No matter your niche or who your customers are, you’ll find that 2022 has more competition in every market than ever before. Therefore, it’s imperative that you figure out how to impress your market with a unique social media strategy to capture and retain loyal customers before your competitors solidify relationships with your audience.

To keep you at the forefront of your niche, we’ve put together an effective social media strategy that you can take and base your marketing efforts on, with full details listed below.

Define Your Goals

Before you jump on the social media bandwagon, you need to define your goals from using social media rather than just creating social media accounts for the sake of having them.

Are you trying to build direct sales through social media and generate brand awareness about your product and services, or are you just trying to increase your community engagement?

Without defining goals, it’s impossible to direct your social media and determine the effectiveness of your marketing strategies.

Once you have your goals, you should be measuring them. Whether you want to see an increase in traffic from each platform, you want specific sales targets that provide good ROI for your social media strategies, or anything else. 

Goals + Measurements will determine how effective you are and can help you redirect your marketing strategy, which should constantly be evolving and improving.

Create Leads and Drive Sales

If your goal is to create leads and drive sales, you need to be showcasing your existing products and services or anything new that you will be offering. You can offer deals, discounts, promos for your followers.

You can also use promotional posts rather than natural posts to drive more traffic to your site for lead and sale generation. You’ll just need to ensure that your ads have good ROI; otherwise, you may need to adjust how you interact with that specific audience, as each social media platform has different types of audiences that you need to learn to engage with.

Generate Brand Awareness & Increase Community Engagement

To get your name out there and connect with your audience, you should be doing more than just showcasing your products and services. Instead, create content that shows what your brand is about, your values, and even the goals and stories behind your business. Your audience is looking for authentic communication with them and not just pushing products onto their screens.

You can also engage with your audience outside of your social media accounts by setting up notifications based on keywords found on the platform so that you can engage and offer insight or help. 

Creating hashtags for your audience to help market your products and create buzz is helpful to engage and get some free marketing. You can even showcase your audience using your products on your social media accounts to encourage the use of such hashtags.

Your audience will appreciate your engagement and consider you a better option than those companies just pushing products. You need to be actively involved in the community and not just using it, which social media users don’t want and don’t like.

Research Your Audience

Before you can create a big buzz on social media, you need to research your target audience, and one of the big problems you’ll face is that the audience on each social media platform differs either slightly or in a huge way. You may even find that certain social media platforms are not effective for your marketing strategy, so time and energy should be limited to those platforms.

Each social media platform will provide tools that let you see your audience’s demographics, how they are reacting to different posts you’re making, and even the times they’re most active so that you can engage with them during those times.

You’ll also be able to see whether your social media audience is your target customers. It’s great to have a huge following, but your goal should still be to drive sales, so if you’re not getting good leads or sales, and your audience doesn’t match who you believe is your target customers, then you need to readjust your posts and ads.

The difference between social media platforms will drive what you do on each.

• YouTube and Facebook are exception places to push ads due to the high-earning of the standard users across them. So building engagement isn’t always crucial here.
• Instagram and Youtube (again) are the best social media platforms to engage with Gen-Z and Millennials, so you can push ads but need to include your personality and brand within those ads, rather than just pushing products that may do better on FaceBook.
• Pinterest is uneven with a much larger female audience, so directing your marketing efforts towards women will do much better.
• LinkedIn is a more professional network of people, so professionalism and strong content rather than visuals will work better.

These are just examples of how you need to tailor your marketing strategy towards different platforms. If your target customers are extremely thin on a social media platform, you need to consider whether the ROI will be worth it.

Create Unique And Engaging Content

The core of your entire social media marketing strategy will be how well you create unique and engaging content that connects with your audience niche on the specific platform you’re trying to create buzz on.

You should be incorporating your brand into every post you do, whether through the style of writing or the colours and graphics you use in your posts. 

If your audience can’t quickly identify that it’s a post from you, then whether they enjoy the post or not won’t matter. You’re either trying to drive traffic or build awareness about your brand, so make it obvious who is posting.

Some ideas to help create unique and engaging content are:

• Most platforms allow for stories that push whatever you just posted to the front of the line and become the most obvious to consumers. Use your stories to create behind-the-scenes posts about what your company is doing, whether it’s showing offices or production facilities. 

Make it interesting, add some humour, and show that you’re a real business that does care about the platform and audience.

• Create short, engaging, and action-packed videos. Many social media accounts do the best with shorter videos that capture customers’ attention quickly and don’t give them time to drift off before the message is presented.

Social media is about personality and engagement. Make sure that your posts aren’t standard ads you would see on a bus or in a newspaper. It’s essential in all of your posts to show personality and then make sure you’re engaging with comments on the posts.

Brands that post and never engage quickly loose audiences.

• Stay consistent and post often. You should be posting at least once a day on social media platforms that you want to engage with. Once you take a break or stop being consistent with your posting, your audience can forget you, and your engagement starts dropping way down.

Consistency can relate to your niche as well. While you can get good viewership or bring in followers, if you aren’t posting things related to or that will connect with your niche audience, then you’re wasting your resources.

• Using your audience research, you should be posting when your customers are most active on the platform and not just when it’s most convenient for you or your marketing manager.

In most cases, you can schedule posts or use another platform to post at specific times for you so that your posts can hit your target audience at just the right time for optimal engagement, which also means you should be responding to and engaging back with your audience.

Are You Ready To Impress Your Market With A Unique Social Media Strategy?

Most businesses fail to realise that social media differs from traditional marketing. The key things that make you stand out, unique, and create buzz for your brand are by being authentic, curating your posting style for your audience on each platform, and ensuring that you engage back with your customers.