November 25, 2020
If you want to reach modern consumers where they congregate, you may want to start with a social media marketing strategy. In volume 1, we discussed how to set measurable goals and the metrics you really need to run a business. This helps you gauge performance along the way and maintain solid growth.
In volume 2, we’ll look over understanding your competition and setting up the right channels for your brand.
Chance are your competition is already on social media. In this case, you can learn from what they are already doing—both the good and the bad.
The best way to truly understand your competition is to conduct a competitive analysis of the market. Look at who’s selling the same thing as you and how they’re doing it. Examine the goals they are achieving and the mistakes being made.
Both are learnable instances that will help you set social media targets of your own. This will also help you spot opportunities and places in the market where you can flourish with niche offerings.
One example is if your competition is influential on Facebook and offers a service. You can look to an opposite channel, like Twitter, with a product that branches off of that concept.
Focusing on networks where your audience is underserved is a good way to break into a new market, rather than trying to pull fans away from a dominant brand.
The internet is a vast place and the more you grow, the more people will be talking about your brand. To maintain a solid finger on the pulse, you’re going to need a little help from automation. You cannot possibly listen to every channel online, all the time. That’s where the process of social listening (also called social mentioning) comes in.
Social listening is critical to social media marketing strategies because it answers a lot of questions, like what prospects are saying about your brand, likes and dislikes, and where people are talking about your company the most.
It should come as no surprise that the more you listen, the more informed you will be on how to meet your audience’s expectations, wants, and needs.
It starts by looking at the competition to give you an idea of where to focus. What are they sharing and what are people saying about them? Where is this happening? This will give you some idea of where to look when locating your own social mentions.
There are a variety of ways to discover what people are saying about your brand. The easiest way is to use a social media management tool like Hootsuite or Ahrefs, which will monitor mentions of your business name in real-time, all across the web. You can set up listening streams to look for things like:
As you track things, you may notice a shift in the way channels are used. It might also help you to spot certain campaigns or marketing efforts that people really respond to or ones the audience just doesn’t get. You can then take action accordingly, with data behind the wheel.
This is the kind of intel you need to better inform your own social media marketing strategy.
In this article, we talked about finding a place for your brand online. That begins by researching the competition and asking yourself things like:
This will help you begin your own social mentioning and listening strategies. All of this will enable a business to have a better understanding of where and when to market.
Coming up we’ll look into conducting a social media audit and setting up channels that will make a difference to your bottom line.
Share this article
