Marketing strategies on social networks: 8 tactics you can not miss

According to the annual report The Global State of Digital in 2019 created by Hootsuite and We Are Social , 52% of the world population uses social networks. This huge global audience using these channels represents a vast market of opportunity for any company, regardless of size. An opportunity to create marketing strategies that will allow the reach of your business to extend to the digital world.

However, for your social media marketing efforts to pay off, the first thing you need to have is a strategy . Below, we present the basic concepts that you must take into account when planning your marketing strategy.

Index

• Positioning strategies in social networks
• Segmentation strategies in social networks
• The new era of marketing
• Eight digital promotion strategies

Positioning strategies in social networks

To start planning your social media marketing strategy, you first need to consider what your goals are. Whatever the specifications of your objectives, it is important to have a differentiating element to position yourself as a benchmark in the minds of your consumers. If you do not have specific objectives, it will be very difficult for you to measure your success and ROI in your reports. Ask yourself questions like:

Do I want to generate awareness of my brand and increase its perception?

Do I want to manage the reputation of my business?

My purpose is to increase sales?

Give customer service?

Increase traffic to my website?

Do market research to learn more about my audience?

Being the leader of my niche?

Once you have defined your objectives, these will be a guide to know what type of content you need to provide to your audience, in what format and what are the best practices for your brand when it comes to investing in ads. Facebook Ads is a great tool to simplify and optimize this part, since the platform offers a variety of customizable options according to your goals.

For example, let’s say that the objective of one of your campaigns is brand recognition. These types of ads present the perfect opportunity to show the behind-the-scenes culture of your business and the team that makes it possible. However, if your goal is to increase traffic to your website, then your campaign ads will look very different and will have elements like a CTA. Content creation is up to you, but through advanced targeting options and tracking the performance of your ads, Facebook ensures that your ad performs at its best, reaches the right people, and becomes memorable on the mind of your customers.

Segmentation strategies in social networks

As we mentioned above, in order for your marketing strategies to meet their goals, you need to make sure that your content is reaching the right audience. This is where segmentation strategies come in, a vital tool for your content to reach the people who may be most interested in your services or products.

Buyer Persona

The first step is to get to know your audience, and creating a buyer persona is a great tactic to do so. A buyer persona is a semi-fictional character who represents your ideal client. To create this customer prototype and define a profile, it is necessary to carry out an audience analysis to discover patterns in the demographics and interests of your customers. Use the social network analysis tools to extract the necessary data to create these profiles. Platforms like Facebook , Instagram and Twitter , among others, offer a free report with valuable information about the people who interact with your brand online, even if they are not yet your customers.

Thinking of the buyer persona as a real customer will help you make informed decisions when crafting the right content for the right consumers. For example, Netflix It is a global company that targets an audience with a very wide age range. On its platform, you can find content aimed at all kinds of niches, from children’s cartoons, documentaries about planet earth, award-winning international dramas and soap operas, among many, many others. However, its content on social networks, particularly on Instagram, has a clear focus towards a youth audience. Coincidence? Although we do not know the marketing secrets of this streaming giant, this is probably not a random decision and it is very possible that it is the result of a market research where they extracted the demographics and interests of their followers on Instagram and realized of the age range and behavior patterns of his followers.

Facebook Insights is a great targeting tool to maximize your ad effort (and budget). Thanks to its segmentation features, you can target different types of audience based on their age, gender, location, language, internet connections, and interests. Facebook offers three types of segmented audiences:

• Main target audience : thanks to the algorithms and data collected by Facebook, with this function you can target the audiences that have the greatest potential to buy your products.
• Personalized audiences : target your ads to people you already know or have already interacted with using the information you already have available.
• Similar audiences: New audiences by combining personalized audiences with targeted Facebook ads.

Check out our complete guide on Advertising on Facebook and become an expert in the world of Facebook Ads. Get the most out of your ad budget with Hootsuite AdEspressov or Hootsuite Ads , two powerful tools that make it easy to create, manage, and optimize your marketing strategies.

The new era of marketing

Every marketer will be familiar with the strategy of the commercial mix ( marketing mix ) and the four variables that compose it, the famous “4 P’s of Marketing” : product, price, point of sale and promotion. But are these concepts still applicable to a social media marketing strategy? Of course! You just have to adapt them to the online world.

• Product

Whether it’s a physical item, a service, or an experience, the product is a key part of your campaign. Before the digital age, customers relied on a sensory experience to determine product quality and viability. Currently, your product itself is your content and the format in which you decide to present it. For this reason, the quality of your content is vital and a great challenge. However, it is also a great opportunity, since within social networks there is an incredible variety of formats to present your product and highlight all its features. We explore this point in depth in the last “P”: promotion.

