Gaining exposure and building a community on social media are challenging feats, especially with the levels of competition on any given platform. Some brands think that sharing product highlights on their social media pages is enough, but they aren’t–these tactics aren’t getting the traction the posts need to impact the social users’ purchase decisions. So think again if you think posting will do, and the rest will take care of itself. Apparently, you are doing social marketing wrong.
Of course, the right social media marketing services provider can turn the tables for you, but it pays to know what you are doing wrong exactly to know which areas you need to improve on. These are the reasons why your social media campaign failed.
Probable reasons why your social media campaign is not working
1) Targeted the wrong social media platform
We get it, there are far too many social media platforms that it can get confusing which ones to concentrate your attention and resources on. So what’s the workaround?
Ultimately, you need to find the social platform with the best fit. To determine if there’s a fit, ask yourself these questions.
- What are the purposes of using this and that platform?
- What do you want to achieve, and how would you like to achieve them?
- What are the compromises that you are willing to make?
Let’s take Facebook, for example. As of February 2022, it has 2.91 billion monthly active users, including all age brackets. So there’s the chance of capturing a sizable market share in this platform. However, Facebook is mainly used to connect with your target audience and build a community around your brand, products, and services. So you build relationships, awareness, and loyalty through genuine interaction with your audience. The downside is that it takes time to build communities unless you spend on Facebook advertising.
So if you are selling lifestyle, household, or family-oriented products, you may concentrate on Facebook. After all, you can create a business page, and it has a marketplace where you can post product listings. Nonetheless, you also need to invest in social ads to target the right users to buy your products.
You want to be on social media platforms that have conversion value. Such value differs depending on the platform that you are using. So concentrate on those that will give you maximum conversion value.
2) Had limited information on the target audience
When doing business online, it is not enough to know your product like the back of your hand. You must have an in-depth knowledge of your target audience too. In addition, you want to align your marketing strategy, goals, and objectives with your target market’s needs and preferences.
In marketing, there is an approach called targeted marketing. This purports to raise awareness among a particular target, which can be a subset of a total addressable target market or audience. For instance, marketing maternity dresses for pregnant women. Such an approach guides you in creating content that resonates with your audience, providing them with the information they want to see, read, or hear.
Not embracing targeted marketing would incur costs and not generate the expected results and returns. For instance, the more you know about your target audience, the more effective you would be in building a campaign and tweaking it if necessary. So there will be structure and a more focused approach to organic and paid social media marketing initiatives.
3) Compromised interaction through excessive self-promotion
When doing a social campaign, mindlessly posting content hoping that the right people will see it is a waste of time. Brands are expected to participate in activities that are not directly business-related. For example, having a playful exchange with your followers, liking their posts, asking questions or polls, etc. These build rapport with your followers and create a strong reputation within your industry.
This means staying away from posting aggressively, especially irrelevant posts. Updates that do not align with your audience’s values will hurt your brand and reputation. In social media, you cannot just publish posts to make a sale. Social media is all about connecting with people, so pull back on sale-sy or overtly promotional posts.
There is always a time to push marketing messages online. However, don’t think of social media as a billboard that you paid for to convey marketing messages to your audience. Instead of positive engagement, you would only experience a backlash or followers purge wherein your followers unfollow or block you.
4) Lacked content customization and optimization
Now that you decided to be on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter and are armed with the proper knowledge about your target market on these platforms, what’s the next step?
Remember that different platforms have varying content requirements even if you are marketing the same brand. Therefore, you have to respect the uniqueness of each social media platform by creating content for each. For example, if you post the same content on Facebook and Instagram, people will see the posts twice. As a result, two things will happen: 1) excessive exposure and 2) information overload. None of these will do your brand any good.
Another vital thing to remember with cross-posting is that the content may look on Facebook, but not necessarily on Instagram. So you need to use a tool or app that allows you to preview how the posts look before hitting the publish or schedule button. You need to tailor the content to meet each platform’s content standards. If not, the post might confuse your followers and urge them to unfollow you instead.
For social content optimization purposes, make sure that your posts are composed of the following:
- High-quality images that suit the size or pixel requirements of the platform
- Target keywords
- Attention-grabbing headlines
- A compelling call to action
- Appropriate hashtags
5) Lacked consistency in publishing posts and updates
Since engagement is the lifeblood of social media campaigns, you may easily get discouraged when followers do not react to your posts. There are two reasons for this–one could be any of the above mentioned while the other is inconsistencies in posting.
Time is crucial when doing Facebook or Instagram marketing. The right path is to show your followers how serious you are and that you care about them by posting regularly. By doing so, you will build a strong followers base and gain their trust enough to buy from you and recommend your brand to others.
Being consistent on social media requires commitment, though. Creating a social calendar is one way to make sure you serve your followers the content they can interact with. But, as with generating great content, scheduling posts also requires dedication and consistency.
But if you don’t have the time to devote to this, Optimind has a social team that can do both: create and schedule well-optimized social content. We can do highly targeted social advertising as well. Our social media marketing process starts with determining which profiles you should concentrate on and why. Thus, if you’re ready to build a social campaign that drives the results you want, call us.
