Navigating the social media marketing (SMM) world isn’t as complicated as you might think. That is, if you know how, when, and what to say and do to generate the results you want out of your marketing campaigns.
However, despite the straightforwardness of implementing a successful marketing campaign, no one is immune to committing social media mistakes.
And that’s what we’re going to talk about.
To help you avoid committing the mistakes that can hinder the success of your marketing endeavors, allow me to share with you four menacing social media marketing mistakes that you should never make.
1. Not having a clear strategy.
Sadly, some business owners think that publishing posts daily is a good enough “strategy.”
If you’re a seasoned social media marketer, you’d know better than to call that a strategy.
An effective social marketing strategy entails more than just publishing a post daily.
You need to have a clear road map to take your marketing campaign from zero to the moment where you’re raking in truckloads of cash (or whatever goal it is you’ve set for your campaign).
The first step is to define your goals.
Ask yourself this: “What do I want to get out of my social media marketing campaign?”
Once you have the answer, it is easier to determine your marketing approach and strategies.
So you can run your marketing campaigns effectively, you need to have social media marketing tools in place — capable ones, at that.
SproutSocial is one such tool.
The platform is packed with features you can use to understand your market, demographics, social media platform engagements, etc.
By aligning your strategy with your goals and using the right tools to implement it, you are bound to see progress in your marketing results.
2. Failing to Engage With Your Followers
Although communication is not the only factor that makes a relationship successful, it is essential in sustaining it.
Engaging your followers by communicating with them across various relevant social media platforms is a vital aspect for your marketing campaign.
Remember that engaging your target audience are your main reasons for creating your social media profiles on certain platforms. Otherwise, what’s the point of being there?
Engage your followers by responding to their comments, tags, and mentions, even when if they’re saying something negative about your brand.
If your followers are posting questions about your products and you fail to reply, you just might lose the opportunity of closing a sale.
Engaging your followers also gives your social media campaigns a more personal touch.
While not all of your audience is THAT appreciative of brands taking the time to address their questions promptly, who knows, a big portion of your audience might.
If they see you taking the time to address their inquiries, they just might drop their guards towards you, therefore, increasing your chances of closing them as paying customers.
3. Neglecting to Track Your Numbers.
To figure out which aspects of your social media marketing campaign is working, you need to track your results.
Check your conversion rates, bounce rates, engagement rates, sales, add to carts, etc.
It’s when you track these pertinent details when you’ll have a guiding compass of which among your ads are working.
It tells you which among your content are stirring audience engagement, which ones are compelling them to sign up, and which ones are causing them to click your “Buy Now” buttons.
One method you can apply to help improve your conversions is to do split testing.
Split testing allows you to compare two different versions of your marketing campaign to check which one performs better.
Here are a few tips that can help you when split testing.
- Choose a basic but reliable split testing tool. There are several split testing tools online, however, you need not go for the most expensive, or those with the most features.
Just go for the platform that can give you the metrics that you need.
Google Optimize is a free online tool that’s easy to use. It provides a walkthrough of the whole split testing process.
- Select important pages for testing. Start split testing by choosing some of your best-performing pages and select one from each main category.
After testing, apply the recommendations to your pages in each corresponding category.
- Form your hypothesis, set up the test, and run your experiments. Split testing is more than just changing the color of your “Buy” or “Add to Cart” buttons.
It’s a systematic process that begins with your hypothesis, which will then be tested by controlling the variables.
It’s vital to clearly define your split testing process and the expected outcome for you to learn and document the results.
If the split testing results show that the experiment has helped increase your bottom line, then you can apply the changes in each category and start another test. If the test didn’t affect the conversions in any way, start a new one.
Ultimately, by split testing certain aspects of your social media campaigns, you can determine which ones are bringing you significant results, and which ones aren’t.
This, then, allows you to pull the trigger on the elements that aren’t yielding anything positive to your campaigns while doubling your budget on the parts that do work.
4. Promoting Your Brand by Bragging About It
Let’s face it, your business may be the best in your niche, but bragging about your success and how others can’t match it can annoy your followers.
There is a very fine line between bragging and simply promoting, but knowing the distinction can help you establish a more effective personal branding.
One way of ensuring that you write the right kind of content for personal branding instead of shameless bragging is by hiring a seasoned freelance writer for your social media marketing content.
The expertise that these seasoned writers have are often expansive, so much so that they often have the skills needed to turn your content consumers into paying customers.
However, just like in most things in life, there are effective writers and there are those that aren’t. That being said, you ought to be very careful when hiring freelance writers for your content needs.
Here are some points that you can look into before you hire a writer:
- Experience in the industry
- Proven track record of bringing in positive results on their previous campaigns.
- Knowledge in social media marketing
- Writing skills
- Efficiency and timeliness in delivering results
Whether you are relying on your own skills or outsourcing for your social marketing campaign, if you are describing your business to be “the most,” or “the best,” without backing them up with facts, then you run the risk of you annoying your audience.
A strong and effective personal branding entails a demonstration of your value through your actions and knowing your strengths and weaknesses and being honest about them to your customers.
If the focus of your social marketing strategy is just bragging about your brand, then you are setting yourself up to fail.
Are You Making And of These SMM Mistakes?
The first step to coming up with a solution is to recognize what you are doing wrong.
If you want to improve your marketing strategy and get better results, make sure that you identify the marketing mistakes you’re making and then apply the right solutions.
Share this article if you found the information useful. Cheers!
For any types of queries, you can contact us on info[at]namasteui.com.