Another element that has changed considerably thanks to internet connectivity is that customers can access the opinions and reviews of your product immediately and thus inform their purchase opinion. A tool that can help you stay informed in real time of the opinions and feelings that your brand or a specific product is generating is social listening. Social listening is the practice of monitoring all your social networks to discover all the mentions of your brand, your products and your competitors. Through a single panel, Hootsuite makes it easy to monitor these keywords and conversations on social media. With social listening, you can ensure that your product always maintains a good image and join the conversations that take place around it. Hootsuite Insights is a great ally in this part, as they allow you to monitor over 100 million data sources and even track sentiment by location, language and gender.

• Price

For many consumers, price is the decisive element that results in a purchase or not. The accessibility that the internet gives us to put our products up for sale has reduced operating costs for many companies. Also, this has increased competition, no matter how small your niche is. In addition, users can immediately compare your prices with your competitors to inform their purchase decision. For this reason, setting an adequate price, which is attractive to your consumers and is also profitable for you, is one of the most laborious and sensitive tasks of the digital marketer. Help yourself in this part with tools like Brandwatch to always keep you updated on what is happening in your niche and with your competitors.

• Point of sale

The point of sale is the place where you decide to sell your product. Thanks to the heyday of E-commerce (e-commerce) and in particular M-Commerce (where users can make purchases from their mobile devices) any company can sell its products online, which has significantly transformed and simplified the purchase process . For this part, it is necessary to do market research to find out where in the digital universe your consumers congregate. In this way, you can decide, for example, if direct purchases on Instagram are viable for your company or if Facebook Marketplaceit better suits your profile. This is not as complicated as it sounds. As we mentioned earlier, the most popular social networks offer a free statistical report – such as Instagram or Twitter Analytics or Facebook Insights – on the performance of your company on these channels.

• Promotion

Of the four “P’s”, this is the point that has most changed in marketing strategies in the digital age. Often also called “Advertising”, this point refers to the format in which you decide to present your product. According to the annual report The Global State of Digital in 2019 created by Hootsuite and We Are Social, Facebook has an advertising reach ( the number of users that your ads can reach) of 82 million globally. Of course, this scope offered by social networks has changed the transmission and content of our messages completely.

To choose the best channel to present your product and meet your goals, ask yourself questions like:

Where do my clients congregate?

What type of content do I receive the most interactions with: images, videos, stories, etc.?

What role do ads play in my content promotion marketing strategy?

Again, the answers to these questions are in your social media metrics, and Hootsuite Analytics can help you with this.

Below we present 5 specific tactics based on this information that you can implement in your social media marketing strategies.

Eight marketing strategies you can’t miss

1) Present your content in new formats

We all know that images and videos get more interactions than a text post. Also, we know that Stories are conquering users on social networks. Now, it is time to go one step further, get out of the comfort zone and use new types of media such as 360º Videos, Live photos, virtual reality and IGTV. HBO is one of the companies that has used some of these new immersive formats to their advantage, just as they did in their different campaigns for the hit TV series Game of Thrones.

360º Videos

 

VR

One of the greatest incentives of the digital age is the possibility of taking advantage of technological advances for your benefit.

2) Use similar audiences in your marketing strategies

The similar audiences tool is a great ally to find new clients. The platform is based on the characteristics of your target audience (the clients with whom you have already interacted) to find new prospects, integrate them into your sales funnel and thus improve the performance of your ads.

Similar audiences on Facebook, for example, are based on different target audiences (or seed audiences) depending on the goal you want to achieve. For example, if your goal is to increase your sales, Facebook will be guided by the customers who have most visited your website.

To extract valuable information from this practice, you need to test with different audiences and measure their performance. Which one works best for you? Find out how to build a friendly audience with Facebook’s ad manager.

With Hootsuite Ads , you can control all your ads from the same platform.

3) A / B testing to optimize your content and marketing strategies

A / B testing is a super valuable research tool for testing small variations in your advertising content to determine which is the most effective for your target audience. For example: you are about to launch a new product and you are planning the campaign. However, you are not sure if a video ad or a photo ad is the best for your audience, or you have two copies to accompany your image and you don’t know which one to use. An A / B test allows you to test the two different types of ads and measure the results through different variables to discover which format encourages more interactions with your customers. Look at this example from Booking.com, same message, different images:

Over time, you will be able to obtain information that will help you tailor your content for each social network and each specific audience, which will help you refine your social media marketing strategy.

4) Check the performance of your marketing strategy

The time has come to create your monthly report: how do you check that your marketing strategies are paying off? These two tools will be of great help:

Facebook pixel

The Facebook Pixel is a snippet of code that you can install on your website to track the actions users took on your page after seeing an ad on Facebook.

Thanks to cookies that track interactions with your customers, the Facebook pixel helps you ensure that your ads are seen by the people who are most likely to take the action you want. The great advantage of this is that it allows you to improve your ad conversion rate (that is, to know if your ads are really getting the customer to take action) and get a better return on investment. This code also works to optimize your ads and build audiences.

