Three Social Media Marketing Trends To Watch In 2020
With the new year here, it’s time for marketers to solidify their strategies for more productive, effective results. The marketing landscape is constantly changing and evolving, and if businesses don’t keep up, they’ll see a drop in conversions and revenue.
For social media, this is especially true. Users continue to interact in different ways and use social platforms to engage with brands they do business with. In 2019, 79% of the U.S. Population had a social networking profile.
Imagine a business that doesn’t know the first thing about how to use social media to engage their customers. You may have a large following, but if you don’t utilize your platform, you won’t see positive results.
It’s important to keep up with the upcoming social media marketing trends so you and your team create a strategy that’s effective and fruitful. Here are a few trends to watch in 2020 that you can apply to your social media marketing strategy.
Building Online Communities
What keeps users coming back on social media time and time again? When you get tired of the memes, acquaintances’ life updates and baby photos, what entices people to continue using social platforms in their leisure time?
Social media provides a stable platform of connectivity between people who otherwise wouldn’t coexist as easily. People lead busy lives, and even those you’re close to can become estranged when there’s so much going on. Perhaps a more significant reason people continue using social media is to be part of a bigger community where they feel valued, respected and loved.
In 2020, social media marketers should put more emphasis on building online communities to grow their customer base. There will be more focus on responding to users, cultivating conversations and building authentic brand-consumer relationships. All of these elements will encourage repeat customers and increased engagement.
Humanizing Your Brand
Brands are constantly fighting to grab their audience’s attention and persuade them to look their way. There are so many marketing messages pushed on consumers day in and day out that it takes extra effort to reel them in. How can you intrigue your customers when you have so many competitive forces standing in your way? You humanize your brand.
In the upcoming year, marketers will put more focus on adding human elements to their social marketing messages. There’s no room for robotic, traditional advertising that makes it difficult to produce results. If you want to connect with consumers, then you need to humanize your brand and create relationships beyond your products and services.
Brands are already leveraging the use of memes, slang and pop culture to relate to their customers and build long-lasting customer relationships. I predict this trend will continue to rise in the new year as consumers demand more personalization from the businesses they invest in.
Social Purchasing
Marketers aim to please their customers and provide them with smooth experiences. This includes sharpening website design, improving navigation and offering superior customer support. It also means providing additional convenience wherever possible so businesses have a higher chance of converting customers and generating sales.
That’s why I expect purchasing through social media to continue to grow as a trend for the upcoming year. Companies already bombard users with ad after ad based on their previous searches. Users are used to seeing products they want when they log into social media. More businesses will use this to their advantage by enabling shopping directly through social platforms.
Providing convenience is one of the key ways to drive sales and persuade users to click through. If your brand offers a positive user experience (UX) for customers, you’re sure to see an increase in conversions and engagement.
If you want to boost your social media marketing efforts for the upcoming year, then it’s crucial to pay attention to the trends. You can expect a bigger emphasis on building authentic relationships, social purchasing and humanization to bring audiences and businesses together.
What social trends is your business focusing on in 2020?
12 Unique Social Media Marketing Methods That Work Wonders
It’s a fact. Today, every business needs a strong social media presence. No matter whether you run a small local shop or a multinational company, social media should be an essential part of your marketing strategy.
Not only a social media platform helps you connect with your target audience, increase awareness about your brand, but it also boosts your leads and sales to a great extent.
Since around 2.96 billion people use social media platforms worldwide, it’s no passing trend. According to Statista.Com, by 2021, this number is going to reach 3.09 billion. So, if you’re not using this fantastic tool yet, you’re surely missing out on an incredible marketing opportunity.
Source: Hootsuite
Undoubtedly, social media is one of the ideal platforms to market your business. However, due to increased competition and the rise of social media algorithms, the entire landscape of social media has changed. If you really want to stay ahead of your competition, you need to look for unique social media marketing ideas that can spice up your social media campaigns.
In this post, we will make you familiar with some creative social media marketing ideas. However, before that, let’s have a quick look at some social media statistics that is important for you to know.
Having a solid marketing goal is essential for every business. However, if you don’t know what you want to achieve, how are you supposed to attain it?
Before you jumpstart your social media marketing, make clear goals and objectives that will align with your marketing efforts. It is advisable to write down your goal. A study reveals you’re more likely to be successful if you write your goals.
To layout your goals, you can:
To create a successful social media strategy, you must have adequate knowledge of your audience. You should be able to know their needs, wants, and desires. Below are a few tactics that can help you better understand your audience.
When you exactly know who your target audience is, you can better help them.
3. Produce diversified content for different social media platforms
For most businesses, it is easy to post pictures to Instagram and short tweets to Twitter. However, on most social media platforms, you can display different kinds of content, including video, photos, infographics, blog posts, and more. It is essential because if you keep producing the same content time and again, it may bore your audience, and that can keep you from reaching your goals. By providing diversified content, you also determine the best content types for your target audience.
