Social media has come a long way. Remember the days when Twitter posts were 140 characters and retweets were manual? Yeah, you had to type “RT@” to retweet someone’s tweet.
By the way, Instagram will turn 11 this year. Back in the day, the direct messaging feature wasn’t available on Instagram, and Stories weren’t a thing.
While the evolution of social media is rather nostalgic, it has also made things a bit challenging for brands. Organic reach has reduced, and achieving a consistently high ROI has become challenging.
But by implementing the right strategies, you can overcome these roadblocks and grow your business using social media. Here are five social media hacks that’ll help you boost your ROI.
Why Should Businesses Use Social Media?
The use of social media has increased exponentially over the past decade. As of 2021, 3.6 billion people use social networks, which is nearly half of the global population. So, one major social media benefit that we’ve already established is that it can provide massive reach.
Facebook, the biggest social network, has more than two billion active users. That’s more than the combined population of the U.S., Canada, the European Union, Australia, and Russia.
However, the benefits of social media go beyond reach. Here’s why every business should invest in social media.
- Easier Communication: Brands can contact customers (and vice versa) easily and quickly with social media.
- Networking and Partnerships: Social media also provides networking opportunities by connecting you with influencers and other brands.
- Organic Reach: You can build a following and generate sales on social media without spending a single penny on advertising. You can rely purely on organic reach.
- Boost Website Traffic: Your growth on social media can have a direct influence on your website traffic. You can channel your social followers to your website.
- Customer Feedback: Social media platforms are an excellent place to collect customer feedback. In fact, many brands use Twitter specifically for providing customer support.
- Impress Target Customers: Let’s face it; if you want to convert your potential customers, you need to woo and impress them first. Social media helps you do that. You can show off your product’s strengths and encourage your audience to buy from you.
- Branding: Branding is one of the essential benefits of social media. If you want to communicate values associated with your business, social media is the right place to do so.
- Track Competition: You can analyze what your competitors are doing. If they did something that you feel can help your business, you can take inspiration from them.
All in all, if you want to reach a large audience and engage them quickly, you should exploit social media. Besides, you can also take your social media marketing efforts offline. Local businesses, such as retail stores and restaurants, can use QR codes to boost their social presence. You can create customized QR codes using a QR Code Generator and link them to your social media profile. Customers can scan the code and find you on social media without manually looking for you.
The Problem with Social Media: Why Tracking ROI Is Difficult
Social media used to be great. The competition was low, and reaching your target customers was easier. Social media is still great, but things have become more challenging. Here are some challenges businesses might face on social media.
Declines in Organic Reach: Social networks, particularly Facebook, has plummeted organic reach for brands to boost paid advertising. Facebook posts from brands now reach fewer people. The same effects have also happened on Twitter.
Content Overload: Every business, regardless of its size and type, is on social media. This has led to a hyper-competitive environment, where only brands that stand out will survive.
Lack of Engagement: Some brands can find it difficult to achieve genuine engagement and connection. This is especially true for brands that can’t relate to their audience on an emotional level.
Difficulty Getting Sales: When people go on social media, buying something isn’t what they’re planning. Therefore, brands can have a hard time getting direct sales on social media.
Not Being Able to Measure ROI: Sales shouldn’t be your only goal on social media. Improved engagement and brand awareness can go a long way in growing your business. However, tracking these metrics can be tricky.
Five Social Media Tips to Boost ROI
Social media has become slightly challenging, but it doesn’t mean you reduce your efforts or start looking for alternatives. Social media is more lucrative than ever and can offer colossal opportunities. However, brands need to be a bit smarter now.
Here are five social media tips you should implement to boost ROI for your business.
1. Understand Your Customers (Really Well)
Yeah, understand your customers well. You’ve probably heard this numerous times. But, do you know your customers well? Like, really well?
When creating buyer personas, most brands list generic characteristics like age, location, gender, income, problem, and the like. Well, guess what? Every brand does that, and you’re just joining the crowd.
You need to delve deeper. Are your customers young, open-minded, and fun-loving? And do you have a lot of visual assets to engage them? Try engaging them on Instagram and Snapchat. If they’re middle-aged and you don’t have much media to show, Twitter could be an ideal place to find your audience.
Understanding your customers boils down to research. You need to enter the CIA mode and find whatever you can about your customers. This includes the food they like, the work they do, the clothes they wear, the products they purchase, the sites they surf, etc.
2. Leverage Paid Advertising
As discussed, major social platforms like Facebook and Twitter have allegedly plunged organic reach for brands. While regularly organic social media management is still worth it, it’s not enough. If you want to bring in sales and boost ROI, you need to invest in paid advertising.
Facebook can be a goldmine when it comes to paid ads. While all social networks offer advertising capabilities, the extensive targeting tools Facebook offers are unrivaled. They allow you to amplify your posts based on four objectives: reach, impressions, engagement, and click-throughs.
Based on your goals, you can create a pipeline plan to engage and convert your customers.
3. Learn from the Past Campaigns
Learning from past mistakes is essential, especially when it comes to marketing. Let’s say you blew your Facebook ads account the last time you created a campaign. You got a lot of impressions, but the click-through rate was drastically low.
Pause for a moment and figure out what went wrong. Maybe you targeted the wrong audience. Maybe your headline wasn’t catchy enough. Perhaps you didn’t give your campaign enough time.
Now, when you create your next campaign, keep those mistakes in mind. Tweak your ads by changing the headline or the target audience and see how they perform. Paid advertising on social media is all about trial and error. You need to keep experimenting, learning, and improving.
4. Take Your Efforts Offline
Social media is essentially an online phenomenon. But taking it offline can greatly boost your chances of getting more eyeballs and increasing ROI.
QR codes can help enable social media marketing offline, as discussed earlier. You can use a QR code solution to create QR codes and link them to your social media profiles. Then, you can include these codes in your store, bills, business cards, etc. This way, your customers can find you on social media easily.
5. Shift Your Focus on Selling
Last, don’t focus too much on selling when on social media. It’s all right to share promotional content once in a while; after all, your primary purpose is to increase revenue and ROI. But don’t let it define you on social media.
When crafting a social strategy, focus on engagement. Look for ways to pique your audience’s interest and give them a reason to follow you. Share interesting news and stories. Nowadays, bands also share memes and jokes to keep their audience entertained.
You don’t necessarily need to be a comedian behind the keyboard to engage your customers. Just find ways to keep your audience hooked. Create surveys, encourage user-generated content, launch events, do giveaways, host a webinar, etc. There’s a lot you can do if you decide to be a little creative ;).
Conclusion
Social media has continuously evolved, and it’ll continue to change in the upcoming years. But one thing that’ll always remain constant is engagement. Brands that’ll manage to engage their customers on an emotional level can achieve a consistent flow of sales and a high ROI on social media.