Things happen at the speed of light in the social media world.
One minute you’re sending 140-character tweets off into the Twitterverse and the next you’re typing out essays on X. You jump to sign up to Threads, but the platform seems to fade into obscurity even faster than NSFW images disappear on Snapchat.
This constant and quick evolution means that it’s extremely important to keep abreast of developments, trends and best practices in this realm if you want to create successful social media marketing campaigns.
The social media marketing landscape
The most important decision you’ll make in social media marketing is choosing the channel. The platform you use for your promotion will affect the strategies that you use to capture the attention of your target audience.
A misalignment between platform and promotion will likely lead to an inefficient allocation of resources. Which means that you’ll end up paying a lot for a campaign that won’t be seen by people who are interested in your products or services.
So, the question is: What media formats are popular on each of the most popular platforms and who uses these channels?
- Facebook: The most versatile platform, offering text-, image- and video-based posts. It appeals to a wide age range, but is most popular with people over 25.
- Instagram: Initially an image-only platform, short-form videos are now becoming increasingly important on Instagram. More than 60% of Instagram users are under 35.
- X: When it was still called Twitter, X was a text-based social media platform popular with the over 25s. We’ll have to wait and see if this remains the case after proposed changes to the platform are implemented.
- YouTube: This video-centric platform attracts diverse demographics of users seeking both entertainment and education. More than half of YouTube users are 44 or younger.
- LinkedIn: A professional networking platform that offers great B2B marketing opportunities, 60% of LinkedIn users are aged between 25 and 34.
- Pinterest: The vast majority of Pinterest users (76.2%) are women, 57.5% of whom are below the age of 34. They use this image-driven platform to plan new projects.
- Snapchat: Snapchat’s disappearing content makes it popular with younger users – 20.3% are under 18 and 38.9% fall into the 18 to 24 range.
- TikTok: Short-form videos are the name of the game on TikTok. Users are spread relatively evenly across the age ranges from 10 to 49, while gender skews slightly (57%) female.
Most businesses tend to stick with the Big 5 (Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn). However, using a targeted strategy to meet your audience where it is will help to drive greater success with your social media marketing efforts.
The elements of effective social media campaigns
Crafting impactful social media campaigns requires a strategic blend of key elements. Let’s take a look at the various factors that can drive greater reach and impact.
1. Defining campaign objectives
To understand whether a marketing campaign has been successful, you need to define what you want it to achieve and set reasonable goals. And social media marketing campaigns are no different.
You may want your promotion to drive brand awareness, generate leads, increase engagement, build brand image or get potential customers to convert.
Whatever your objective, it’s important to ensure that you set specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound (SMART) goals.
2. Understanding your audience
Getting to know your audience inside out is essential for ensuring that your social media marketing campaign hits all the write notes – and plays on the right platforms.
If you don’t already have a good idea of who your potential customers are, you’ll want to conduct some thorough research to understand their preferences, behaviours and pain points.
A great first step here is to use tools like the built-in social media analytics features to gain deeper insights about the users who already interact with your brand.
3. Creating captivating content
Now that you know who your audience is and what you want your campaign to do, it’s time to start crafting content that resonates with potential customers.
Create a variety of types of content, from single images and image carousels to videos, infographics and text-based posts. Plus, be sure to tell a story in each post and across your campaign. This will help spark emotion for campaign viewers, which can drive engagement.
4. Keep things consistent
Ensuring your brand has a consistent visual identity, tone and voice across all social media platforms is vital for creating a cohesive experience for your audience. This will make your brand recognisable regardless of platform and help your messaging to stick in potential buyers’ minds.
When your content makes a lasting impression, it can help to increase your target audience’s affinity for your brand and potentially drive loyalty.
5. Leveraging the power of hashtags
Hashtags play a pivotal role in categorising and enhancing the discoverability of social media content.
By adding relevant hashtags to your posts, you can connect your content to broader conversations, topics and communities. This will help you to expand the reach of your posts beyond your followers and make your content easier to find for users interested in those hashtags.
It’s best to opt for hashtags that are directly related to your posts’ content. You can also explore industry hashtags to find what’s already working for other brands.
Keeping up with social media marketing trends
Navigating the ever-evolving landscape of social media marketing demands staying ahead of emerging trends. Let’s take a look at the five biggest trends in the social media marketing space today.
1. Community is key
Creating content is definitely an important part of social media marketing, but it’s far from the only thing that matters. Brands that want to turn members of their target audience into loyal customers must start by building a strong community.
To get started with building a strong community, you’ll need to engage with your audience by interacting with their comments on your posts, liking and commenting on their posts, sharing their content and promptly addressing any negative feedback they might have about your brand.
2. Short-form video is buzzing
According to explainer video business Wyzowl, 89% of social media users say they’ve been convinced to buy a product or service by a brand’s video. What’s more, 90% of consumers use their mobile devices to watch video content.
It’s also good to know that consumers are more likely to watch an entire video if it’s in vertical format. Plus, you should keep your clips below a minute in length on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok and Pinterest. YouTube videos can be longer, five to 15 minutes, with exception of YouTube Shorts which also need to be below a minute.
3. Pay attention to social SEO
The way the new generation of consumers finds goods and services is changing. When Gen Z searches for places, products or services, they don’t use Google. Many go to TikTok or Instagram.
This means it’s incredibly important to optimise your social media marketing strategy by incorporating SEO into it.
Performing keyword research will help you to figure out which topics to cover and media formats to use. Plus, using keywords in your post captions will ensure they’re more easily searchable by users.
4. Don’t forget social commerce
Hubspot’s 2023 Global Social Media Trends Report indicates that one in five Gen Z, Millennial and Gen X social media users had purchased a product directly from social media within three months of being surveyed. What’s more, 47% of social media marketers have reported an uptick in social shopping.
For those looking to start selling on social platforms, Instagram is likely your best bet. It’s the channel consumers say offers the best shopping experience, plus marketers believe it has the best marketing tools.
5. Small is superior for influencers
Around one-third of social media users prefer having products marketed to them via influencers.
While a high follower count was the main concern for social media marketers in the early days of influencer marketing, brand alignment and quality content are now far more important.
In addition to more targeted messaging, working with micro influencers provides access to highly engaged audiences at a lower cost than accounts that have large followings.
Measuring and optimising campaign performance
Using analytics tools to gain insights and refine your approach will help you to increase the efficacy of your campaigns. There are a couple of tried-and-true methods for improving your social media marketing efforts:
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- Identify key metrics: Look at the goals you’ve established for your campaign, draw up key performance indicators and identify the associated metrics (e.g. reach, clicks and conversions) you need to track.
- Iterate and improve: Make use of A/B testing to discover what works and what doesn’t. Once you’ve gathered enough data from various posts, start optimising your content, post timing and overall strategy to guide ongoing enhancements.
- Track and analyse: Get a view of how successful your promotion is by analysing your key metrics and measuring them against your goal. Don’t forget to run an ROI (return on investment) analysis to understand how cost effective your campaign was.
Check out: Unlocking the Power of Data-Driven Personalisation for Customer Experiences
Trending: Social media continues to change the marketing game
As social media continues to change the marketing landscape, successful campaigns must be consistently branded and tailored to your target audience. You’ll also need to have clear goals and defined KPIs against which you can measure your campaign’s performance.
The most important factor, however, is the ability to embrace evolving trends. Adapting to and experimenting with these powerful tools, can help you to foster connections with new customers and drive brand growth.
We’re keeping up with the social media trends so you don’t have to. Get in touch with our team, and let’s explore how we can help make the most of your social media marketing.