Whether your business is old or new, big or small, social media should be an integral part of your marketing mix. Social media holds immense potential in terms of effective and cost efficient marketing. It continues to grow, especially in the post covid world. Many businesses were forced to develop online marketing tactics.

However, it can be difficult to get the right strategies in place. We'll talk about some of the important points you should keep in mind before going forward with a social media marketing strategy, and some of the top social media marketing strategies you can employ - and then show you some of the best social media marketing case studies.

Important things to keep in mind when doing social media

Research your target audience

The importance of knowing your audience can never be underestimated. There is no point in doing any kind of marketing campaign without knowing the basic traits of your customers/users. Understanding your audience incorporates anything and everything starting from what they like/dislike, what are their hobbies, how do they spend their leisure time or which pages they follow on social media. All these questions can give you meaningful insights into your users, that can further allow you to concentrate your efforts in the right direction.

Define your KPIs

KPIs or key performance indicators, as the name suggests are the most important metrics to measure the success of your campaigns. Without having your KPIs figured out before launching a campaign is just like driving a car without knowing the final destination. Your KPIs will give you the right point of reference and help you to understand how far you have come in terms of your campaign. Your KPIs can be different for different campaigns; for example with a brand awareness campaign, some of the KPIs that you would want to focus on would be impressions, clicks, likes/shares etc. Meanwhile for a conversion focused campaign, the KPIs you would want to look at would be conversions, click-through-rate, cost-per-click etc.

Rethink your content strategy

2023 is a year of innovation with marketing. Video continues to become a larger and larger part of digital marketing and not just with reels and TikToks. We might also see more widespread adoption of the metaverse. It's important to stay on top of trends, and evolve your marketing and content strategy as innovation happens. It's also important to remember your brand strategy and guidelines! Keep a human touch in your interactions and keep it simple to understand.

Assess your performance

It is not an easy task to deliver with every campaign that you undertake. Some might return good results while others might just end up being a sunk cost. But one thing that you want to make sure of is to not repeat the same mistakes repeatedly. You should visit your old campaigns and understand what went right or wrong. Assess your performance month over month, and week over week, and see how you are progressing towards your goals.

If you have checked the boxes on the above points, then you are already on your way to creating a successful social media campaign. Now let's see what are some of the top social media marketing strategies that you can incorporate into your marketing mix.

Top social media marketing strategies

Creating educational content

Creating value for your customers should always be a number one priority. Users and consumers usually have lots of options beyond your brand, and are easily swayed to a different one. The only thing that holds onto your customers is the value you create for them. With social, one way to do this is to create content that educates them. It could be about anything that is related to your product. For example, if your brand sells a social media co-pilot, create posts about great social media marketing tactics.

Producing different types of content forms

Uploading a similar picture to Instagram every day just won't work. You need to have diversity amongst your content to regularly engage your audience. Experiment with different posting themes, media, and image/video quality. A great tactic can be to create a content pillar such as a podcast or blog, where you can chop multiple bits of micro-content into different social media posts. It's also a great opportunity to tells your users stories, or humanize your brand by giving your customers stories about your employees. You can always shoot behind the scenes footage too, which often gets more engagement that the polished stuff. Users love unique and fresh content.

Teaming up with micro influencers

Every marketer knows the potential of influencer marketing, but due to the high saturation in the influencer market niche, it is hard to get a cost efficient ROI. It is an opportunity for you as a brand to look in a different direction. Micro influencers are influencers with a smaller following but they have a higher engagement with their followers as they can interact with their smaller follower count more easily as compared to other big influencers.

Keeping a human touch

Social media in itself has the word social as we do in our identity of being social beings. The whole aspect of social media is to create a social sphere of interaction between different individuals over a medium. You should always focus on interacting with your users like you would do with a friend. Keep the content and the conversations as human as possible, users don’t like the feeling of talking to a robot or a mechanical entity. Post content that you think would create value for a fellow human user. The best possible way to implement this strategy would be to put yourself in the shoes of your users. Imagine how you would feel if you would have to go through the content or the copy that you had put on your posts.

Taking advantage of technology

We are in the 21st century and it’s about time that we start acting like it. We witness so many technological advancements all around us. Recently, the talks of the metaverse. It is real and it’s going to be knocking at your doorstep sooner than you had expected. Brands need to incorporate a better UX for their users. For example, if you are a makeup brand, think about having an AR (augmented reality) interface for your users where they can visit and try different shades of lipstick right on your application. Another feature which you can add is AI powered chatbots, that allow for users coming into site to have a 24/7 source of assistance that can help your users to find information about your product.

Case Studies: Top social media marketing strategies

What a better way to understand a concept than reading about examples or case studies about some of the best campaigns undertaken from big brands on social media.

Starbucks – #Whatsyourname

This particular campaign was undertaken by Starbucks UK to put a light on the social cause of supporting gender diverse youths. This campaign was focused on creating educational content for its users so that they can create an awareness for a social topic through their campaigns. Starbucks partnered up with the gender diversity charity Mermaids to better understand gender diverse youths and create an awareness campaign around it.

Apple - #ShotOniPhone

In 2015 Apple launch this campaign for users to post on Instagram with the #ShotOniPhone hashtag for a chance to be featured on one of Apple's 10,000 billboards around the world. They doubled down in 2017 with opening up their own Instagram account to keep the momentum going. As of the time of posting this, the hashtag as about 27M entries.

Spotify - #SpotifyWrapped

Every year in December everyone's timelines are full of their friends' Spotify statistics for the year. This genius campaign plays on the fact that music is so special and personal to everyone, and they want to share their music taste with their friends. It's the equivalent of jumping into your friend's car and they won't stop playing their new Bad Bunny CD (I might be that friend…).

We are still building the coso.ai platform, but soon it will link in with your media library and analyse the latest social trends to automatically populate your social media content calendar with much of the content talked about in this post. If you want to get early access, you can join the waitlist on our homepage.