5 Reasons Your Social Media Marketing Campaign Bombed

October 20, 2017 by

Didn’t get what you expected from your last Social Media Marketing campaign? Here’s why.

Social Media Mistakes

Top B2B Social Media Mistakes to Avoid 

Growing a personal brand on social media takes trial and error. Avoid these mistakes to optimize your business investment in social media marketing services.

You have invested a great deal of your marketing budget and valuable time in social media marketing, but you may not be getting the return on investment (ROI) you hoped for. You’ve read about other businesses who are thriving on Twitter, attracting customers from Pinterest and Instagram, and making money from targeted Facebook ads, but yours isn’t one of them.

Before you pull the plug on your social media marketing campaign, take time to review what is and isn’t working and refine your strategy. When trying to assess what works, be sure not to skip over the basics. Review the following key areas every quarter.

Not paying attention to some of these simple rules could be the reason why your campaigns are tanking every month. Remember to invest in a social media marketing strategy upfront, before engaging in social media, to avoid making critical mistakes.

Common mistakes that founders make when marketing their products or services on social media platforms include not understanding their customer base, not tailoring their messaging to the specific needs of their audience, and failing to create a clear and compelling value proposition.

By prioritizing strategic marketing capabilities and resources, you can better determine the proper communication channels to reach your target audience and allocate the necessary resources to achieve your goals.

What are the top social media marketing mistakes businesses make?

When you try to appeal to everyone, you appeal to no one.

You don’t know who your target audience is. First, do you really know who your customers are? Are they teens, young millennials, or baby boomers? Mostly men or women? The content that you put up on social media should be of interest to your customers, but you need to know who they are first. If you’re unsure, spend some time researching who is buying your product or services and who is engaging with your content. If you don’t have a crystal-clear idea of who your buyer persona is, your Facebook advertising campaign will also underperform.

You don’t know what your target audience likes. You can’t create a lookalike audience if you don’t understand what the audience looks like to begin with. Do you know who your audience is and what other pages they like? Are they using their phones to access social media or are they more likely to use a desktop computer? Would they respond better to an email campaign or a paid search ad on Google? These are important questions to think about for your audience to reach them.

You have no rich media optimization. Your page speed times are painfully slow. You use the same headshot in every press interview and social media post. Your posts are not properly tagged or titled. All of this makes crawling, indexing, and optimization very hard. If Google can’t find your content, how can anyone else? Make sure your landing pages are mobile-optimized to increase search visibility and boost organic results on Google. Optimize all of your content to increase visibility on the web and in the metaverse.

You put all of your digital eggs in one basket. You cannot rely solely on any individual social media platform to promote your business. Platforms come and go. This is why it is better to diversify your risk and resource allocation across different platforms.

You never look at analytics. What content is performing the best with your target audience? Do they like images, video or long-form content best? Out of the content you created, what generated the highest share count? If your followers love to engage with pictures but do not seem interested in back-and-forth discussion, Instagram may be a better choice. Measure the shareability then tweak accordingly. Also, be sure to dig deeper than basic Facebook or Twitter insights. Familiarize yourself with Google Search Console and Google Analytics. Review how much traffic is being driven from social media back to your website, and look at the sources that are driving inbound leads to your site.

You post external links instead of native content. Wondering why your posts don’t attract more views on Instagram or TikTok? It could be because you’re not uploading videos and photos natively. When you use external links, your posts lack the seamless integration and high quality that make native posts so appealing. To upload a photo natively, obtain the raw file and post it directly to the platform of choice. Additionally, you should always fill out all of the description fields for rich media optimizations. This descriptor information and ALT text can help people find your content when they are searching for the topic online in the image section of Google.

You spread yourself too thin. Are you spending hours filtering photos for Instagram and seeing little to no results? Your target clientele may not be active users on Instagram. According to studies, the average American spends roughly 40 minutes per day on Facebook. This may be a ripe opportunity that you have completely looked past if you are more focused on Instagram or Snapchat. You need to find out where your customers are and then focus on the social media networks that perform best with your prospects. For example, your target clientele might want six-second Snapchat videos versus long YouTube videos. Do not spread yourself thin just to make sure you are “everywhere.”

You create boring content. Is your content even shareable? For example, you want your customers to know what a great staff you have and you are posting office photos daily. While customers care about customer service, if they are not sharing or commenting on these photos, stop posting them. Instead, try focusing on the benefits of your products and services and provide tips or articles that help your customers live better lives. Stop wasting time creating content that your customers and users are not engaging with. Rule of thumb: if you wouldn’t share the content you are creating, stop creating it. If you can’t personally see yourself even giving it a measly like, why would someone else like it?

You don’t respond. Are you tweeting out questions and not responding when your customers answer? Do your followers tweet and tag you, but you don’t interact with them? According to Entrepreneur Magazine, almost half of the millennial segment — and one in three consumers overall — say they are influenced by social media and use it to make purchasing decisions. Customers build relationships with companies through social media, so you need to take time and respond to them. If they do not see that you are responding, they will leave you behind in the social media dust.

Other social media marketing mistakes include:

  • Buying followers
  • Low-quality photos
  • Forgetting to remove the URL slug from a post
  • Retweeting tweets without adding editorial commentary to posts
  • Forgetting to check your other inbox for incoming sales messages from leads
  • Not replying to comments
  • Forgetting to remove and update admins when you change agencies
  • Not registering your social media name/handle on a social media platform

But really, the number one reason why your social media campaign bombed? Because you are inconsistent. Social media is a daily practice. You have to post consistently to build an audience and get results. One-hit wonders don’t do very well on social media. You can’t post religiously for two weeks and then ghost your followers for two months. Your audience won’t build up trust in your brand and won’t rely on you to provide consistent, steady content. Lack of consistency is the number one reason most social media campaigns do not take off.

