Three Social Media Marketing Strategies That Pay Off Today

 

When platforms like MySpace, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter emerged in the early 2000s, they were only adopted by a handful of people, often those in-the-know in the tech world and college students. People tended to congregate with people they already knew in real life and nobody really knew how they’d be leveraged in the long run. That made it “easy” on their developers because few people were using the sites. It was an experiment of sorts—just watching the unique ways in which people leveraged the technology and testing out different things to see if they took flight or flopped.

 This was a golden age for marketers too. At that stage, if you ran a business page and made a post, literally everyone who followed you saw that post. It was guaranteed exposure. Today? Not so much.

 See, as people flocked to social sites, the platforms had to find ways to stop their users from being buried under a deluge of content. Like Google, which created algorithms to weigh sites to decide which ones to serve up to searchers, social platforms had to develop algorithms to decide which content to show to whom and when.

 Not surprisingly, businesses began struggling. Their messages were no longer seen. They could devote hours and hours to managing their social media profiles but never see any payoff. Unfortunately, many erroneously came to believe that there was no benefit to social media marketing because of this. There still is. Actually, you can get great returns from social media marketing, but you have to keep the algorithm in mind and tailor your approach to the results you want to achieve and the budget you have to work with.

 This in mind, we’re going to break down three strategies that genuinely deliver ROI based upon your budget.

 

Tier One: Low Budget

 

If you have a low budget (or no budget at all) there’s still value in having a social media presence. People will visit your social media profiles to get an idea of how your business operates and to ensure you’re a trustworthy entity before doing business with you. Plus, some people will still follow you, so it’s important to have a social media presence no matter what industry you’re in or what kind of budget you have. Many people believe that active social media profiles can influence your Google rankings too, but the search engine giant hasn’t confirmed this yet.

Go on Autopilot

Create social media profiles on the major platforms and make sure each is filled with accurate information about your business. Then, use the built-in tools to automatically publish content on a regular basis or pay for a service that will do this for you.

 

Tier Two: Mid-Range Budget

 

Social media marketing should be a layered approach. In other words, no matter what your budget is, you should have a presence and be posting. However, if you have money to spend on top of the basic maintenance of your profiles, you can begin to leverage paid reach strategies.

Run Targeted Ads

Targeted ads are awesome because you can set your budget, choose your message, and decide who sees your ads. That way, you can opt to show them only to the group who is most likely to take action. There are two keys to success here. First, you have to make them an offer they can’t refuse. Invest in quality copy and create a sale or deal that’s too tempting to pass up. Secondly, you should perform A/B testing. That means you should create a few different offers and ads and present them to different audiences, so you can see who responds to what.

 This brings us to another point. Nailing both these keys is difficult. If you’re only spending a few bucks per month, you don’t have a lot on the line and it’s not a huge deal if an ad isn’t successful. If you’re spending hundreds of dollars per month and aren’t nailing those areas, that’s a bit harder for businesses to swallow. In that case, you’ll get better ROI if you pay a professional to manage your ads.

 

Tier Three: Bigger Budgets

 

Reaching your audience organically is insanely challenging on a small budget, which is why most don’t see the returns they need to make it a worthy venture. You have to be able to satisfy the algorithm, which means creating content people genuinely love and share.

Leverage Video Content, Select Audiences, and Influencers

Countless studies have explored what people look at most and share. Written content can be great, but photos top it and videos top photos. This in mind, you really want to leverage visual media as much as possible to demonstrate to the algorithms that you’re providing people with what they want to see.

 The other catch—you need higher engagement rates to get your content shown to more people. There are two ways to do this. First, segment your audience. Don’t try to create content that appeals to the masses. Create content that will create strong engagement within a select group. As an alternative, you can work with a social media influencer. The ideal influencer will be someone who already has a high engagement rate and also has the same audience you do.  

 

Want Better Results from Social Media Marketing?

So many businesses become burned out on social media because they try all the strategies and don’t get the returns they need from them. If this is you, don’t lose heart. At JJ Social Light, social media marketing is in our DNA. We work with businesses of all types and create custom strategies built on their goals and budgets. Contact us for a free consultation.