be enjoyable or shareable, but how about convincing your audience to take the next step?
Regardless, your click-rate should be the go-to engagement metric to examine other than your likes and shares. Typically, when people click your stuff, they’re just a step away from conversion. If not, take your cue and make the appropriate changes to your material.
At least, your shares and likes can help boost your brand image, so don’t be discouraged if they don’t correlate with your bottom line.
Social Media Following Grows Spontaneously Once The Campaigns Start Running
As you can tell now, social media marketers prefer to obsess over numbers, and counting followers is another example.
For obvious reasons, followers are important. What is not apparent to many marketers is that it requires time to develop decent quality followers. It doesn’t help that far too many social media marketing services these days provide a guaranteed number of followers almost immediately or within very short timeframes.
However, in fact, many of these providers just artificially improve your following social media. But followers are not generally the people you need to develop your business. In many other words , having large numbers of followers is virtually pointless if they aren’t your target market.
It takes time to create an interesting organic follow-up on social media. You typically start noticing meaningful organic interaction after months of consistently sharing and posting valuable, unique and curated material.
Social Media Marketing = More Conversions
While advertising may provide you with access to more people, it hardly does anything other than that. Conversion will always depend directly on the nature of your messages.
Let’s also remind ourselves of the difficulty of running social media ads. To be successful, you must target the right demographic and make continuous changes to adjust for better targeting. This could also mean a large investment for short-term gains.
If you want to ensure the durability of your social media posts, the content marketing agency that you are partnered with should concentrate on developing messages which will serve your company long after your ads are out.
Marketing On Social Media Is Free And Simple
A type of investment is the time you spend crafting your tweets, making your images look fantastic, and posting your content on your social pages. It is time you should have spent on other tasks in order to develop or run your business. So if you’re assuming that social media marketing is free of cost, it is not. It costs you in other ways, and here we aren’t even talking about paid social advertising.
In order to be successful, social media marketing often needs skills. Your posts have to propel action, but more than that, they also need to help boost the perception of the brand and present the company in the best light. These are all the things that are best left in a content marketing agency’s hands. It will still represent an investment on your part, whether or not you get someone to do your social marketing, so you could also rely on experts to do the job for you.
Believing On An Universal Approach To Social Media Marketing
This is likely one of the most fundamental things you need to learn when you are marketing on social media: Social media marketing in general does not have a universal approach.
Some would argue that you need to build content that’s personalized to each platform, particularly when you consider their targeted user demographics. However, in real life, when your resources are limited, this is easier said than done.
At the very least, ensure to make minor changes to adjust for the “quirks” of each platform, e.g. LinkedIn’s professional tone or Twitter’s shorter character count . These easy changes will help guarantee that your content can actually work to your business benefit, along with many other ways to optimize your social media strategy.
Quality vs. Quantity
No one enjoys spam. An excellent way to put people off your brand and easily lose an audience is to spam your followers on social media.
If you have invested time , effort, and money building a virtual network around your brand, without a proper marketing plan for social media, it might all come to nothing.
The goal is for consistency over time: a coherent tone of voice and content that represents your brand’s reputation and values; regular (daily) posts between all platforms.
In one go, if you do too many posts, the message will get lost. An approach that is too sporadic and the messages would never be shown in the first place.
The best approach to this is a robust social media strategy and proper planning. Again, this requires time, thinking and analysis into the different subtleties of each network.
Final Thoughts
In the long run, merely producing content without a plan in place could damage your business. It is essential to look back and do a daily analysis of your content and social media strategies to understand how your content performs and how you can refine it for success, even though you have a content strategy up which is running on social media right now. No doubt, for modern marketers, social media can be a very powerful tool , especially if you know what will happen once you start to run your campaigns.
What other aspirations do you have about your campaigns on social media? Reach out and see how we can help you fulfill those objectives.