Advice From A Marketing Mag 30 Under 30 | Building A Successful Social Media Marketing Strategy

Amanda Lai, Social Media Specialist at Wattpad, presented a social media workshop at BrainStation Toronto, sharing her experience ‘breaking through the clutter’ of social media. Here are highlights from her workshop.

Know your Audience

• For example: When running the Facebook page for a bathroom tissue brand, Amanda recognized that middle-aged women are the main people who buy the product for their families, so she began to post things that the women would be able to relate to in order to effectively market the product
• (1) Research: Facebook insights, Twitter analytics, social ranking tools (usually free and offered by social networks to gather data about your audience)
• (2) Social Listening: hootsuite, tweetdeck, sprout social for example
• (3) Interaction: Engage with your audience; the best way to pickup on behaviour is to build a relationship with them

Create Content that Works

• • To analyze how your audience responds to actual content, analyze their user behaviour in order to find out their likes and dislikes and design a high quality content strategy
  • Begin to use user generated content (if possible) as it will help to generate more interest among users in hopes that they will be the next to be features
  • Relate the content to the platform that you are on – whatever the audience is used to seeing on that network. (i.e. on Instagram, people want to see visually appealing content vs. branded advertisements) (i.e Tumblr: people want GIFs, pop culture, humour)
  • Use the right language that relate to the consumer; be authentic and keep in mind terminology, language, and tone/voice

Join the Conversation

• Use strategic hashtags to be part of the right conversations: trending tags, high-traffic tags, hashjacking (using another hashtag to market your own brand) (i.e. Wattpad “hashjacked” #writeon when Amazon launched their product of a reading/writing platform to promote their own brand)
• Create your own hashtags: create branding moments, rally a community together, and start conversations

Measure Success

• Define Objectives:
  • What are you trying to achieve?
  • Why are you on this platform?
  • Can social help with other areas of your business?
• Include call to actions (CTAs) to get your users interacting i.e. if you want them to share/like, then ask them to do so – this is proven to get more interaction than just posting the post
• Identify the Right Metrics
  • Quantitative: engagements, link clicks, reach/impressions
  • Qualitative: sentiment (sub tweets)
  • Google Analytics: social referrals, bounce, conversions, new visitors
• Test and Evaluate
  • A/B test (test different things to see what performs best – you may be surprised!)
  • Experiment
  • Evaluate performance over time

So, to summarize…

• Get to know your audience
• Create content that resonates
• Do your hashtag research and take advantage of the opportunities
• Define success your own way

Want to learn more? BrainStation’s Digital Marketing course offers a comprehensive section on social media.