5 Social Media Strategies That Will Grow Your Business In 2019

Getting results from social media is getting more and more difficult as the “noise” increases. In the US alone, about 88% of businesses use social media for marketing purposes. That is quite a bit of competition, but with the right strategies in place, you can stand out and reach your target audience.   

In this article, I’m going to talk about five social media strategies that will grow your business in 2019, together with useful tools to help you put together each of the strategies in this list.  

1. Listen to your customers and competitors on social media: Sentione

When it comes to marketing, data has always been of utmost importance; because if you want to succeed at marketing, then you need to know who you’re marketing to, what your competitors are up to, and where your market is heading. With this knowledge, you gain the power to make better marketing decisions and create better marketing strategies.

The question is, how do you get this data for your social media strategy?

The answer: with a social listening tool. 

There are several things that you can learn by monitoring relevant conversations happening online, depending on what your own focus is. But first, you’re going to need some software to help; one of the top social listening tools that you can try is Sentione – it will allow you to monitor keywords across social media and the web, perform market research, find relevant influencers and learn more about your audience.

Here’s what you can do with a good social listening strategy:

• Manage your online reputation by monitoring your brand name: catch any discussion that mentions your brand and jump into the conversation, whether it’s about customer service issues or a potential lead looking into your product.
• Monitor competitors so that you can understand what their digital marketing is and how it’s working for them: where they’re active, how big their audience is and what types of content they create.
• Find better influencers to collaborate with: monitor specific keywords and audiences in order to find the most popular influencers in that niche.
• Understand your audience: who they are, where they’re from, what keywords and hashtags they use the most, what content they prefer, which social accounts they engage with the most, etc.
• Analyze the sentiment of your audience: measure the success of a campaign beyond the conventional metrics by assessing emotional reactions.

2. Use dynamic video advertising on Facebook to boost conversions: Idomoo

When it comes to the undisputed winners of top conversion and click-through rates, there’s no denying that video sits comfortably at the top of the list.   

Another huge trend happening right now has to do with personalization; personalized content is becoming increasingly important as customers clearly prefer it and it consistently leads to higher conversion rates and more sales.

So it definitely comes as no surprise that Facebook now allows you to create Dynamic Ads, which help brands deliver personalized ad experiences using video.

But to make the most of this tool, you need to know your audience and who you’re targeting; in other words, you need data. This way, you can deliver truly personalized experiences more easily and improve your ad campaign’s conversion rates.

To help, you can use Idomoo, a Facebook marketing partner that allows you to create dynamic video ads at scale. To give you an example of how it works, Idomoo’s personalized video engine recently powered a campaign for Auto Trader UK, whereby the Fiat 500X was shown in different contexts, such as camping, date nights and ski trips, and each creative was shown to different segments based on their Facebook interests and likes. The campaign was a huge success, yielding a 56% clickthrough lift over non-segmented video.

3. Turn your employees into brand ambassadors: Smarp

The third strategy in this list is quite different from the others I covered earlier. This one is all about boosting brand awareness and improving results by leveraging your very own employees.

Employee advocacy basically means promoting a company’s message with the help of its own employees. And social media is the perfect place for this.

Your employees might have a smaller audience, but it’s a highly engaged one; when an employee helps promote their company’s messaging, it can have a significant impact in terms of brand awareness and reach, website traffic and social media engagement.  

In order to help develop an employee advocacy campaign, take the time to plan your strategy:

• Find ways to motivate your team to share your content and build a company culture where advocacy can grow.
• Create clear guidelines, as you don’t want people sharing the wrong things or hindering your company’s image in any way.
• Create and curate relevant content.
• Develop a system that is easy to follow: employees need to be able to access content easily, as well as be able to share as quickly and efficiently as possible.

To help you actually implement your employee advocacy program, one great option is Smarp. This platform facilitates employee engagement and advocacy by providing an internal content hub, where employees can find all of the company’s shareable content and schedule posts for their personal social presences. It’s also a great solution for keeping tabs on what’s happening with various initiatives across departments, as well as maintaining dynamic libraries of assets and resources that commonly need to be accessed.

4. Amplify your branding on social media without a designer: PromoRepublic

I’ve talked about some very different strategies, but now I want to focus on branding – specifically, social media branding. It’s common knowledge by now that visual content drives superior engagement on social media, but posting visual content that isn’t aligned with your brand identity might actually do more harm than good.

Just like any other business presence, your social media channels should be consistent with one distinctly branded visual language. If not, you might come off like an amateur in the eyes of your audience and discourage them from trusting you or engaging with your content.

So not only do you need to make sure your content is well-designed, but you also need to make sure it’s consistent with your brand identity. This can be a real struggle if you don’t have a graphic designer ready at hand.

One solution to overcome this issue is PromoRepublic, an easy-to-use platform that helps you create branded visuals for social posts – and to schedule them with an AI-powered posting calendar. You can pull prefab assets from their constantly growing libraries of seasonal and evergreen visuals, customizing them with your own font choices, backgrounds, logos, colors and more, with just a few clicks – or you create your own from scratch.

5. Reach out to your audience one-on-one: Drift

The final social media strategy I want to talk about has to do with conversational marketing: a one-to-one approach to marketing that can actually help you learn more about your own customers but most importantly, improve your conversions overall by shortening the sales cycle.

The big focus of this marketing strategy is, of course, on the human connection and the conversations happening with your customers – delivering targeted messaging consistently and in real time. However, while social media is all about the conversation, what happens when they get to your website? Once you have a visitor on your website, how can you keep the conversation going?

One solution is to use a tool like Drift, a conversational marketing platform. You can use it as an onsite or in-app chat, to help nurture audience members with discussions similar to those that take place on your various social channels.

And you can also set it up to recognize UTM parameters in your social media links, so that the system knows which channels, topics, or even specific posts prompted them to click through, triggering automated onsite chat that keeps that very same discussion moving forward.

Conclusion

There are many approaches you can take to social media marketing, but ideally, you should implement a mix of different strategies to help boost your results and leave your competitors in the dust.

Because the best way to grow your social media? It’s to experiment with new tactics, leverage data and analytics and continuously optimise your approach.