Social media marketing research is an essential part of a well-formulated business plan. This is especially true for small to medium-sized businesses. Are you using social media to its fullest advantage? Do you have a well-developed social media marketing research plan in place?
This post is going to show you the 5 essential elements required to ensure you’re getting the most from your social media presence.
#1: Clearly Defined Business Goals
Everything you do on social media should serve the goals that you set. It’s difficult to move forward without a clear path in mind. A business should look closely at their needs and then decide how social media can help them meet those needs.
Create a research strategy around those well-defined needs. Your overall social media marketing campaign can have more than one goal. In most cases, I recommend each one have a main goal and two secondary goals. Then create content around them.
Some goals that are common to all businesses are:
• Improved Brand Awareness
• Customer Retention
• Reduction in Marketing Costs
#2: Goals Led by Clear Objectives
Of course, goals are essentially worthless if you do not have clear objectives in place. For example, a business can set a goal of generating more sales but that goal would be useless without clearly defining how many sales they want to generate and how they plan to generate those sales.
Clear Objective: “We need 100 sales per week. Since our leads convert about 10% of the time, we will need to generate 1,000 new leads every week.”
Not only will your social media marketing campaign be designed to help you achieve that clear objective, but it will also show you more efficient ways of getting from Point A to Point B. That’s why research should always be an objective.
#3: Identification of Ideal Customers
Businesses that suffer from a low engagement on their social media profiles can benefit greatly from this type of research. The reason their engagement is so low is that they do not have an accurate profile built for their ideal customer. Therefore, they need to put in some work.
Launching a social media marketing research campaign can help you discover the types of people who are interested in the products and services you have to offer. Of course, you might have to use a few paid ads to get your profile in front of the right people.
#4: The Perfect Content
Content and social media go hand-in-hand. Any social media marketing campaign will fall flat without valuable content. They must be used in unison to achieve your goals. The three factors that determine the value of content are the type, time of posting, and consistency.
The type of content is determined by the overall marketing strategy. Research generally asks the audience to answer questions and compels them to leave comments. More often than not, a debate will ensue. That debate is where you learn how your business is viewed. You can also use it to define your ideal customer.
#5: Researching Competition
This goes hand-in-hand with creating perfect content. For the purposes of research, questions should be asked that compare something within your business to a similar product/service of a competitor. You can then use the comments to gauge how your business is seen in contrast to your competition.
Engagement is essential to launching a successful social media marketing research campaign. If you pay close attention to the biggest brands, you will find that their campaigns all share these common elements. If you have ever wondered why brands tend to post content that forces a debate, then it’s an effort to learn more about their audience.
Author Bio:
Jacob Haney is a content marketer presently working with Research Optimus, a business research outsourcing company. A writer by day and a reader by night, he is loathed to discuss himself in the third person but can be persuaded to do so from time to time.