5 Ways to Get the Most Out of Social Media Marketing for Startups

Social media has changed how individuals and businesses can build an audience, learn how to get the most out of social media marketing for startups.

Social Media Marketing for Startups

Image Source: Vecteezy

 

If your startup is yet to harness the power of social media, the chances are that you’re missing out on masses of conversion opportunities. Social networks have brought transformative levels of disruption to traditional marketing channels, and have become a leading source of brand promotion, information, and sentiment. 

 

This is perhaps unsurprising. After all, there are 2.95 billion users on Facebook, 2.5 billion on YouTube, 2 billion on Instagram, and over 1 billion and counting on TikTok. This means that generating social media marketing campaigns is essential in promoting your business online. 

 

But how can you make the most of your social presence? As a startup, cost-effective promotion is everything, so let’s take a look at the best ways of getting the most out of social media marketing for less: 

1. Identify Who Your Target Audience is

 

The most important consideration to take when working to optimize your social media strategy is to identify your target audience. There’s no point in taking the time to think up creative content and engaging video campaigns if you’re preaching to the wrong social media users. 

 

To help, keep in mind your customer profile, and always consider key metrics like: 

  • Demographics
  • Interests
  • Location
  • The accounts your target audience follows
  • Frequency of social media usage
  • Any other trends of note

 

These considerations can help you to forge your own strategies that can continually deliver success and improve your conversion rates by appealing to the right audience. 

Although your specific strategies will vary depending on your industry and goals, the fundamental metrics to inform your decisions and content plans will always be the same.

2. Plan Your Content Ahead of Time

 

While it can be tempting to rely on your wits when it comes to creating and posting content, it can be a mistake to build marketing materials on the fly. Although it might seem better to wait for a quiet moment to create content, this could actually be a more stressful and time-intensive approach in the long run.

 

By setting yourself up with a social media content calendar, you’ll have the ability to plan your content in advance to help overcome the risks of writer’s block or any last-minute rushes to come up with ideas. This can also help you to generate a blend of different content types to keep your audience engaged. 

 

Here, it’s worth looking at important considerations like: 

  • The type of content you’ll be posting (for instance, blog posts, videos, infographics)
  • When your content will be posted
  • Which social platform you’ll publish it to
  • How you’ll link to on-site content
  • The way you’ll describe your content
  • Upcoming holidays or events to create campaigns for
  • Choice of hashtags

 

Although this may seem like a lot to keep on top of, many platforms offer free content calendar templates that make the process of planning your campaigns in advance far easier. 

3. Seek to Spark a Conversation with Your Audience

 

Social media is the single best place to discover exactly what your audience thinks about your startup. Think of it as a perpetual free focus group. Here, you can engage with your followers to see what they think about your ideas, respond instantly to their inquiries or concerns, and actively gauge their sentiment towards your brand or products. 

 

For audience engagement to work effectively, it requires more time spent on the company’s social media platforms, and to get the best results, it’s worth establishing a policy where you respond to as much feedback, compliments, queries, and complaints as possible. 

 

Although your interactions may not always be 100% positive, ask questions on your posts–with more imaginative questions far better for generating more engagement. 

As we can see from the above tweet from Waterstones, creative posts that encourage followers to get creative can be a great way of generating vibrant conversations. Simply asking what users think about a relevant subject can also work, but more imaginative conversation starters can certainly go a long way to building familiarity and brand loyalty. 

4. Content Curation can be a Powerful Low-Cost Tool

 

Curated content can be an excellent way of generating social proof for your business and building brand loyalty without actually having to create your own content. There are many ways to engage in content curation. For instance, you could create a competition for users to upload a creative image of your product, or set up a caption competition on an image relevant to your industry. 

 

When users engage in your brand and your products or services online, they can produce their own content that you can utilize on your own account. 

 

Here, we can see Specsavers curating content to good effect on Instagram by sharing images of users wearing their products. 

content curation

This can be a cost-effective way of keeping active on social media, and your followers can see your curated images of others enjoying your products as a means of extra brand advocacy. 

5. Make Sure that You’re Linking to a High Quality Website

 

For many startups, your social media goal will be to generate more brand awareness and traffic back to your website landing pages. But there’s little point in optimizing your social media marketing campaigns if there isn’t a credible website to link back to. 

 

Creating a usable and attractive website for prospective customers to navigate to is a core component of your social media marketing. While this can be a daunting task, there are many strong web templates and themes available online that can help to prevent bounce backs and keep visitors engaged in your pages for longer. 

 

Social Media Marketing for Startups is a very powerful tool to use as a means of building a reputation and attracting more prospective customers. Although it’s not easy to generate an effective social media campaign on the fly, with the right tools and pre-planning, it can be a profitable marketing strategy.