It doesn’t matter if your business is a brick and mortar setup or exists only on the internet, social media is the real game changer and the ‘most valuable player’ in the life of your business. The best and the most feasible way to reach your audience – be it the customers, the stakeholders or just another business, social media wields unimaginable power, the proof of which is some gobsmacking statistics.

 

According to the Global Digital Report 2018, the number of social media users worldwide in 2018 was 3.196 billion, up 13 percent year-on-year.

However, the information above is of little use until you know how to use this ‘unimaginably powerful’ tool. In this blog, we will be discussing the 10 Social Media Marketing strategies that can contribute a lot to the growth of your business in 2019.

1. Listen to consumers and competitors: Needless to say, you should know who you are talking to on your social media platform. You need to have a complete idea of what your customers are talking about, what your competitors are up to, and who you are marketing to. Precisely, you need to gather data – the building block for any social media strategy. However, with the increase in noise across these platforms, it is getting harder and harder to keep a tab on everything. Hence, you need to invest time in smart work. Instead of relying on the manual workforce, use Artificial Intelligence. Sentione, a social listening tool, can help you gather all the relevant data for a flawless social media marketing campaign. It allows you to monitor keywords across social media and the web, find relevant influencers for your brand, perform market research, and learn more about your audience.

2. Dynamic Video Advertising on Facebook: Wouldn’t it be great if you could show one product in different contexts depending on who is seeing it? Idomoo, Facebook’s marketing partner makes it possible. When it comes to social media advertising, video advertising wins the game by having the highest click-through rate and yielding maximum conversions. Idomoo gives you the advantage of making video advertising personalised by creating dynamic Ad videos at scale.

 3. Amplify branding: Here’s a social media fact that you need to know – Even visuals have language, and social media majorly runs on visuals. When we talk about branding, we refer to the image that you have set for your brand in the minds of the audience. This image is created by the kind of visuals and content you use – and these should be consistent in nature. Your visuals cannot have striking differences because this way, you’ll be making it harder for your audience to recognize your brand. It is essential that your social media channels are consistent with one distinctly branded visual image. PromoRepublic is a platform that allows you to create branded visuals for social media posts and also schedule them with an AI-powered posting calendar. You can also use and customize assets from their evergrowing libraries or build your own from scratch.

4. Influencer marketing: Influencer Marketing gives you the best of both worlds – real and virtual. While the influencer’s outreach on social media is an added advantage to your brand, the credibility and popularity of the influencer is directly proportional to your leads and conversions. Many businesses, especially those operating solely through the web, are adopting the Influencer Marketing strategy and have achieved amazing results from the same.

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Ridhi Dogra does an influencer marketing campaign for Doree, a designer clothing store in Mumbai. 

5. Upload Stories and Go Live: Two of the major social media channels, Facebook and Instagram, give their users the option of going live. To mark the second anniversary of Facebook Live, the social media giant came up with an infographic that shared some mammoth stats, one of which is that Facebook Live generates 6 times more interactions than regular videos. Instagram allows you to upload stories that stay for 24 hours, wherein you can talk about your product, or show how you work, go behind the scenes, and much more. Going live is a risky task, given that it involves the highest risk of making mistakes that might be hard to cover, but at the same time, it also helps you build trust within the audience who will respect the transparency that you wish to keep between you and your customers.

This a great opportunity for you to improve your brand awareness among instagram users and you can use it by leveraging the instagrammability of your brand. Learn how to leverage instagrammabilty of your brand and then apply these principles to your instagram account.

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Stories are an effective way to interact with the audience.

6. AI-driven customer service: With people becoming more and more comfortable with Artificial Intelligence, interacting with them round the clock is getting easier. Gone are the days when a human had to be present to take orders or solve customer queries because chatbots do it all these days. Emil Kristensen, the Chief Marketing Officer at Sleeknote says, “You can create a Facebook chatbot to do just about anything. Whether it’s order/shipment tracking, customer service, order taking, customer surveys, or finding products–there’s a chatbot that can do each of these, and help you make sales on autopilot while still providing personalized service to your customers.”

7. Consistency: When we talk of consistency, we talk about the frequency of posting and what you post. While you should be consistent with the nature of posts that go up on your social media channels – the visuals, the language, etc., you also need to make sure that you are engaging with the audience at least once in two days. Consistency is the key to brand recognition, driving customer perception and engagement. Ultimately, through all of this, you will see results and ROI.

8. Continuous demographic research: The trends we follow, the words we use, and the things we talk about change at the speed of light. You need to be aware of the latest trends within the demographic that you serve and target and tap the opportunity of tailoring content that the audience will relate to. This will help you catch more eyeballs.

9. Set of 50 hashtags: Hashtags are the bars on which hangs the growth of your account. Hence, it is important that you do the research work on the hashtags that work you – it can even mean looking at what kind of hashtags your competitors are using and tweaking them a little. You need to collect a set of 50 hashtags that you think will work perfectly for your brand. This will help you develop a good niche for the growth of the account.

10. Make the most of IGTV: Instagram TV, or IGTV, is an amazing tool to find new people and grow your account because, like Instagram posts, IGTV also allows you to add hashtags to your videos, and that too, thirty of them. With vertical videos gaining more and more popularity and acceptance, tapping the wonderful platform of IGTV is something that you must consider if you wish to grow your audience base, your popularity and your brand.

Chanel’s IGTV talks about everything – right from the brand’s new collections to the right looks and accessories for the season.