If you want to grow your business, you need to leverage social media as a marketing strategy. According to many social media statistics, over 80% of consumers said that social media plays a significant role in their purchase decisions. These consumers tend to place an order after watching influencer content.

Social media increasingly impacts business growth which drives many business owners across industries to unearth the evolution of social media. It turns out to be a comprehensive and multipronged source for enhancing marketing performance and reaching and growing your audience. 

More than 4.48 billion are active on social media (this figure is expected to double during the next two years), making it a supreme channel for increasingly important prospects.

What does this mean for you?

Social media is not a stand-alone marketing tool. It evolves a whole intelligence process to create your own influence. It stops being only a social network. It’s part of your online presence offering an unmissable virtual space to digitally advertise your products, communicate with your customers, build your community, and promote your products. 

Social Media as a Marketing Strategy

You might see taking advantage of social media as a marketing strategy can be accessible to all business owners. They just implement templates with intuitive designs and press POST. Followers will make their way to your account, click on your websites, and request a quote or buy your product.  

Unfortunately, it doesn’t work like that. You need to have a different yet unique strategy to start levelling up your brand. In this article, we will go through 10 proven techniques to do so and make your social media marketing a way to enhance your marketing activities. 

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Social Media as a Marketing Strategy: What Does This Mean?

Before diving into the most effective social media practices for your business, we need to identify what we mean by using social media as a marketing strategy. 

Social media as a marketing strategy means using every feature to strengthen your company’s image and brand. These social networks can help businesses increase sales and generate traffic to their websites. It’s a way how to implement digital marketing or e-marketing to share information about your business and let your audience get engaged with what you offer.  

Need to learn how to do that for your business success? Keep reading!

10 Proven Strategies to Harness Social Media Power

The first post sent by Mark Zuckerberg in 2004 marked the beginning of a unique communication era. This step has changed the future of technology forever, emerging the concept of “social networks”!

It’s no secret that social media has gained more effectiveness over time. In other words, it represents a force to be reckoned with, especially for small businesses.

Basically, too many businesses just create their accounts on social media on an ad hoc step, but does it work?

I doubt!

That’s why there is an entirely new industry called social media marketing which has changed over the years. 

We round up the most important practices for using social media as a marketing strategy and start blowing away your competition. 

1. Be Savy When Setting Your Social Media Objectives 

Be as cautious while describing your social media objectives as you would be when creating a password.

What does this mean?

Use common sense that will resonate with the unique needs of your business. Something you need to remember all the time, or you’d lose access.

Does this matter?

Of course, it does!

One of the common problems faced by business owners engaged in social marketing is that they often overlook this step. They never allocate time to set relevant goals. Instead, they take it for granted.

Please open a business account on social media. 

Then what?

Post a bunch of photos, and if we can create videos, it’d be great too!

Then what?

Nothing.

It doesn’t work like that… You’re posting on social media without having an idea of why you are doing so. Naturally, your social media marketing plan should match your overall business strategy. However, social media has its unique approach to building a successful appearance there.

Ideally, you need to set strategic goals for how you establish a brand identity for your business to progress. To use social media as a marketing strategy, you need to align your company goals with your social media goals to execute your business vision.

One of the proven strategies to overshine your competitors on social media is to apply the SMART theory to your social objectives. 

Specific (S)

Make sure your goals are defined perfectly and will help you generate a tangible outcome. Without focusing on only specifics, your goal will end up being vague to achieve, and your whole strategy will run the risk of being useless. This specific mindset will help you clear your mind of clutter and only focus on what you want to achieve. 

Why is this important?

You’d be able to uncover resources to leverage your business

Example: Grow my followers by 20%.

Measurable (M)

“I want to be successful on social media!

No way this will happen without having a clear definition of this success. In other words, you need to have tools to measure this success. That will help you evaluate your progress and put a clear picture of the achievement you should pursue. 

How to do so?

Answer the question of how many followers or how many sales, engagements, or leads you need to gain. That highlights how you’d know you’ve achieved your goals. 

