social media strategy

5 Data-Driven Social Media Marketing Strategies For Marketing Managers

Looking to fine-tune your social media strategy? Good news! This is the perfect time. The marketing team is constantly seeking innovative strategies and tactics to capture the audience’s attention, engage consumers, and drive growth. In a landscape of increasing competition, having a succinct social media strategy and the ability to say “no” to efforts that don’t yield results will help maximize social impact.

Today, social media strategy is more than just boosting your posts. It’s about the techniques that the marketing managers of social media management companies implement to improve social sharing. However, as a social media manager, you might get overwhelmed by the abundance of information and strategies available online. That’s why we have shortlisted five strategies that will get your plan going to make a big impact on any social media platform. (Psst.. we have one bonus point too, just stay tuned till the end).

1. Enhance Data Accuracy and Integrity

In today’s time data drives most of our decisions in social media. Every day social media managers struggle with questions such as “Who is the most engaged age group who is sharing our content” ?, “What is currently trending, should our brand participate in this? “Are positive sentiments for the brand going up?

Making assumptions is bad news for marketers, which is why the correct understanding of data and trends results in better responses. This is why, you can follow some metrics to define data quality;

Accuracy: A well-fact-checked data is valuable; make sure it is free from errors or inaccuracies.
Completeness: Half-baked information has more negative impact than positive, a full range of data is required to make a decision.
Consistency: The data should be consistent and with different datasets.
Reliability: The data should be evaluated and must be relevant to the brand and issues aft hand.

When the media strategy is not built on these key metrics, it can have huge consequences. As IBM estimated, around $3.1 trillion per year marketers lose due to poor quality data.

With utilisation of the right tools for data tracking, measuring the analytics can help in improving your social media strategy. It can give you valuable insights into your audience’s behavior and preferences, and analyse their engagement, clicks, shares, and comments to understand what content your audience resonates with most. With A/B testing, and report auditing marketers can strengthen their social strategy.

2. Cross-Channel Marketing

When your users are not on one platform, then why should you be? Not convinced?

Well according to the Salesforce report, “a buyer is anything but linear”, customers are interacting with brands on different marketing channels, social, emails, web, and mobile, so brands should prioritise a connected marketing strategy in all of those areas to create an exceptional customer experience.

While analysing cross-channel marketing, it is important for marketers to understand it’s impact on different channels and adjust their strategies accordingly.

Pay close attention to key metrics for cross-channel marketing:

Content Performance on Different Platforms:

Evaluate how well your content is performing on various social media platforms such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. Remember that each platform has different KPIs, so understanding their individual performance is crucial.

Tailor No. of Posts per Channel:

Different platforms cater to diverse audience groups. For instance, Instagram users seek entertainment and may visit multiple times a day, while Twitter or LinkedIn users have specific hours of activity. Avoid spam content by adjusting the number of daily posts per platform accordingly.

Measure Post Engagement Rate:

Calculate the engagement rate by dividing the number of engagements by the total impressions or reach. A high engagement rate often indicates viral content. Understanding these metrics provides insights into the best posting times, preferred content types, and ideal posting frequency.

By focusing on these essential metrics, you can optimize your cross-channel marketing strategy. Gain valuable insights into audience behavior, content preferences, and posting frequencies to ensure impactful and successful content across all platforms.

While you may be repurposing the same content on different platforms, it will yield different results. You may create static textual content for Facebook, and it will bring good results, but it won’t work for Instagram. The solution is to make it in an explainer video or make it in infographics. In this case, you are repacking the content, where the intent and the main content stay the same while as per format the design and placement changes.

3. Increase Brand Awareness

If you are a social media manager, you might be dealing with specific goals and KPIs for brands. From creating a SMART framework to determining goals (brand awareness, leads & sales, engagement, and traffic) you must be knowing these are important strategies for gaining success in social media. However, a strong strategy for brand awareness is the most crucial step and helps in building the overall brand image.

This will help the targeting to an audience that is more brand-aware. Brand awareness is segmented into two forms;

Native social media posts;

Your brand post
Your brand mention on other’s posts

Paid social media;

Your brand ads
Influencer collab
Paid PR campaign

For this, you must ensure that the brand mentions are targeted towards building a positive brand image;

This can be ensured by:

Keep Track on Brand Mention: Go through all content about what is being said for your brand and how you are managing your social reputation. The utilisation of a brand monitoring toolkit always comes in handy, as social media marketing manager for any social media marketing company you can track and react to new mentions in real-time, compare brand analytics with competitors, and also generate leads. It can also help during brand promotion to keep track of positive and negative reactions.

Brand sentiments:

After you post content on any social media platform, it is important to check the brand sentiment. Check whether the mentions are— positive, negative, or neutral. Collect information on hashtags, and keywords to monitor online conversations.

4. Focus On Personalisation

Technology ushers the personalisation of brands. From mentioning the name of the consumer in the subject line or body for email marketing to personalised notifications for apps, every brand is focusing on personalised user-generated content. Today with AI, it is easier to know and predict people’s behavior, the sites, and communities they visit, likes, comment, and shares. Such a data-driven approach can help marketers to find valuable insights and identify their key target audience and understand the probability of their audience clicking and converting.

Adding social media tracking pixel, help marketers to track the visitors who are engaging, who are interested, and who are spending time, how they are spending time before either purchasing or leaving without purchasing.

Types of pixels;

Retargeting pixel- Targeting campaigns to people who have taken action to show interest in your brand.

Conversion pixel- These pixels are active once a purchase has been made, these are used by marketers to get clarity on the source of conversion to measure the success and failure of their marketing campaigns.

Up-selling Pixel- This allows marketers to offer potential customers newer and advanced version of products to buy.

Cross-selling- Offering products that they have already purchased from another platform, or taking action to show interest in another platform.

Although these pixels can help in more targeted ad campaigns, it is important to keep your eyes on the data. Pay close attention to Google Analytics, and other social media insight tools to find the reach, social media referral traffic, and conversion rate to improve personalisation and targeting of consumers.

5. Do A/B Testing For Content

As we have mentioned earlier, two similar posts won’t gain the same engagement, which is why as a marketing professional it is important to do A/B testing. It is not a new concept and has existed before for ads, but now marketers can experiment with two different content ideas for organic content too.

Facebook has launched organic content testing, and post-testing in Meta Business Suite. In this, you can create 2-3 drafts, and navigate to create Content Tests within the post section. Select primary metrics, and indicate you would like to end the post automatically. Once it ends you will get results, so you can manually select which post should be distributed to the targeting audience. Right now, each page can create only 5 content tests, however, it will be rolling out with scale gradually.

Bonus Point: Don’t detest trends, rather piggyback on them!

If you are a marketing manager for a business, you must not detest all the trends coming and going, instead of detesting it’s time to piggyback on them.

For example, the release of the Barbie movie has created multiple trends, “Barbie selfie generator”, “Hi Barbie”, and many more. And brands to not feel left behind piggybacked on moment marketing. From video content to memes, there were no brands that didn’t integrate into their marketing strategy.

We did too…

https://www.instagram.com/p/Cu_flOgAX9Q/?hl=en

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A post shared by Promotedge (@promotedge)

Influencers often lead the way in trend spotting, which is why following key personalities in your sector is important to keep yourself up to date. When you are following a trend, make sure you are sincere about the values of the brand and choose the trends that align with the brand image. Always remember, consumers will sense insincerity or fake if it looks forced, they would be turned off by it.

Strengthen Your Social Media Marketing with PromotEdge

As social media marketing, you need to experiment with data, create KPIs, and understand the psyche of the audience you are targeting. With the pointers mentioned, you can see your sales