Social Media Marketing – Looking to 2020 and Beyond

The world of Social Media Marketing is changing, onward, and upward. Marketing and advertising via social media used to be an organic bonus if enough people liked your post word of mouth or the “Share” feature garnered natural attention to your business, social media was a success.

There are many missed opportunities small companies should start utilizing social media.

First, add Paid Strategies. Businesses need to get smarter and set part of their advertising budget specifically for Social Media. Relying solely on any organic advertising and marketing for your company is old school. The information out there is immense and if you aren’t working hard to get your companies name out to consumers you are using social media to its capabilities. Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Pinterest and Reddit all now have advertising platforms that target consumer audiences. They are sophisticated and allow companies to reach consumers further than organic marketing. Teaming up organic and paid strategies will push your efforts further and re-target to audiences in hopes that they convert to a paying customer.

The second missed opportunity is not engaging with your consumers. So much of the content pushed out into is companies telling consumers what is new with them, who’s a shining star in their company, why their product is the best. One of the greatest assets of social media is you can connect directly with consumers. So why not engage them for content they’d like to see. Ask them via Twitter why they like the products or their favorite product. Big name powerhouses like TripAdvisor and Yelp prove that customer reviews and first-hand accounts have selling power. Ask your customers to vouch for you, reaching out for personal sentiment will engage and grow your business.

A third opportunity being missed is called Event Targeting. Hopefully, you know a thing or two about trade shows in your industry. Now you can utilize those events virtually, holidays, concerts, and other events that might relate to your business. Targeting those tweeting or attending these events virtually and in-person gets your business right in front of your intended and interested audience.

Another feature to utilize is Twitter Moments. This feature allows you to identify topics or trends that have gathered interest and virality, using this information you can alter or create marketing that would gather the most attention and interest. Targeting your audience is super important now, any thoughts that social media marketing could be “Throw it against the wall and see what sticks” is outdated.

These media platforms are creating the advertising vehicle to allow for audience targeting cause they see how useful and powerful that information is. Not utilizing things such as them or Analytics programs to see where you are getting your customers from is the last missed opportunity.

Securing new customer where you can get it from and not asking: How’d they get here?, What brought them in?, What was the message they saw?, is just silly. Even using old school survey’s they ask “How did you hear about us?”

Using Analytics is similar without having to ask directly from the consumer, these programs are designed to track all this information for you and is incredibly helpful in determining which marketing messages reached the furthest and brought the most people for you.