Example: I have 1k followers now, and I want to grow followers by 20%.

Attainable (A)

Should my goal be super easy to achieve or challenging to make it happen?

Not at all!

Your goal should be reasonable. It’s okay to challenge yourself but keep it attainable. Reflecting on this foundation, you will be able to pay attention to any potential obstacles that you might need to handle to achieve your marketing objectives. That means you will be able to outline the steps you should take right now that qualify you for the big dream.  

Example: I have 1k followers now and want to grow followers by 20%. (It’s reasonable based on your resources and current situation)

Relevant (R)

This one is about explaining what you can do and what your business boundaries are. In other words, you need to be real with yourself and define your resources. You need to focus only on what is worthwhile to your brand and highlight what is aligned with your values.

Why?

That will help you define your priorities and answer whys!

Example: I have 1k followers now, and I want to grow followers by 20% (again, this is a relevant goal because it comes with your social media main objective, which is to build a community and increase brand awareness).

Time-Bound (T)

You have done great work till now, but the most important part is still missing— to determine the timeframe for this mission. Every goal needs to be limited to a target date. 

Why?

Setting a schedule will help your team be stuck to your plan and enhance their productivity. It also keeps you motivated, focused, and more disciplined to achieve your social media objectives. However, the challenge here is to set a realistic timeframe. You don’t want to bite off more than you can chew and end up feeling frustrated, demotivated or burned out when your goals seem too far away.

2. Use AI-Powered Tools: ChatBots

Handling all DMs and comments can consume your time and energy. Thankfully, many technologies are out there to help you answer them all without losing any leads. The secret entails optimising chatbots.

In general, the message the chatbot creates is nothing special, a series of FAQs and standard responses to common queries, but its significance is profound. It can sort out the messages and save years you would spend responding to questions like “how much” or “how does it work?!” It’s one of the advanced social media management tools to resolve your followers’ problems that don’t require human interruption.  

Also, a number of chatbots can now be integrated into your social accounts to make it super easy for you to handle your customers’ requests. These tools can even take your customers’ orders from Meta accounts and offer an all-in-one payment platform. 

Imagine you have a tool that turns numbers and letters into something tangible that works for you: answer questions, record data, receive orders, and accept payment. Brilliant, right? 

Not just that, but there is a considerable number of tools that can read signals in comments and communicate directly to your followers. For example, if you have a 20% offer and you want to make all your audience know about it without having to communicate with everyone directly, just syndicate your account with a tool (such as ConvertKit) to send the offer to your customers’ DMs after leaving a keyword you determined before. 

This is the kind of social media strategy you need to build right now!

3. Think of Educational Content

Let’s have a look at your account; if it seems more like a promotional channel for your products or services than displaying a valuable message, then you need to reconsider social media as a marketing strategy

Regardless of what your marketing goals are, investing in educational content is always a KILLING way to take. It’s a smart move to grow organically. If you provide your audience with valuable knowledge within your industry, strengthened by practical advice, people will trust you, buy from you, and become loyal customers of your brand.

Your brand can stand out, and even people you don’t consider potential customers will look to you as an authority.

Either offer your educational content within your social media platforms or direct them to your website or any other resources such as ebooks, courses, or webinars.   

4. Focus on Personalising Your Messages

To make your audience engaged with your content, you need to shift your social media strategy to bring a personalised experience to everyone who checks your accounts.

To use social media as a marketing strategy and make it work for you, you need to humanise your brand identity. People love to interact with people. They need to feel that there are people behind this screen. Occasionally, introduce your team to your audience. Create content that reflects your company culture and social events.

While chatbots are excellent for automating some routine tasks, be cautious not to make your message robotic. To do this, stop directing your customers to landing pages. Instead, take them to a chat window where the chatbot can answer their questions. The thing is to keep it more engaging and personalised as much as possible.  

5. Start with a SUPER Content Strategy 

Within 18 years, social media has taken the world by storm. It started in 2004 when we heard about a new website where we can communicate with anybody in the world, MySpace. You can tell it’s the first social media platform that attracted more than a million users. 

