Table of Contents
“Marketing is no longer about the stuff you make but about the stories you tell.” – Seth Godin
As humans; we all love listening to good stories. Storytelling has been around us since the beginning of time and is a powerful mode of communication. It is also a perfect tool to reinforce your message by establishing an emotional and personalized connection with your audience.
Importance of Social Media Marketing
Brand storytelling is an important part of marketing. It’s not a new a concept as it always existed in one form or another. Recently, social media strategy and web development have emerged as a strong and powerful platform for brand storytelling. It is a brilliant way to connect with your customers, increase brand awareness and brand loyalty, improve sales and provide better customer satisfaction.
Be it a small business or a giant one, the significance of social media marketing is undeniable. Some entrepreneurs, business owners, and even marketers take social media for granted. They think it’s just about posting pictures, videos, and all the cool kid’s stuff. It’s not that easy. Social media might be a cheap source of marketing but is certainly a powerful one and social media marketing is pure art. There are hundreds of examples of small businesses who have capitalized this opportunity perfectly and took their business to new heights.
How to Measure Your Social Media Marketing Success
For successful social media marketing, it is important that you analyze and interpret customer behavior on your social media activities. Honestly, there is no perfect algorithm to gauge the effectiveness of your social media efforts. Everything is based on assumptions. I am digital marketer myself (social media + SEO) and in this article, I am listing down three simple ways to figure out if your social media marketing is right on the mark.
1. Reach
The premier and foremost objective that any marketer wants to achieve is the maximum reach of the brand message. Reach measures the impact of your social media content, and brand awareness also helps you to analyze the scope of your audience. Almost all social media platforms provide built-in analytics to monitor the page reach, likes, views, etc with the help of charts and graphs. Additionally, with the use of third-party services, you are able to extend your reach without the need for extensive effort. For example, some people will buy views on Tiktok to help increase their brand’s visibility.
There are several ways to improve reach, and it’s quite subjective to the nature of the business. However, here are some generic ways to increase organic reach on social media.
- Post content relevant to your business. Informative, interactive and creative.
- Look at your competitors and see what they are posting. If they are getting better reach, try to find out the things they are focusing. It doesn’t mean to imitate them and lose your brand individuality, but this is just to uncover the areas of opportunity and then tailor your efforts accordingly.
- Refrain from posting too much. Experts suggest prioritizing quality over quantity.
2. Engagement
User engagement with your social media content is the next important thing that you should worry about. It is a valuable indicator that determines the quality of your publication and what sort of traffic are you attracting. The more visitors are engaged, the more they value your content. If your engagement level drops, it means that users don’t find your content inspiring and you need to push harder and come up with more creative ways.
Here are some of the engagement metrics
- Clicks Likes and shares on your social media posts.
- Number of comments you receive and try to read all the comments and reply back to them.
- Some social media platforms also provide users to review the brand so you should regularly monitor the review section as well. Reviews also provide you an opportunity to see if customers are happy and satisfied with your products and services.
Increasing engagement is a tough job. It is a trial and error method. To produce the exact kind of content that visitors like and appreciate requires a lot of research and a better understanding of target audience. One of the great ways to increase engagement is to initiate social media contests. This may cost you a bit, believe me, the only way to quickly increase user engagement levels is to offer rewards.
3. Conversions
At the end of the day, it’s all about sales, conversions, and revenue. Conversions actually help you analyze that how many users moved to the next step and entered the lead generation funnel to join your organic marketing database. However, this approach may differ from business to business. For instance, I do social media marketing for a clothing brand where customers can directly place the orders on Facebook. More leads give me the notion that my efforts are in right direction.
On the other hand is a Restaurant. My client has placed a questionnaire for every customer who visits the restaurant that includes a question “From where did you hear about us? The options provided are Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and others. This not only helps me measure the conversion rate but also helps me inspect the platform they prioritize and which platform is working well. So the way to monitor conversions via social media may vary from business to business.
Conclusion
The nature of your social media audience is subjective to the nature of your business, so there is no definite guide to improve your social media ROI. It depends upon your ability to improve the performance of your actions by dissecting the results.
