Tackling Challenges that Come with Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing is a powerful way for businesses of all sizes to reach prospects and customers.

A lot of customers across the globe get to interact with brands through social media, and if a business does not get a chance to speak directly to their audiences through social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest, then they are missing out greatly.

Great marketing on social media can bring remarkable success to any business, creating devoted brand advocates and even driving leads and sales.

Social Media marketing is a form of internet marketing that involves creating and sharing content on social media networks in order to achieve marketing and branding goals. Social media marketing includes activities like posting text and image updates, videos, and other content that drives audience engagement, as well as paid social media advertising.

Even as social media has taken over the marketing business, a number of challenges can be faced by the same marketers in the process of doing their work as discussed below:

Standing out: 

This is tricky, especially as social channels become busier and busier as more people join them for both personal and business purposes. There is no magic shortcut here, though, it is the same old hard work of knowing your audience, continually measuring how your content performs and incorporating that feedback into your ongoing strategy.

One thing that can help? Thoughtful experimentation. If your brand has not experimented with video marketing, try out a few things on the channel that makes the most sense and see how your audience responds. Try your content at different times, with slightly different wording. You can never control all of the variables when it comes to social, but you can set things up to test as purposefully as possible.

Generating trust: 

Never make the mistake of buying followers or engagement and be sure any influencers you work with have been vetted and make sense for an ongoing working relationship with your brand. If a crisis does crop up for your brand be transparent and authentic in your response, no matter the source of the crisis itself.

Measuring success: 

You have to decide which KPIs are most important to your brand, but do not cling so tightly to them that they cannot shift if your industry starts to shift with your target audience and therefore so does your overall strategy. There is a truly overwhelming amount of data available and that makes it easier to measure things just because you can. Make sure you’re measuring what matters for your brand.

Finding and reaching experts: 

Comprehensive social listening and monitoring are key for this; if you are plugged into the conversation that is ongoing across social channels in your industry, you will see who pops up that your brand should follow and engage to build an ongoing relationship with.

These are the people you can tap in times of crisis to help your brand tell your story.

Proving value:

As things are increasingly measurable, it can become increasingly difficult to know what to measure, especially when it comes to proving your value.

Crisis awareness: 

Comprehensive social listening and monitoring are also key for this; you cannot prevent a crisis if you do not know what the conversation around your brand is.

Some crisis situations are self-inflicted by a brand or someone who works at a brand while others come out of nowhere. Either way, a brand needs to have a plan in place to respond and metrics in place to be able to break everything down before, during and after.

The authenticity of influencers: 

If your brand has been working to build influencer relationships over time, it is much less likely that  you will find yourself in a crisis situation due to partnering with an influencer who has not been properly vetted, and much more likely you will already know their past work and general approach to communicating with their fans, followers and the audiences of brands they work with.

That makes it much easier to identify the influencers who are most influential with your target audience.