When we analyse the social media scene right now, there’s obvious dramatic growth in each social network. The interactive nature of digital channels of social media takes these communication platforms to levels that might override the reach of traditional media. 

The king now is quality content. If you want to challenge your competitors and reach your audience without barriers, think of authentic, unique, relevant, and helpful content. Content marketing is crucial, gaining prominent momentum. It has become one of the most effective forms of marketing.

So if you’re thinking of using social media as a marketing strategy, spend time creating an excellent content marketing strategy. Forget about the proper posting schedule. Instead, make quality your first priority. It doesn’t matter if you have a correct frequency of posts when no one engages with it because it’s not good enough.

High-quality content is the foundation of your website, but it’s not enough. You also need to master SEO and social media strategies to skyrocket your traffic. 

With so many different advertising approaches, you still need to build a strategy to boost your organic reach. Content that sends the proper single to social media algorithms coupled with the right keywords and amazing quality can help you attract the right consumers at the right time. 

What will you get?

FREE growth marketing strategy! Make use of this opportunity to market your products or services!

Pro tip: Be sure to include the right hashtags, especially on platforms such as TikTok and Twitter, along with optimised content. Keep yourself updated with the recent features to find a way how to make it work for you.

6. Focus on Storytelling

Whether you own a small business or run a large corporation, you can not survive without using social media supported by a successful digital marketing strategy

One of the most efficient social media strategies is to invest in creating more storytelling-based posts. Content is the best and most cost-effectively form of marketing today, but you need to use it in the right way. 

As we previously agreed, you should take the educational approach; you need to focus on non-pushy content. If you can integrate educational content with storytelling, then you will double the efficiency of your social media strategy, no matter how big or small your business is.

You just need to bring relatable characters, scenarios and situations that evoke certain emotional responses. Why? Because we often get influenced by feeling-based decisions and stories. You need to trigger emotions to push the audience to do the right job or the desired action for your business without practising any constant self-promotion. 

For example: let’s say you have a skincare cream; how would you promote it through storytelling without making any direct advertising? You might use an influencer who has a big audience base, including your target. She will show off your cream and glide it over her skin while talking about her workday routine. 

Using social media as a marketing strategy needs creativity to win over your audience’s trust without breaking the bank on ads.

7. Define Relevant Growth Metrics

Optimising social media as a marketing strategy is not the only way to grow your audience online. Yet, it’s possible if you don’t take it for granted. In other words, use it wisely. That means you need to show genuine care for your audience, considering your overall business goals and implementing content that applies to current social media trends.  

But here is the thing: all business owners know they should create social media strategies but don’t realise what it should look like or what actions they should take.  

They even invest heavily in their social presence, hire talents to create posts and spend time finding a way to distribute their resources on their social pages. 

They keep doing it without measuring the success or how their campaigns perform. 

Using up social media as a marketing strategy shouldn’t be painful. 

You just need to be updated with algorithm updates because what worked a year ago maybe no longer work.  

I got you. You said you’d rely on social analytics and insights to build your social appearance. But unfortunately, it sometimes turns out to be a grey area! It’s not as accurate as you think.

Of course, it gives you a direction to segment your audience, but what works for your unique business might not align with others. 

That’s why you should build your strategy upon the most relevant metrics that match the goals you have defined yourself.  

And don’t fall into the trap of vanity metrics!

It’s easy to measure your success based on the number of followers, but also use a metric like knowing how far your content is being shared across channels if you are aiming to increase your brand awareness.

What if you need more sales?

Then set the conversion rate, clicks, and traffic generated by social media as your metrics. Only focus on the metrics that will really bring value to your business. 

Always keep your eye on the objectives and highlight the metrics that will give you the answer as to whether you’re going on the right track to fulfil that goal. 

Pro tip: before setting up any campaign, make sure to have the right tool to track traffic driven to your landing page by this campaign. 