Source: SmartInsights
4. Don’t ignore video content
Video marketing is one of those social media marketing trends that has been continuously growing. In 2018, 85% of all internet users in the United States watched online video content monthly on different devices. It shows that video is an excellent medium to promote your business.
There is no doubt about it that millions of hours of video content watched every year on different social media platforms. However, your videos must be watched by the right people. After all, there is no use in a video going viral if viewers do not belong to your market.
Try to target the right people so that they can take the actions you want them to take after watching your videos. For the same, you must define your target audience before planning your marketing strategies. Some of the tools you can use to identify your audience include Google Analytics – Audience Tab, Keyword Planner, Facebook Business Page Insights.
Narrow down your audience based on their gender, interests, age, occupation, knowledge level, or location. Also, create a quality video with tools like Magisto that precisely explains your product or services and answers most of the queries of your audience and prospects.
Don’t forget, high production values, smart use of keywords, and timing of your videos matter a lot in the success of your video marketing. Also, track your results from time to time and customize your tactics based on those results.
5. Try sharing user-generated content from your fans and followers
When you share user-generated content on your social media profiles, it gives your followers a fresh perspective on your brand and helps you build stronger relationships.
Even a survey reveals that people trust content from an average person more than they do from businesses.
You may ask your buyers to share their experiences with your products and services so that you can use that content on your social media profiles.
For example, if you run a furniture store, you can ask your buyers to share the picture of how they position your furniture at their homes. After that, you can share those pictures within your social profiles with the profile link of the buyers to give other prospects an idea about how they can use your products. It will surely boost the interest of other potential buyers in your brand.
6. Give education
No matter what your goals are, you must provide education about your products or services to your customers. Providing education is one of the best ways to build relationships with your target audience. When you give your audience practical advice or valuable information, they look to you as an authority and become your loyal customers. Social media is a great platform where you can educate your followers about your business without any hindrance. As per your convenience, you may provide educational resources such as blog posts, white papers, webinars, and more.
7. Less promotion and more storytelling
When you take an educational approach, you do more teaching than selling. Storytelling is also educational in nature. Nevertheless, the power of storytelling lies not in teaching people things they weren’t aware of, but in showcasing relevant characters and situations evoking emotional responses. These responses stimulate action more effectively than the content involves self-promotion on social media.
8. Try influencer marketing
Influencer marketing is an ideal way to promote your products via social media platforms. When you collaborate with an influential person not only it boosts brand awareness but also builds trust. Perhaps this is the reason, around 2/3 of retailers in North America use some form of influencer marketing.
Source: MediaKix
Always choose a social media influencers whose vision matches with your own. Below are a few tips for selecting the perfect influencer for your brand.
If you think VPN is a tool to hide your IP address only, you’re mistaken. VPN is not just a security tool that ensures your privacy on a public network; it’s much more than that.
Most new businesses are not aware that a VPN can help them understand their competition. From launching marketing campaigns to monitoring PPC adverts to evaluating search engine rankings, there are plenty of places where VPN is helpful.
Since in this post, we’re discussing social media platforms, let’s find out how can VPN help you with YouTube advertising.
Source: Statista
It wouldn’t be wrong to say that YouTube is the most popular video platform of the time. According to Alexa, YouTube is the 2nd most popular search engine worldwide, behind Google. There are numerous benefits to advertising on YouTube. One of the most significant advantages is that it provides a broader reach to your business.
If you have an audience in different regions, states, or countries, you will need to know what works best in that particular region. Well, VPN can help you with this situation. Using a VPN, you can get your location to the region or area your target audience is. Thus you learn about your audience – their issues and needs. Based on that information, you can understand your customer’s persona, what they are looking for, and create marketing strategies accordingly.
Nowadays, several VPN providers available in the market, but not all are equals in terms of quality and customer support. It is advisable to look for the best VPN only. Read reviews of different providers before making your final decision.
10. Take advantage of the enthusiasm of loyal customers
Your loyal customers have the potential to become brand advocates. They can boost awareness of your brand by providing social proof that helps prospects to build trust in your business much more quickly.
Social media is a great tool to motivate your loyal customers to become brand advocates. Below are a few tips that you can put into practice.
We all respond strongly to people in comparison to robots. By humanizing your brand on social media platforms, you can boost your marketing strategy. Perhaps, you interact with your followers by responding to your comments and user-generated content. However, it is not enough. To stay ahead of your competition, you must highlight your team members and their stories, and connect each of your social media marketing efforts back to your unique brand story.
Try to infuse humor in your posts. However, it does not mean you can go with anything. Keep a balance of fun and information.
12. Use of chatbots for social media marketing
Over the years, chatbots have come a long way. Today’s bots are more smart and useful. They are capable of providing initial customer service, automating a function, and boosting user experience.
Even people have started liking bots. A survey conducted by HubSpot concluded that 47% of respondents were open to buying products using a chatbot. It would not be wrong to say that chatbots have become more widespread on social media.
You can synchronize your chatbot with multiple platforms. For example, you can offer a chatbot on your Facebook Messenger, and it can also be used through Twitter direct messages. It will ensure a consistent experience across your social media profiles.