How can you avoid expensive social media business mistakes?

Research. It is important for businesses to conduct market research to figure out which topics and messages will resonate with their target audience the most. Failing to do so can result in wasted agency resources and lost publicity opportunities. Most executives rarely have one specific target audience they are trying to appeal to, and instead, are trying to reach several key audiences and stakeholders. Content needs and preferences differ depending on buyer persona. In this case, it may be best to separate the content into two separate niche websites or separate social media handles.

Acknowledge that effort is a two-way street. Allocate the necessary time to work with the social media marketing agency you hire to ensure that they can meet your goals. This process requires collaborative participation.

Don’t chase marketing trends or fads. They change so quickly, that by the time you’ve implemented something trendy, hip marketers will be on to the next new trend. Instead, focus on staying consistent with your content. Be willing to adapt platforms, but stay consistent with the core mission of your business and why you exist. Find a tone and brand image that works best for your audience. By remaining consistent, your brand will appear reliable and trustworthy. Additionally, you will have a much easier time creating new content, as you will have clear-cut standards and standard operating procedures for social media and content output.

Align platform goals with business goals. When it comes to social media marketing, businesses make the mistake of focusing on social platforms that they use instead of looking at which platforms may be more effective to reach their target audience.

Set clear goals & OKRs. You should have a clear idea of what you want to achieve with your social media marketing efforts. If not, you run the risk of posting for the sake of posting and your efforts will be fruitless due to lack of vision and clarity.

Optimize for social search discovery. It’s important not only to know what your target market wants and needs, but also how to best reach them. What type of content are they expecting to see on your website? What are they searching for? What is the intent of their search and does your content meet that intent or is there a mismatch? Social media platforms like TikTok now serve as micro search engines within the social media site. It is important that people can find you by the terms they search for on each social media platform, in addition to large search engines like Google or Bing.

Remember, cost is not only the amount you pay for services. You also have to calculate the cost of your time, as well as the cost to retrain and onboard new marketing talent.

What is most important to the success of any business is to keep a fresh pipeline full with sales leads and prospects.

Marketing puts the right people in the right funnel to ensure your pipeline never dries out.  

When you work with our social media marketing agency, we ensure your marketing & PR dollars are deployed on key business objectives and consistently executing against organizational OKRs.

Occasionally, small businesses with mediocre content will perform far better than large-scale agency campaigns simply because they post daily and put themselves out there. Half the battle is consistently using the technology and engaging with your audience. Devoting time daily to your presence on social media is a must in order to grow your followers and succeed. Without it, you will perpetually be in a failure-to-launch phase. Even the most expensive New York social media marketing agencies won’t be able to help you if you are not committed to consistently creating new content and measuring the performance.

A successful social media marketing campaign entails executing against agreed-upon key objectives.

Do not keep changing the goal post on the metrics.

Analysis leads to paralysis. Not every social media post is a state of the union Presidential speech. When you over think each post, you kill the momentum and creativity of the campaign.

The only way to know what works is by measuring it against what doesn’t. If you don’t have a large enough sample size of data and post metrics, you will never know if you are effective in your marketing campaign. That means that some posts will not perform, while others soar. This is a good thing because it enables you to do more of what works.

Don’t clip the wings of your agency and micromanage their ability to ship posts, fast.

You want to get the right message out, which is understandable. But that has to be balanced against the timeline you are using to measure an agency, which is often a short period of time ranging from six months to one year.

The longer it takes to get something approved and posted, the less likely the agency will be to score big wins for you.

Ultimately, you need to align your business goals with the reality of day-to-day progress that can be achieved on your behalf. A smaller agency will be laser focused on you. Your business is their priority.

Even if the social media campaign is not your priority, it will be theirs during the engagement.

Give your agency what they need to succeed, or risk the consequences of lack of performance and own the responsibility if you don’t give them what they need to score wins in a condensed time frame.

RECAP:

By avoiding these social media mistakes and taking shared accountability for the success and failure of a campaign, you can help ensure that your social media efforts are successful.

  • Optimize for platform search discovery
  • Conduct market research
  • Set clear goals and OKRs

Every brand has its own set of needs and challenges. However, these tips are great starting points for all brands wanting to grow their presence on social media.

What tips and tricks have you used to grow your audience?

Did you like this post? Click here to read 10 more social media mistakes your business is making 

 

TOP NEW YORK SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING AGENCY | RUBY MEDIA GROUP

There are a number of costly mistakes that businesses make when it comes to social media marketing campaign performance. At Ruby Media Group, we help companies avoid costly social media mistakes that tank performance based on 15 years of experience.

Ruby Media Group helps companies increase their exposure through leveraging social media and digital PR. RMG conducts a thorough deep dive into a companies brand identity, and then creates a digital footprint and comprehensive strategy to execute against. Specialties include content creation, strategic planning, social media management, and digital public relations. RMG helps clients shine in the digital space by extracting their strengths, developing story ideas, and crafting compelling news angles to ensure journalists go to their clients first as story sources and thought leaders. Ruby Media Group creates strategic, creative, measurable targeted campaigns to achieve your organization’s strategic business growth objectives. Contact us today to learn how we can help your business avoid costly social media mistakes that result in low conversion rates. Get started increasing engagement today.

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