On the Facebook for Business blog , the platform registered the success story of Columbia Central University located in Puerto Ric when it launched a conversion campaign focused on generating more new student subscriptions with the help of the pixel. The campaign consisted of videos and images displayed on Facebook that reflected school life within the university and the Facebook Pixel helped them segment the audience to reach new customers and measure conversions on the institution’s website and then promote again. your ads to similar audiences.

These were the figures they achieved:

• 71% increase in recruitment of prospects
• 80% increase in website traffic
• 12X return on investment

Check out our complete guide to Facebook Pixel and start using it today.

Hootsuite Analytics

With Hootsuite Analytics, you can view detailed reports with measurable and tangible data. With this analysis tool you can measure the success of your campaigns and marketing strategies in real time without having to review the Analytics report of each social network separately. With easy-to-use dashboards and the option to create an unlimited number of reports, you can analyze metrics like posts, followers, interactions and traffic from platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram in one place. In this way, you will be able to know what is working, what you have to improve and where it is convenient to focus your budget.

5) stay creative and up to date

The world of digital marketing and social media is a constantly evolving space, so it is essential to stay ahead of everything that is happening in this microcosm.

To know the most relevant news of the advertising industry in your day to day, configure an RSS reader such as Feedly or Syndicator Pro from Hootsuite to monitor in real time the latest publications from sites like, Merca 2.0, A dweek and, of course, the blog from Hootsuite. This will save you a lot of time, since you will not have to visit each web page individually and check its content.

Also, it is important that you continue your education. In our list of online community manager courses , you will find options to stimulate your creativity, to improve your content editing and to become an expert in Facebook ads and branding.

6) Promote your content on all your platforms (Cross promotion)

One of the easiest marketing strategies to implement is cross promotion. Imagine that you are trying to grow your YouTube channel, but you are not having much success at the moment and you decide to post a link to your video on Facebook. Posting that link is the first step in your cross promotion. Either way, there is much more to do and some practices you have to follow to improve the performance of this strategy.

Cross promotion depends on two elements, the “hero” content and the supporting content. Hero content is that piece of content you’ve spent the most time on, and it’s the content where you want your marketing strategy to focus its results. Support content are the posts that will promote your hero content on other platforms.

Going back to the YouTube example, your hero content would be your video and your support content would be the Instagram stories, Facebook posts, etc., that will support the promotion of your video.

Create posts specific to each social platform to promote your hero content.

Cross-promotion is not about posting the same message across all platforms hoping that it will drive traffic to your hero content. It is about adapting the message so that it contributes to the conversation of that network. Take these Donut Media posts as an example.

Both refer to their hero content on YouTube. However, they do it with content native to Instagram and following the best practices of the platform. In the first we can see a traditional publication, without calls to action or other texts that can distract from the content of the image. It is not until the description, where the hero content is discussed, and your audience is invited to watch the video. This is much different than posting the hero video thumbnail to Instagram and expecting it to drive traffic to your website. Unfortunately, it is a practice that I have seen with many youtubers.

Why should you create Instagram specific content? … or any other network.

Interaction rates on Instagram drop dramatically when the image has text overlay, so a specific publication on this platform will have better interaction and lead more people to your hero content.

Similarly, Instagram stories are a key tool in your social media marketing strategy.

In this Donut Media example , you’re using the stories to promote a video from your YouTube channel. Either way, they’re doing it by creating platform-native video, with the right proportions, time limits, and other considerations.

7) Optimize your content on each platform

If you want your content to have a greater reach, you will have to optimize it using the best practices of the social platform where you want to publish it. For example, I mean that if you post a video on YouTube you make sure to add the most relevant tags to your content, use no more than 70 characters in its title to get your followers’ attention (this is the maximum limit visible in searches phones), etc.

If you want to learn how to optimize your content on social networks, I recommend that you view this list of video tutorials to optimize your content on each social network.

Each social network has optimization rules and “best practices”. I have put the practices in quotes because if you don’t follow them your organic reach will be affected; then, they are not so much recommendations but requirements.

Another example of this is Facebook’s 20% rule , with which images covered in text in 20% of their total area or more will be negatively affected by Facebook’s algorithm, their organic distribution will be reduced and they cannot be promoted.

In the following case, Facebook determined that the text corresponded to less than 20% of the image, so it will be possible to promote it, in any case, its performance will be lower because the text occupies a larger percentage than Facebook would consider optimal for its platform. . Our recommendation: keep the text to a minimum.

Create a community of super fans and brand ambassadors

Finally, the most important step of your social media marketing strategy will be to create a community of super fans or brand ambassadors. These are people who follow your content, interact with it regularly, and are interested in representing your brand, channel, or fan community on social media.

Building a community of ambassadors will allow you to strengthen your marketing strategy for the organic distribution of your content. If every time you publish a new video, photo or any other type of content, you are ensuring that it will be organically shared with social circles outside your area of ​​influence, circles that you will try to acquire.

Remember that this is a reciprocal relationship and that you are going to have to offer greater value to this community than to the rest of your followers. One way to show your appreciation could be to send them small gifts, mention them in your posts or even a direct and personal message can be very valuable.