Social media marketing offers great opportunities for customer interaction, lead generation, and sales. By using social networks, you can find new customers and also connect with your existing ones, extending their relationships with your brand. However, many social media marketers rarely claim to have seen these advantages. Why is that? Challenges. Here are three common challenges you might still face and ways to solve them for good.
1. Securing resources and time
According to an eMarketer survey, 46% enterprise companies find securing internal resources extremely challenging. That’s not very surprising. When was the last time you asked your boss to hire an extra hand for social media marketing? If it wasn’t too long ago, you’ll remember the sting of being turned down after ineffectively sharing your workload issues. Everyone assumes that social media managers simply tweet. Why should any company need more than one of those employees?
Solution
The simplest solution to this problem? Subscribe to a reliable social media management tool. Choose one that automates/organizes your most time-consuming tasks, so you can make room for tasks that actually contribute to your goals. Here are a few great examples of tools.
DrumUp for social media and content marketing
Using DrumUp, which a social media manager tool, you can schedule social media posts in advance, store drafts/completed ideas in organized folders, schedule across multiple accounts, curate content that your audience will appreciate, automate content sharing from RSS feeds (of your blog or interesting websites) and automate content sharing from libraries or pre-filled folders of your best evergreen content.
Canva for easy social media graphic designing
Using Canva, which is a graph designing tool, you can choose from optimized templates for sharing graphics on different social platforms. The tool also stocks templates for infographics, blog graphics, and so many other purposes, so you design-time is significantly reduced. If you have standard colors and fonts for your brand, you can also save your work on Canva and reuse the same templates to create quick social media graphics.
2. Proving an ROI
Proving the ROI of your social media marketing activities is as challenging as it is essential. That’s why many social media marketers are limited to small budgets and resources. And most of them dislike month end reviews and presentations. It’s not easy to present results that can’t be linked to company progress and revenue. However, it’s critical to do so when trying to acquire a bigger budget that has to be taken away from another element of marketing or from another department.
Solution
An important part of proving an ROI is ensuring that there is one in the first place, by sharing effective content. Next, you should aim at securing the metrics that you can reliably measure.
Quintly for social media engagement metrics
Using Quintly, which is a social media analytics tool, you can measure social media engagement, benchmark engagement metrics of different months and set and track your social media KPIs to to ensure that your efforts are headed in the right direction. You can also use the tool to analyze profiles of different influencers to identify key people with whom you can work. If you’re looking for simple social media engagement metrics, you can probably manage with a simpler tool like DrumUp.
Google Campaign URL builder to track social media referrals
Using Google Campaign URL builder, you can track social media referrals to your KPIs through your website. What it entails is simply creating unique URLs for each social media post and making note of them. If you have Google Analytics integrated with your website/blog, you will be able to see the unique URLs in the referrals and conversions columns.
3. Consistently creating engaging content
Many social media managers begin their stints at different companies with a lot of super-creative and effective content. But as time passes, ideas dry up and perspectives get fixed. It becomes tough for inhouse social media marketers to see the same products in fresh and exciting perspectives, hindering their marketing performance. An important part of social media marketing is consistently churning-out the right content at a medium-high frequency to compete with increasingly crowded feeds.
Solution
Some marketers rely on quarterly reviews and research to refresh their social media content strategies. Others outsource work or hire influencers to add freshness to their social media presences.
Upwork to outsource social media content creation
Upwork, which a freelancer recruitment platform, clearly works, because there are 1000s of content creation jobs posted on the portal every single day, many probably from returning customers. Using Upwork, you can run writing project experiments with different social media content creation freelancers. And once you’ve worked with one for too long, you can always find someone new with whom to work.
Brand24 for social media content inspiration
Using Brand24, which is a social media monitoring tool, you can set-up keywords to collect different kinds of social media/blog content to use as inspiration for fresh content. Instead of setting up only the obvious keywords, you should extend the basics to include long-tailed keywords to get more diverse content pieces for inspiration.
Wrap
The potential that social media marketing holds is rarely justified by the results that many social media marketers see. By effectively addressing common social media marketing pain-points, marketers can push past the mediocre and transform the effect of social media marketing on their businesses.