The saying “high tide raises all ships” has never been truer. Social media success comes when you amplify your message across all your tactics and channels. So, unless you’re severely limited by budget, social media should NOT be the only focus of your marketing plan.
To that end, you must coordinate your social media marketing efforts with everything your company is doing to communicate the promises, products, and solutions offered by your brand. And despite what you’ve heard about its demise – this can definitely include influencer marketing.
Go Omnichannel
We recommend creating a comprehensive marketing strategy that combines all your digital methods – SEO, PPC, email, display, etc. – with traditional marketing. This omnichannel approach improves the chances of success for all your channels across the board.
If you plan to grow using only organic social methods, that’s okay. Just understand, unless you’ve discovered a silver bullet product or service, your growth is going to be limited and slow. While we have seen companies find success with such methods, you have to be patient, and you have to be very creative.
Use Social Media to Engage in Influencer Marketing
Tap into new audiences by working with influencers. Influencer marketing can be one of the most powerful channels to get your message out to an interested audience. Influencers have developed a level of trust with their audience, so when they promote or discuss you, they’re creating a valuable “social proof” campaign for your business.
To be clear – we’re talking about more than just tapping into new social audiences. Highly effective influencer marketing will also be omnichannel. You should look for influencers who employ efforts such as email programs, blogs, YouTube channels, and podcasts to expand their reach.
Finding the Right Influencer Can Make a Difference
How do you find influencers? Doing so manually can be tedious and time-consuming. Look into cost-effective platforms designed to match you to influencers, such as Grin, Carro, Upfluence, and SocialBakers just to name a few. You want to work with people whose audience shares the same attributes as yours. You want them to be complementary to your efforts.
Once you found the right person or people for your brand, conceptualize campaigns that benefit everyone – the brand, the influencer, and most importantly, the influencer’s audience. Give them something of value for free as an introduction to your brand. Even if you’re doing a giveaway, give something to everyone who participates.
You should always consider influencer marketing when developing your marketing budget. While they aren’t free, many influencers will work in trade. Even if they don’t, it’s an investment worth exploring if the audience is right.
How Can I Achieve Social Media Success Today?
Let’s end with the following summary of how your company can achieve growth with social media as an intrinsic part of your overall marketing efforts.
- Know your customer
- Know your audience
- Differentiate your messaging, offer, and content
- Build the relationship by putting in time and effort
- Provide value
- You don’t own the social media platforms, so drive meaningful conversations to your site
- Use data to build high-performing audiences
- Integrate your approach by using social to amplify your other channels and vice versa
Social media success isn’t a big, scary concept. In truth, it uses the same customer-centric ideas that classic marketing experts have used for decades. The difference is that too many people have convinced themselves – and their bosses – that it is magic and that it costs a lot of money.