5 Reasons Why Social Media Marketing Won’t Work

As a digital marketing agency, we get a lot of questions from our clients about what they should be doing on social media.

Social media marketing can work well if you know where to invest your time and resources. There are countless strategies and platforms you can use – some are better than others. Although for most businesses, your social media marketing efforts are more likely to fail rather than succeed. We’ll explain why that happens… but first, you should understand the importance of getting things right:

Why Social Media Marketing Works

Over 3.6 billion people used social media worldwide in 2020. This number is expected to increase to 4.41 billion by 2025. The sheer number of people using these platforms alone is enough for you to make social media part of your marketing strategy.

Here are some reasons why social media marketing is important:

• Your clients are online. So are your competitors.
• You can connect and expand your relationship with your customers.
• You can use it to learn about your target audience.
• Increase your brand awareness.
• Promote your products and services.
• You can use it to expand your customer service capabilities.

Social media marketing works best when you’re helping customers and entertaining your audience. Otherwise, you run into these problems:

Why Social Media Marketing Won’t Work

There are a lot of common mistakes companies make online. Most of them are innocent oversights that you can overcome. Here are some mistakes many social marketers have made in the past that you don’t have to repeat:

1. Failure to understand your audience: Your messaging needs to be specific to be most effective. Forgetting to do this will make it more challenging to connect with your customers.

2. Too much self-promotion: There is a time and place to plug your products, services, and brand. But there is so much more to social media marketing.  Focus on providing a variety of content that your customers are looking for. Add value to their social feeds.

3. Performance isn’t tracked: Social media platforms provide you with a wide variety of metrics about your audience and your posts’ effectiveness. Use them!! Find out what your audience likes and tune your strategy accordingly.

4. Lack of consistency: Build a schedule. You need to be consistent and active on social platforms over an extended period of time to build fame. Publishing regularly gives your audience a reason to come back frequently and engage with your brand.

5. You are too concerned about the number of followers: The quantity of followers you have is not as important as the quality of people following your brand. Instead of thinking of easier ways to get more followers… think about reasons people will actually want to follow you instead.

How To Do Social Media Marketing

Here are 5 effective social media tactics our digital marketing agency uses that you should consider:

1. Be authentic: People want to engage with brands that have personality. Avoid being too professional. People want to have real conversations. Make your social accounts as “human” as possible.

2. Be a great storyteller: Who doesn’t love a great story? Think of each one of your posts as a mini-story or as part of your larger brand story. People view stories as more meaningful and interesting.

3. Be part of the conversation: Most companies just dump their content and leave, forgetting the “social” aspect of “social” media. Ask questions, engage with comments, participate in conversations outside of your brand pages. Don’t be shy!

4. Master a few platforms, then expand: Some social platforms will provide you with a better return than others. Focus on the spaces where your audience is the most active before you go searching for others.

5. Customize your content based on the platform: What you post, messaging styles, the types of conversations, and how you interact changes based on the platform. Someone’s LinkedIn profile often looks very different from their Twitter or Facebook accounts. Adjust your tone accordingly.

Social media marketing can be highly effective if you do it right.  Hopefully, this list will get you thinking about some improvements you can make. If you’re just getting started with social media marketing and need a boost, consider running social advertising campaigns first to gain a following. There is a lot of competition online so paying for a bit of fame pays off.

The Marketing Garage is an award-winning Toronto digital marketing agency that cuts through the social media marketing hype to deliver real results. Our unbiased, data-driven audits help you understand what’s working. And what’s not. Read some marketing case studies or give us a call to pop the hood on your marketing.

The Marketing Garage is an award-winning Toronto digital marketing company that has extensive experience in cultivating effective digital marketing strategies. We help businesses in many different sectors across North America fix their online marketing and branding. Our data-driven mix of SEO and digital marketing process gets real results.