Why Your Social Media Marketing Never Works Out the Way You Plan
By Kayleigh Alexandra
Social media marketing gives you access to a broad and engaged audience, one that you can turn into long-term customers for your business.
In order to get what you want from your social campaigns you need defined goals, a content journey, and a proper post-campaign review.
Omitting any of those steps is probably the reason why your last social campaign failed — and if you don’t follow my advice — it’s why your future ones might fail too…
Recommended reading: How Instagram Marketing Is Helping Online Sellers
You Don’t Have Clearly Defined & Measurable KPIs
Social media marketing is great for your business – it can broaden the appeal of your brand, introduce your company to new people, and increase revenue for your organization.
But, social media marketing isn’t simply a case of using your platforms and seeing an immediate return for your efforts. In order for your social strategy to work, it needs to be guided by clearly defined & measurable KPIs.
There are 10 social media marketing KPIs that you should track and monitor, but these can be broken down into four metrics:
- Engagement: How many likes, comments, and shares you get
- Reach: The number of people who saw your campaign
- Leads: Sales leads generated as a result of your social media marketing
- Customers: New customers secured because of your campaign
For your Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram marketing to work, you need to know which one of the four metrics above you’re targeting – if you have no focus, or are focusing on the wrong thing, your campaigns will never work.
You’re Not Using Data To Create A Content Journey For Your Audience
Data is a huge issue in social media, and not without good reason – your social channels hold an enormous amount of information on your followers, including details that can have a huge impact on the success of your marketing campaigns.
One of the reasons your past efforts have probably failed, is that you’re not using your audience data effectively.
You should begin by targeting followers that have never engaged with you your business or bought from it before.
Why? Because this ‘cold’ audience will make it simpler to see whether what you’re doing is really working. Facebook Ads makes it easy to use data to create targeted campaigns, enabling you to build custom audiences inside the Facebook Business Manager.
Once you’ve created your custom audience, it’s important you understand the journey they take, and what social content you need to hit them with at each stage. For this example, if your KPI is to get more customers, you should use the 6-step buying process:
- Prospects
- Engage
- Page views
- View content
- Add to cart
- Clients
If your past social media marketing efforts didn’t cover content for each of these 6 stages, then you didn’t do your job of getting people to complete their journey to becoming customers. The following article gives more details on how to map your social media content to your buyer’s journey.
You’re Results-Focused When You Should Be Tactic-Oriented
What do you look at once you’ve run your social media campaigns?
Is it how much money you’ve spent, and how much money your business made?
If that’s the key KPI you set then that’s great, but focusing on the headline figures tells you nothing about how the campaign operated – for your social media marketing to work you can’t be focused purely on results, you also have to review your methods to see where you succeeded, and where you failed.
A key reason for reviewing your campaigns is that you could have achieved results/seen traction due to something you had no input on. For example, there could have been a freak global incident related to the topic of your campaign, or an influencer could have shared one of your posts.
For your campaigns to work they need to be repeatable.
So, to make sure your future campaigns always go the way you want them to, you need to review them in detail; see which tactics worked, and which didn’t and then use this to assess whether you got the results you wanted thanks to tactics (or luck).
No marketing strategy is foolproof. Sometimes the best campaigns fail, and on other occasions the worst ones succeed. For your social media campaigns to work in the way you want them to, you need to be clear about what you want, create a content journey for your audience, and then review the tactics you used (not the results you achieved). Do this and you’ll have a workable and repeatable social media strategy.
