Nearly a quarter of all social media marketers worry their social strategy is ineffective, according to the 2019 Sprout Social Index.
If that’s just one of your concerns, you’re likely also dealing with these top three challenges.
Read on to learn tactics to overcome them and feel more confident with your company’s social media marketing tactics.
Note: All the below data is from the 2019 Sprout Social Index cited above.
1. Developing social strategies to support business goals
Nearly half (47%) of social media marketers struggle with this one. Leaders are even more likely to grapple with this challenge.
Why is it such a doozy? Often, this problem arises if there’s a gap in understanding between what you want to achieve as a social marketer and how that fits into the objectives your company is working towards.
Social marketers’ rank their top goals on social in this order: increase brand awareness, generate sales leads, increase community engagement, and increase web traffic.
Organic social efforts are a great way to increase brand awareness and foster community engagement. But if your business’s overall goals are primarily to drive sales, boost web traffic, or grow your audience at large, you’ll likely have to develop targeted social advertising campaigns to achieve those goals.
2. Identifying and understanding your target demographic
43% of marketers list this as their greatest challenge.
Before you dive too deeply into who you want your target demographic to be, analyze who’s already following you on your social platforms. You can gather basic demographic information like age, gender and geographical area.
Then, compare that data to your customer persona, which should build atop that basic demographic information to detail your target customer’s interests, behaviors and motivations. From there, fill in the gaps.
Describe the differences between your current social followers and your target customer, and then determine ways you can create more content that will attract the customers you want on the platforms they already visit.
If you don’t have a crystal-clear idea of who you’re targeting, start by surveying your current customer base. You could also try conducting a few polls on your social media profiles to gather intel there. Once you compile that critical info, you can enact some of the tips listed above.
3. Securing budget and resources for social media marketing
31% of social media marketers have trouble with this one. Before tackling this challenge, it helps to first focus on the two above if they’re also on your list. Once you develop social strategies that support your businesses’ overall goals and target a specific client persona, it will be easier to secure resources.
From there, it helps to gather a list of stats and successes. Did you know that 90% of companies found that investing in social media has a direct impact on its revenue? Or that 84% of people are more likely to buy from a brand they follow on social.
Curate a one-pager of research-backed ways that investing in social benefits the company’s bottom line. Then, you’ll have to hone in on the specific results you’re driving — and remember to frame it in a way that will matter the most to whoever decides your budget.
That means you should resist the urge to exclusively highlight the size of your audience and the number of engagements you’ve garnered. You’ll also have to detail how much website traffic or sales social generated.
Finally, seal the deal by having a clear plan in place for how you would allocate the extra resources and the impact you could make on the business in the future.