The general rule is to give everything it takes to increase the engagement of your posts to make sure that your current strategy resounds with them.

8. Establish a Community 

The number of your social media followers is essential and influential. Still, it’s not the only output you need from social media, especially if you have a business and need leads more than anything else.

To guarantee a be-all and end-all success without relying on paid social advertising, shift your focus to building a community. Again, it will be reflected in how much social media engagement you deliver.

To do so, you need to build your brand personality through emotions with a funny and human touch. That’s how you can reach your audience and make them relate to your business. 

Keep in mind: social media is about being social with our audience. The last thing is to keep posting the same type of content repeatedly, especially if it’s a promotional copy. After a while, no one will care! Eventually, everyone will lose interest in your brand. Not to mention your competitors are already ready to steal your audience’s attention. So, one of the proven approaches to social success is always to take the interactive route.

Here is how to do it:

  • Share stories to ask questions about your brand and products 
  • Capture shots behind the scenes 
  • Share polls about different topics 
  • Gather information about your audience and build a content strategy about it.
  • Share tips within your industry
  • Post testimonials and your customers’ reviews

Expert advice: use all digital marketing channels to boost your social appearance. You might need to send emails to your current customers asking them to leave a review about their recent orders to increase your brand credibility. People like to hear from each other!

9. Define What Kind of Audience You Want on Social Media 

One of the mistakes you should avoid (unfortunately, almost all business owners make this mistake) is to consider all followers are really interested in your brand and will buy from you. This is not how it works, and here is the ugly truth: not all of them are good enough for you. Even social media experts have deemphasized the importance of the number of followers.

There is a fine line between having someone as a follower and turning them into a customer. You might share really cool content that keeps your audience engaged, but when it comes to taking action, nobody shows up.

That’s where the 80/20 rule comes in. And it rings true with your social media engagement as well. It tells you that 80% of positive outcomes (sales in your case) come from 20% of causes (consider them as followers).

Also, it is totally normal if you apply the marketing funnel process. At every stage, you will lose some people, starting from awareness to consideration and then decision-making. 

Of course, the more followers your accounts have, the more professional your brand sounds. But remember, you come here to build a relationship with people who have the purchasing power to make a decision, regardless of when they would take action.

For example: if you have a store to sell trendy amazing technology devices, you might attract a teenager who still lives with his parents and can’t afford it. This segment can still engage with your content, but they might never buy something from you (unless they ask someone to buy it for them).

10. Don’t Get Stuck With Only One Content Type

Here is what most businesses do: hire a content creator and a designer, then ask them to create a social calendar.

It’s easy to post some pictures on Instagram and Facebook and schedule tweets on Twitter, but it will lead you nowhere.

Almost all social media platforms offer a bunch of features to create different types of content, including carousel posts, single photos, and short and long videos.

So, why limit yourself to only one type? That will leave your audience bored. The best approach is to keep posting and monitor your audience’s reaction and break up the seller-buyer stoic relationship from time to time by creating funny content and taking advantage of trends.

Also, remember that if you target different segments with different types of product lines, their responses will differ based on their demographics and psychographics. 

Pro tip: never think of buying followers or using any fake followers generators. Not only will your engagement numbers hurt, but the platform will also penalise you eventually by restricting your reach or maybe closing your account permanently.   

Small Business Marketing from ProfileTree Digital Agency

How Can Profiletree Help You?

The key ingredient for EXCELLENT digital marketing is to invest in a strategy. If you overlook it, you will definitely lose your direction. You will never have an idea about what you achieve and what you should strive to achieve. 

That’s how Profiletree, a data-driven digital marketing agency, helps you. It’s not just about fine-tuning social media strategy but about making all your resources work for you without bleeding your budget dry. 

Looking for a proven approach to reach your audience, skyrocket your sales, and beat your competitors? Let’s keep in touch! 

2 commments on “Social Media as a Marketing Strategy: 10 Proven Practical Tactics in 2023 to Use Right Now

  1. wow , i really imprassive and i like your post.
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