Consider a store in your area. A store with a dark personality, where the shutter is always half-open. The owners serve their few customers by stretching their arms from beneath the shutter. Customers cannot see inside, and the owners are unable to look outside. How would you like to visit such a store? Uncomfortable for sure.

Customers feel the same way about organizations that refuse or fail to remove their veil, stand in the brilliant light of social media, and engage with their customers.

Social media is crucial for all businesses, regardless of size, audience served, or products or services. According to a 2019 poll of the top businesses, social media advertising accounts for 15-20% of their marketing budget. Such is the significance of social media for business.

Ready to make your brand shine on social media? Here are nine tactical tips from the social media marketers of Digital Googly, a social media marketing agency in Kolkata, India, to get you started –

  1. Define your social media marketing goals 

Without the right goals, you will never achieve the right results. The maxim applies to every aspect of your life, including social media marketing. Therefore, before going on a social media platform and publishing a post or two to get going, sit back and think hard about what you want to achieve on social media.

Begin with a big picture. Here are some references –

Local business – engage local followers and grow a greater community presence.

Start-up – build awareness for a new product or service and generate leads.

Big business – provide timely customer service to boost customer loyalty.

After drawing a clear sketch of what you want to achieve, start getting in on the details and flush out your objectives.

Pro tip from the social media marketing agency in Kolkata, India – “make your goals specific, measurable and achievable within a timeframe.”

  1. Pick the Right Social Media Platform

After setting your goals, research the demographics of each social media platform to see where your prospects are hanging out. Along with demographics, study the type of content each social media audience demands and note whether you have the resources to produce such content.

After you decide the platform on which you will be investing your marketing efforts, the next step is identifying your audience.

  1. Identify Your Audience

Do you know the age-old phrase that every great marketer has etched in their minds? It’s – “Know Your Audience!”

You may believe you know who your target audiences are, but this is only the tip of the iceberg. If you’ve never used social media analytics to evaluate your audience, you’ll be astounded by the wealth of information available.

You can, for example, use Facebook Audience Insights to collect aggregated data about your audience. This knowledge will assist you in creating material that will appeal to your prospects.

  1. Engage in relationship building

As the name suggests, social media is a platform to be social and engage with your prospects. What it is certainly not is a place to position adverts and then complain about the poor engagement rate.

To be successful on social media, you need to be a go-getter,” says Digital Googly, a digital marketing company in Kolkata, India.

You must always be willing to engage in dialogue with your prospects to keep them interested and involved.

For example, if you publish a post on social media and one of your followers asks a question in the comments section, rather than dismissing it, respond to their question as quickly as feasible. The better you are at engaging your followers in dialogues in the comment box, the higher your post’s organic ranking will be.

  1. Create a social content calendar

Have you ever planned several quality social media posts for a month, fully engaged yourself in creating and publishing the posts, only to have everything fall apart after a few days?

Consistently posting high-quality material throughout your social media channels is critical for engaging your audience and attracting new followers.

And the reason most businesses fail to achieve such consistency in quality across their social media platforms is that they fail to organize their social media calendar ahead of time, says the SMM experts of the social media marketing agency in Kolkata, India.

Content calendars serve as the foundation for your company’s distribution and promotion across all marketing platforms. A well-thought-out and well-organized social media calendar may assist you in defining your content themes and posting repetition to meet the audience and objectives of each social network.

Here are four key steps that you can take to develop your social media calendar –

  • Determine what types of content your audience responds to
  • Determine how frequently you should post to each social network and profile
  • Create or find great content to share before the deadline
  • Fill up your content calendar with a social publishing tool
  1. Create quality visual content

Visual content is the key to your social media marketing success. The primary reason you should invest in creating quality visual content is that people prefer visuals. Research suggests that online consumers tend to retain only 10% to 20% of the information they read on the net. However, when the same information is presented with visual elements, the retention rate goes up to 65%.

Therefore, with the right visual content, you will attract more of your prospects’ attention and generate more views and engagement.

  1. Find the right time to post your content

You may have read about a couple of studies on Google about the optimal time to post your content. However, imagine if you, along with every other company, started following these studies and posting at the same time. Your messages will get lost amidst an ocean of content.

According to the digital marketing company in Kolkata, India, instead, what you need to do is publish your posts at your optimal send times. You can identify the optimal send times by studying your social media sent messages and examining trends in when your posts get top engagement.

  1. Audit your social presence

Audits of social media platforms are vital. It is a process of analysing your company’s analytics to determine growth, opportunities, and what can be done to improve your social presence.

Here are some data points that you should include in your audit report –

  • Profile information (name and URL)
  • Engagement metrics
  • Publishing metrics
  • Audience demographics
  • Referral traffic
  • Channel specific metrics
  1. Combine organic with paid

If your organic posts do not receive the number of impressions or views that you had hoped for, you can always include a few paid ads between them to give them a boost. Even a handful of paid ads can get you hundreds of new impressions.

Not sure what kind of advertisements to run? Here are some audience research data gathered by the SMM head of Digital Googly, a social media marketing agency in Kolkata, India, to help you plan your ads –

  • Entertainment – 41%
  • Discount offers – 37%
  • Informational – 33%
  • Story – 20%

Comes from a brand that my social circle likes – 10%