12 Mar 6 Ways to Revamp Your Social Media Strategy in 2018

With just a few improvements, your social media profiles could become relevant contributors to your Digital Marketing strategy in 2018. By switching up your approach and committing to a higher level of quality, you could soon be generating more leads, revenue, and interest in your company with minimal effort.

The great thing about Social Media marketing is that it doesn’t have to take a lot of your time to work wonders. If you plan ahead and use Social Media to reinforce your other marketing activities, you can achieve huge ROI through both organic and paid social campaigns.

So, to inspire you to improve your social presence and go beyond expectations, make it a goal to implement the following 6 Highly Effective Social Media Marketing Improvements in 2018.

#1: Create a Social Media Marketing Strategy Document

Writing down your marketing ideas is critical to your growth. According to CoSchedule, professionals who document their planned marketing strategy are over five times more likely to achieve success. Also, 88% of people who set marketing goals actually achieve them.

Social Media marketing is just one part of your overall marketing strategy. The most effective marketing is like a 3-legged stool: you have Traditional marketing (TV, radio, direct mail, etc.), Relationship marketing (networking, trade shows, referral programs, etc.), and Digital Marketing (SEO, PPC, email, social, etc.). For most businesses, each marketing channel is like a separate boat in the water rowing in its own direction. A cohesive marketing strategy will align all your boats so they row in the same direction, supporting each other and growing your business.

Documenting your social strategy involves both high-level and low-level considerations.

On the high level, you want to include your overarching goals for social – make sure you move beyond vanity metrics. You want to describe how Social Media fits within your overall Digital Marketing plan. You want a few guiding pointers for brand voice and the type of values you want to express.

For low-level strategy, consider how often you want to post per week or per month. Plan a budget for the next quarter. Describe publisher sources for shared content you want to write.

Getting all of this down in writing helps you stay focused and consistent. It also makes it easier to communicate your intended strategy to others, such as employees or contract marketers.

Most importantly, it keeps you from approaching your social media activities haphazardly. Having intention and purpose is the key to achieving better results.

#2: Use the Hub and Spoke Model

The major mistake most businesses make with their Social Media marketing is not using it to drive traffic to their website.

Social Media thrives on vanity metrics – likes, follows, shares. Unfortunately, these don’t drive conversions. Most conversions are going to occur on your website, where visitors will engage more of your content and come to see you as a trusted authority before taking a conversion action – fill out a form, subscribe to a newsletter, pick up the phone, or make a purchase.

The Hub and Spoke Model positions your website as your hub and your various Social Media platforms as your spokes. All content originates on your website, typically as a blog post but also as case studies, white papers, videos, etc. It then gets disseminated to your social platforms as teasers with a link back to the original post on your website, driving interested browsers back to where a conversion is more likely to occur.

This model will also simplify your content creation by starting with longer content pieces allowing you to break them up into multiple, shorter social pieces. So one blog post becomes five Facebook posts, twenty tweets, etc.

#3: Coordinate Social Posts with Specific Campaigns

If you want to push your social media marketing to the next level in 2018, try a couple of test campaigns. These campaigns should tie into your other Digital and non-Digital Marketing campaigns for special events, promotions, or content offers so they can have an express purpose beyond “just posting because.”

For instance, if you have a promotional offer such as a free webinar or e-book, your social campaigns can convert audiences into leads or customers. If you have an event, like a big in-store sale, you will be aiming to increase foot traffic over the sale period.

Connecting Social Media activity to campaigns in this way ties them to concrete goals. Your performance can be benchmarked, and the metrics you gain can help you seek out ways to improve your next campaign based on the data you collected.

#4: Create Content Marketing Assets and Landing Pages Just for Social

A marketing campaign is not just an ad, nor is it just a social post or a handful of social posts. A campaign is a series of assets that you leverage across marketing channels to target a specific audience at specific stages of the Buyer’s Journey.

You can significantly upgrade your Social Media marketing returns by creating campaign assets specifically designed to complement social posts.

For instance, you can create a lead capture landing page for specific target segments to use with targeted promoted Social Media posts. That way, your call-to-action can take 18-year-old college students to a different page with different appeals than your page aiming to convert 23-year-old graduates starting their careers.

You can also create assets that you know will perform well on social, such as infographics. Infographics get around 41.5% engagement, on average, making them the content with the second-best ROI behind video.

Developing campaign-specific assets like these help connect your Social Media presence to customer actions that actually generate revenue. They also ensure you have a best-fit destination for each outgoing click to your website, as opposed to shoehorning a single “Contact Us” page link into every post or something similar. Since each asset is custom-made for each campaign, they’re better suited to their individual purpose.

#5: Invest in Professional Grade Social Video

Speaking of developing visual content with high ROI, now is the time to start considering using video within your Social Media marketing strategy.

Businesses that use Video Marketing generate 66% more qualified customer leads and earn 54% more brand awareness compared to those that don’t use any video. Even more impressive, 77% of small business owners who use video report significant benefits and positive ROI.

In the past, we’ve mentioned how Live video and repurposing content as slideshows can be a great way to dip your toes into the Video Marketing scene. But to truly revamp your social presence, you should consider budgeting for a few (3-5) short, professionally made video assets that can be leveraged on your website, YouTube, Email Marketing, and Social Media platforms.

Why? Because these assets get attention and shape the way people see your business. They serve as a form of social proof for the quality of your services when they include Live testimonials. They give you something to link to within other campaigns and to embed within your blogs. They also serve as brief sales pitches that can be far more convincing than any chunk of text.

For best results, plan ahead for when and why you want to use your video assets and how you can repurpose them in multiple ways for future campaigns.

#6: Promote Posts to Targeted Audiences with Paid Social Advertising

Like video, we’ve suggested using paid Social Media advertising several times at this point. Well, we’re going to mention it again because it’s an easy marketing method that can have a huge impact on your bottom line!

Social Media engagement almost always comes at a lower cost per lead and cost per click compared to advertising on paid search or through display ads. Promoted Social Media posts can also be targeted to specific customer segments, helping you get your messages in front of the perfect audience you need to earn more customers.

Plus, as you are probably already aware, Social Media platforms such as Facebook have been moving to a monetized model for a few years now. As organic reach decreases, the need for Social Advertising becomes greater. Like it or not, pay to play is part of the overall game.

However, this is why your overall marketing strategy needs to be diverse. Social Media should never be your only means of reaching new prospective customers. Just like you would never invest your entire retirement fund in just one company’s stocks (say Enron, for example), you never want to invest your entire marketing budget on just one channel.

When that channel changes – Google alters its algorithm, Facebook limits organic reach, magazines go out of print – you don’t want your entire business to collapse. Years ago, small local businesses put all their faith in Facebook as their primary channel and built up large followings that they could frequently post to. Then Facebook severely limited the reach of those posts and businesses found their primary channel no longer worked.

Social Media can be a powerful marketing channel when you incorporate it into your overall marketing strategy. Follow our tips for 2018 and watch your website metrics and your conversions improve.

Benchmark your marketing strategy today with this easy self-assessment! Get your personal 47-point Growth Plan once you complete the assessment.