3 Simple and Effective Ways to Boost Your Social Media Strategy

By Molly Spelts:

It’s easy to get caught up in the same social marketing routine. Why? It’s convenient, it’s worked in the past and you know exactly what to do. Some of you might have been trained that way or simply built your own social media strategy and it’s what you’ve stuck with ever since the whole social media marketing trend started.

So why would you want to change it? Easy. You’re not going to see the results you want as time goes on. Technology is improving and social platforms are innovating and evolving. Your competitors are going to be miles in front of you if you stick with the same out-of-date strategy. I’m not saying throw out everything you’ve learned but I am going to teach you how you can enhance it to upgrade your overall brand, reach and metrics to see the results you want.

Learn from our very own social media maestro, @Molly_RBM! You’ll be able to redefine your #SocialMediaStrategy using these 3 simple and effective solutions today: Click To Tweet

These 3 simple and effective ways will have your social media strategy looking shiny and new all over again. Take a look:

Get Goal-Oriented

Whether you’re a team of 1 or a team of 10, goals are necessary. Goals help outline short term and long term expectations for you to compare and contrast your results. Plus, it’s a great motivator. Goals don’t have to be extreme but they should be obtainable and reflect your company or clients overarching goals. Here are a few great places to help you kickoff setting your goals:

Company’s goals: Evaluate the needs and desires of the company or the client as a whole.

• Are you a startup just hitting the ground running? Brand awareness is most likely where you’ll want to start. Getting your name and product in front of users should be goal number one. After that, you can start reaching out for leads and bringing in a customer base. Remember, no one is going to buy or be interested in a company if they don’t know them, which is why brand awareness is crucial.
• Are you a company with incredible brand awareness? Lead Generation is likely your focus now. Capturing users and converting them into leads for your sales team is what your team should focus on. This can be a short and long term goal depending on how long it takes for your team to push leads through the sales funnel.
• Last but not least, your company is killing it at brand awareness, you have great leads coming in but now what? This is where your social team can focus on building and maintaining personal engagement through social. This helps create that human one-on-one interactions with users, aka consumers. Doing this enables your company to round out their overall customer and consumer experience to make a lasting impression.

Team/Client Goals: Working internally with your team to help strategize and implement personal, team and overall social strategy.

Team of 1

For those on the smaller spectrum of social support, goals can seem overwhelming due to the fact that you’re one person managing ALL things social. A way to help you continue your work and still set goals is to set aside one day to meet with your clients or managers and ask them what they want to see from you. This is also something you should ask yourself. It can be weekly, bi-weekly or monthly, to ensure your goals are staying on track or if things need to be altered.

Take time to look back and review your numbers and tasks to see what thrived and what didn’t. Doing this can actually help you free up time (I know, crazy but stick with me), you’ll find that some process can be automated, improved or eliminated depending on their past results.

Team of 5+

If this sounds like your team, great! While you’re not managing social alone, your support team still needs to regroup every once in a while to help set those goals in place and make sure they are aligning with your clients/company needs.

Divide and conquer is the best way to get this done, your team should know your strategies like the back of their hand, as well as their clients but things can get missed, not communicated well or simply never brought up. This is where we get stuck in ruts. Goals will help move things along and be able to show results that your company or clients are looking for. Task out to each team member what strategies they’ve used and have seen a good outcome from. By documenting and tracking this it will be easier to find the gaps and issue areas in your social foundation. It’s important to push brainstorming powwows as well, this is where the best collaboration can happen.

Marketing Automation: Friend and Foe

Social media automation can be a lifeline but it can also be your biggest nightmare. This is not something you should rely solely upon but don’t swear it off just yet. If done right, and maintained in a tasteful manner, marketing automation can expand your audience reach and help hit your target market better. Remembering that not EVERY single task you have is to be automated. Keeping a level of human “touch” is the key to staying relatable to users. So what are some useful tools that have given me and my team time back in our day and helped improve our numbers? Here are a couple of my fav’s:

Missinglter: Does your team push a lot of blogs and great content but you only post it once and it’s forgotten? Missinglter will pull ALL those blogs and create campaigns for you, including crafting up recommended social posts and hashtags for a whole YEAR. It’s plug and chug at this point and all you have to do is review and approve the content. Once you do that, it’s set for the year. Pushing your content out on your social channels on pre-set time slots that you’ve chosen to best suit your client or company posting times.

HubSpot: Hello, beautiful user-friendly marketing automation! HubSpot is a great tool not only for social but for your whole marketing team. Offering anywhere from Landing page building to email creation and workflow automation.

As for social, this tool offers a chrome extension for you to pull up on any page to craft a social post and schedule it out. It also offers a draft mode for those of you who want to come back to your work without having to save it somewhere else. Need to schedule posts months in advance? HubSpot is going to be your BEST FRIEND. There are so many more features to this great platform and as a social media pro, I give it a 12/10.

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Investing Time and Money

This is honestly one of my favorite things about social media marketing but also the most nerve-racking. Paid social media ads can be extremely valuable and influential to a great marketing plan. I get so many questions about ads and the best way to get the biggest bang for your buck. Truthfully, ads are changing ALL the time and social platforms are evolving their algorithms more and more each year. Paid social prices fluctuate more than the stock market, so it’s important to understand your client’s needs, their target market, their objectives and what the end goal is. So, what can ads do to benefit your company or client? Here are just a few of the key assets that ads can do:

Improved Brand Exposure: Costs are relatively low, easy to put together and helps boost your social presence. This is a great place to start if you are new to ads and just want to get your feet wet.

My suggested objectives for this include Facebook “boosted” posts and Twitter “promote” mode. Both are relatively low priced and your team can use organic posts instead of creating a new ad copy and working within an ads manager. The return on these can be increased followers, improved site traffic and brand exposure.

Higher Site Visits: Are you promoting amazing content or have some killer landing pages? You should consider sponsored content. Within sponsored content ads, different platforms offer an array of options. These can be priced somewhere in the middle, some more expensive than others but it’s a great place to push your content out to your target market and increase your site traffic.

My suggested objectives for these include LinkedIn Dynamic, Facebook Traffic, and Twitter website clicks or conversions. All of these are useful for those of you who are comfortable to step into the ads world and push your social traffic back to your site. These ads are easy to create and can help improve your conversions if done right.

Increased Leads: Lead Gen Ads are one of the most expensive ads you can purchase, however, the return can be extremely valuable. These involve building out a form to attach to the ad you create and is a great way to keep the user on their platform they are using and still be able to get the info you need from them.

My suggested objectives for these include Facebook Lead Gen and LinkedIn Lead Gen. You are able to build these out a number of different ways to offer a valuable resource to users and get the insight your team needs. It’s a win/win for both, depending on which platform your company thrives on will help you determine which one you would see a bigger return on.

Now, these are just a few of the ad and objective options out there. My team uses multiple platforms, objective options and ad sets to help our clients achieve their goals. Do your research, test the waters and see how it goes. Ads can be very beneficial to your company or client goals. So, put in a little time and money (it doesn’t have to be a lot) and explore social paid ads!

Whether you’re a big team or small, these 3 simple and effective ways can help boost your current or new strategy. Just starting out? Use these as building blocks to lay out the perfect strategy foundation. Already have a strategy in place but it needs a little something? Use these to branch out and revamp your marketing efforts. Want to learn more about marketing? Check out our full blog!