Chatbots can be used to start conversations, encourage sales, answer questions, and offer individual customer support.
Final thoughts
Social media has turned into an essential part of the marketing strategy for any business. And why not? It is a great way to reach a wide audience, demonstrate your expertise, show your authenticity, encourage engagement, and offer responsive and quick support.
Although social media marketing takes a lot of hard work, its benefits are difficult to ignore. If you’re not taking it seriously, you will miss out on leads, customers, and ultimately sales.
Don’t forget, social media platforms are created for conversing with others. You won’t see the desired results until you don’t make your audience a top priority. Moreover, each social media platform is different, so you must know what kind of content works best on them. We hope the methods mentioned above will help you take your social media marketing to the next level.
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4 Social Media Marketing Mistakes Every New Business Makes (And How To Avoid Them)
Social media can be a challenging yet rewarding platform to work on. It’s where your audience spends several hours a day, making it a significant place to find customers and boost your brand image.
However, approaching people on social media is different from how you use email marketing or how you leverage content on your site.
Your social media strategy has to stand on its own while meeting overall business goals. It’s easy to make mistakes when starting a new business and launching your social media marketing plan. You can overlook important steps and processes.
To help you make the right decisions from the beginning, let’s look at some common mistakes new businesses make.
By being aware of these missteps, you’ll be able to start your own social media strategy on the right foot.
Content Inconsistency
It’s important to be consistent when you create and publish content on social media. You need to make posts regularly and also maintain quality standards for your content.
Posting Regularly
Many businesses think that’s enough to come up with content on the spur of the moment and to post something every day. Such content is often poor in quality, and one may end up forgetting to post on time, leading to rushed content.
It’s essential to create a content calendar ahead of time with your content charted out. You’ll never miss a day or fail to leverage important seasonal events.
You also need to make sure that you post more than once a day, especially on platforms like Twitter. Your audience is likely to be from different parts of the country and the world. They are on social media at different times.
While you don’t want to come across as spammy and posting too often, you also don’t want to miss people who come online at other times. Try to post at different times of the day and look at when you get the most engagement.
You can recycle your current content and repost evergreen content that’s useful over time. Having a content calendar and use social media management tools can make it easier to post regularly. You can automate and schedule your posts, which frees you up to engage with customers.
A social media management tool can publish content automatically
Having an Inconsistent Aesthetic
A common mistake a business makes is to create content that’s inconsistent in its appearance. Your content’s look and feel play a key role in branding. It’s important to establish a tone, a persona, color combinations, and other details in advance.
In this way, you’ll ensure that all your images, videos, and other material use the same fonts, colors, and styles of communication. Your audience will associate content with your brand and make it more memorable.
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Consistent aesthetics can impact brand memorability
Posting the Same Content to All Platforms
It’s not necessary to post entirely different content for each social media platform. However, it is a mistake to post the exact same material to your LinkedIn page and to Instagram.
Each social media platform is different and your audience interacts with content differently as well.
You can create content that contains the same message for all your social media pages. But make sure that you tweak your posts to suit each platform. Doing research will help you understand your audience and the best type of content to use on each platform.
Not Doing Your Research
Doing research will ensure that your social media activities lead to the best outcome for your business. Research gives you powerful insights on how to best leverage social media.
Research the best platform for you: When you’re creating content for social media, you need to understand the right platform for your business. Some popular platforms may give you little to no engagement or conversions because it’s unsuitable for your industry. Your audience may also not be active in such places.
Understand your audience: Audience research is essential to help you create content that appeals to them. It’s important to find out demographic information, as well as interests. All social media platforms have insights and analytics services to make this possible. You can also use surveys to ask your audience to give you helpful feedback and information.
Find influencers: Working with influencers can jumpstart your reach online. It’s helpful to do research on influencers in your domain. They can help you connect with their audience, and collaborate by holding giveaways and other activities.
Content research: Content curation and research tools will help you determine the right formats for each platform. For example, you may find that how-to videos and lists will do great on Facebook, but that you should leverage hashtag campaigns on Twitter.
Doing research takes the guesswork out of your marketing efforts. It makes it possible to get better results in your activities. You can also set up benchmarks to measure the effectiveness of your work.
Platforms like Facebook offer data and analytics
No Metrics for Performance
It’s important to set smart goals to help you measure and track how your marketing efforts are going. Without any metrics in place or a measurement plan, you won’t know what’s working and what’s not.
Measuring your social media activities ensures that you measure the right things. It lets you have a timeline for results so that you don’t expect unrealistic results in a short time frame.
By setting up clear metrics ahead of time, you also make sure that you’re not tracking too many things. Use business tools that are available with all social media platforms to help you track what matters.
Start Your Social Media Activities on the Right Foot
You can grow your business on social media when you use it the right way. It’s vital to have a clear strategy in place and to measure the outcomes of your activities.
By avoiding the mistakes outlined here, your business will launch and win over followers from the get-go.
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