social media marketing tips that works

Social media marketing can be a dynamic powerhouse that solidifies branding, creates quality leads, and drives sales. Or, it can be a big time-wasting, task-oriented dud. The key is to know how to strategically create, carry out, and measure the overall plan.

Businesses trying to achieve successful social media marketing must overcome several common challenges. Carving out enough time, creating high-performing content, and properly measuring the resulting metrics are all aspects that, if handled incorrectly, can tank the plan and leave them with a big goose egg as the outcome.

Don’t do that!

With some planning, companies are more likely to reach and exceed the payoff that got them excited about social media marketing in the first place.

Lucky for you, we have the step-by-step plan laid out.

Follow these 10 easy tips to rock your social media marketing strategy and enjoy 10X return on investment.

Call them what you will – flows, pipelines, journeys – but most marketers are obsessed with “the funnel.” However, leads often take a hike just at the point when you're trying to get them to convert. Luckily, certain PPC and social media advertising formats allow marketers to bypass the leakiest part of the funnel – landing pages – entirely.

Our first social media marketing tip is to eliminate the possibility of losing potential leads at the landing page stage. One of the most effective ways to do this is by using Facebook “Call” buttons in your Facebook ads. This powerful feature allows mobile users (which Facebook users overwhelmingly are, in many cases exclusively so) to call your business directly simply by clicking your Facebook ad – no landing pages, no load times, no vast, gaping chasm into which potential leads disappear forever.

Learn more about Facebook call buttons and other social media marketing hacks in Larry’s post covering his top 10 paid social media hacks of all time.

No time to read this post? We have created a free download for you to read when you have time!

Social Media Marketing Tip #12: Leverage the Power of ‘Life Events’

Targeting the right people with your social media marketing is important. Going after the right people at the right time is incredibly effective – and remarkably simple. Our next tip is to leverage the events in people’s lives to create timely, relevant advertising that targets people during periods of major change with Facebook’s “Life Events” parameter.

We’ve all seen what these “life events” look like on Facebook. Your arch nemesis from high school lands your dream job, your ex-crush gets married to that guy, the high school prom king and queen who’ve been together forever finally have the impossibly cute kid they’ve been threatening to have for years – you know, all the stuff that makes us feel really good about ourselves. Well, you can use these life events as the basis for a marketing campaign.

2. Use an Awesome Visual Storytelling Tool

Find a tool that helps you create visual content that you can use to promote your core content on social media with visual storytelling. With so much content out there, it's important to create visuals that catch attention and encourage your followers to take action.

I write about and speak about a lot of visual content creation tools and Easil is one of my favourite tools for this right now.  Here are some of the reasons why I love it:

• professional quality templates for everything from social media images to posters, banners, ads, business cards and more.
• awesome templates for visual storytelling with visuals such as infographics and Instagram story templates including multi-page Instagram story templates.  

• you can easily re-size your images and create multiple pages.

• you can print your designs (in Australia but coming to the US soon)

• cool filters, text-effects, color palette matching and more!  

Easil is super easy to use and is very "drag-and-drop". It was (apparently) developed for use with clients within lifestyle and entertainment industries so it's real-world tested. I was getting a little tired of the same layouts everywhere and I wanted something that wasn't cookie-cutter.  Easil is fresh and unique so it can definitely help you stand out with your visual storytelling.  

If you fail to plan, you plan to fail. So many businesses make the mistake of blindly jumping into social media marketing without a strategy or plan.

If you can’t answer questions like “why are you on social media?” or “what social media platform features your target audience?” then it’s time to hit the reset button. Start putting together a plan in writing that you and your team can refer to when you need it.

Your social media plan should consist of mini-plans for each social media channel you expect to be active on. You’ll have a plan for your Twitter, Facebook and so forth.

If you’re just getting started, keep your number of active social networking sites to three or less. For most businesses, particularly small businesses, trying to tackle five different social media accounts often results in doing a mediocre job with little to no results.