Back in May, I briefly covered several social media pain points along with some solutions when tackling this ever-changing aspect of digital marketing. In this blog post, we’re going to look a little more in-depth at strategies to increase the activity of your fan base across social media channels. A lot of science goes into creating and maintaining an engaging brand voice, but there’s no magic pill. The process takes time.

Research is a key component in digital marketing; it helps build a solid foundation for the experimentation that is social media. With that in mind, here are four areas you need to beef up if you want engagement numbers to soar!

Build Your Buyer Persona

Every business has their ideal customer, right? We call these buyer personas. HubSpot defines this as, “a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers.” So, what does this have to do with social media and engagement? You want your content to resonate with your fans and if it’s not speaking to the right audience, engagement doesn’t happen. When content is targeted around buyer personas, it:

1) Answers the questions they have

2) Builds your authority in the industry

3) Solidifies customer trust

All of this drives engagement. If all you know about your consumer is gender and age, that’s pretty broad and won’t deliver results. How do you get to know your ideal customer? Start with some questions:

  • Who am I trying to reach?
  • What are their problems?
  • How can I answer their questions?
  • How can I educate them about my brand?
  • How do I interest them in a product or service without selling to them?

Once you know your ideal customer, crafting quality content that speaks directly to their interests and needs is much easier! I may be biased, but HubSpot has a great buyer persona template that will help you identify and build your ideal customer. After finishing, they’ll send you an editable word document. Can’t make the time to do it now? Download HubSpot’s free buyer persona guide, complete with the template!

Analyze Platform Performance

Remarkable content created around your audience is just one small piece of the pie. A helpful blog post, informative video, enticing product offer, or share-worthy picture isn’t going to travel very far if your social media platforms aren’t performing. This ties back to knowing your customers.  Here are a few key areas that need your attention:

  • Current platform audience: Who’s your current fan base? This is a good benchmark to have. It lets you know if you’re reaching the right people and where you might need to make changes in overall targeting.
  • Posting times: Your audience is online, on different platforms, at various times of the day. Experiment, make notes, and find the ideal times that work for you and gain the most interaction from fans.
  • Platform diversity: Depending on your business, you’re reaching out to different demographics. One social media platform might work better for different audiences. If you find something resonates well with a particular audience, run with it. Likewise, if you find a platform just isn’t cutting it, put your marketing efforts somewhere else.

Check out the Competition and Find Inspiration Accounts

Along with testing your platforms for performance, it’s always a good idea to keep up with what your competition is doing! You share the same audience, so essentially, their customers could be your customers too. Take a look at the type of content they promote. What are they doing that you could try as well? More importantly, what are they NOT doing that could gain you customers and a dedicated fan base?

Inspiration accounts are just as important. These aren’t competitors, but could be in the same type of industry.  Sometimes you get stuck in a rut when it comes to promoting your brand, and these companies are there to simply provide inspiration! They can serve as a resource for a new direction such as:

  • Helping find overall tone
  • Utilizing influencer marketing
  • Ideas for branding with images
  • Video series topics
  • Choosing hashtags
  • Content topic inspiration and more!

The list could really go on and on, but the point is to utilize these similar accounts in order to keep your platforms interesting, engaging and ahead of competitors.

Utilize Advertising

A budget is a must with digital marketing, and that money should leave some room for ad spend.  Advertising goals should align with and support your social media objectives. So, whether it’s increasing your target audience fan base or promoting an offer, make sure it fits with your overall strategy and lay out a plan.

This brings me to my last point.

What do you do with all of this information?

Once you’ve thoroughly covered each of these four steps, create a strategy to measure growth and performance!  Benchmark your data and set some reasonable short-term and long-term goals. Remember, better engagement means better reach and ultimately more visitors and potential customers to your website. So, what are you waiting for? If you find you do need help, this is what Posse Social Media does all day, every day and we’d love to talk!