Hook Your Audience with Strategic Social Media Marketing

Learning to implement social media marketing is a lot like learning to fish. Despite all the different reels, colorful tackle and local jargon, it’s actually super easy. Create content, publish content, rinse and repeat. Here’s the catch: no matter how much you learn, social media marketing–like fishing–takes strategy and time.

From tweets to photo carousels to the infamous TikTok video, the internet’s array of social platforms is a hotbed of opportunity. Facebook boasts over 2 billion active users, with TikTok and Instagram both clocking in with over 1 billion and counting - holding down the number 1 and 2 rankings, respectively, in most downloaded apps of 2022. By implementing social media marketing into your integrated marketing initiative, there is virtually no limit to your brand’s reach.

Social media marketing provides the unique–and critical–opportunity to connect directly with your audience, generating and guiding conversation around your brand while providing personalized customer service. A successful social media marketing campaign will result in ever-expanding brand awareness and loyalty, increased web traffic, improved SEO and constant opportunities to collect consumer data.

Now is when strategy comes into play. You can post online all day, but without a social media marketing strategy, you’ll never reap the benefits. Applying even the simplest social media marketing strategies can result in endless rewards. Here’s how to do it:

Have a plan:
Understand and maintain your brand identity. Know your audience and pinpoint the information they want. Figure out the best ways to convey that information–on which platform, using which medium, with what content style, and at what times. Engage, engage, engage:
Be a part of the conversation you stir up. If someone comments on your post, comment back. Yes, every time. Stay consistent:
Commit to social media management week after week (after week) without fail. Publishing content and engaging with consistency will help you build trust surrounding your brand.

Simple, right? It can be if you’ve got the time.

Understanding your brand identity means crafting it in the first place. It takes time–a lot of it–to develop your brand’s story and voice in a meaningful way. It takes even more time to build trust around your brand through consistency. When implementing social media marketing, this looks not only like perpetually churning out new content, but ensuring that every single piece of that content, from the imagery and audio to the caption and tags, is meticulously carved out from the original story.

Pro-tip: Use a content calendar.

Here at Springer Studios, we swear by content calendars, as they make it possible for us to create, approve and schedule a month’s worth of social posts in a single day. We use a calendar that will publish our content for us, so all we have to do is spend a few hours planning and inputting content before we let the calendar do the rest. Whether you hire an agency or go the DIY route, a content calendar will up your social media management game by setting your social posting to auto-pilot.

So you’ve got your brand identity down, created excellent content, and loaded it all into your content calendar. Awesome. You’re halfway there.

Now comes the ultra-important and ultra-time-consuming task of engagement. Social media marketing offers you the precious chance to communicate directly with your audience. This means responding to every message, liking and replying to every comment, and even engaging with posts that aren’t your own to ensure you stay relevant in the all-powerful algorithm.

Publishing content with painstaking consistency coupled with a commitment to on-brand participation in the comment section is the key to a successful social media marketing campaign.

If learning social media marketing is like learning to fish, then practicing social media marketing is like, well: fishing. It will always necessitate strategy, and it is famously time-consuming. There are plenty of fish in the sea, and you can have them all with on-point social media marketing.