5 Signs of a Weak Social Media Campaign

Given that the majority of businesses are increasing their digital marketing spend going forward, there's a lot of pressure for marketers to prove that their campaigns are yielding results. Just to put this in perspective, recent research by Digital Neighbor finds that the need to capitalize on social media is a leading driver in the push for higher investments in digital marketing. While this shows a positive sign on the effectiveness of social media marketing and the fact that businesses are finally beginning to acknowledge the importance of social media in their marketing efforts, the pressure to prove return on investment in this channel ultimately mounts on marketers. In a different survey of social media marketers published by Simply Measured, only 9.4 percent of marketers are able to quantify the revenue driven by social media marketing efforts. While not proving ROI might be a pointer to the fact that a system is not totally ripe for effective and accurate measurement, or to a lack of the right metrics to do this, another aspect marketers should pay attention to is the effectiveness of their campaigns in themselves. This article shares signs to watch out for in a weak social media campaign. Poor targeting Before launching a campaign on social media, the right course of action should be identifying and appropriating your focus toward the right audience. This means you will end up whittling your focus to a narrow but ideal number of leads. These leads should be qualified by some of the following criteria: Demographics: Use factors like income bracket, age group, educational qualifications, job role and location to determine this. A perfect tool is Facebook Audience Insights. Psychographics: While this is not often mentioned in social media marketing circles, basing your targeting on such factors as taste, aspirations and values of your audience can help your content formation process. This will result in you creating content that truly hits home with your leads on social media. Pain points: Your social media marketing is instantly rendered weak the moment your ad shows to users who feel no passion for what you're promoting. Given that social media provides for little space to canvas users, targeting customers with no desire for your offering will result in a weak campaign. Marketers are reducing the quality of their social media efforts by pushing for broader reach on social media, with the impression that they will attract everybody. Use available tools and insights to target only customers that are likely to interact. Inefficient tracking system Having an advanced tracking system in place will help you understand how your visitors interact with your website. The actions most social media visitors will end up taking on your website might be connected to how they found your website. While Facebook is the biggest source of social media traffic referrals to websites, this channel may not be the best fit for your product type. By using an advanced tracking system such as tagging your URLs with UTMs (urchin tracking modules), you can identify what source a visitor that ends up making a purchase on your website comes from. Paul Lepa, lead digital marketing campaign manager at PearlsOnly, said his company was able to identify that users from Pinterest converted more from social media referrals, adding: Our report was aided by combining Google Analytics in-depth traffic reporting with using UTMs, which was instrumental in tracing visitors' behavior on the website, which helped to better target them with specified ads. PearlsOnly’s products are mostly attractive on an image based website such as Pinterest and Instagram, which explains their findings. Bad landing page Your landing page is where your audience gets to finally make up their mind about shopping on your website. This means your social media campaign goal is not complete if your landing page fails to convert visitors into buyers. By using keywords that will trigger the emotions of your visitors and incorporating the best page elements, such as white spaces and case studies, everything on your landing page should motivate your visitors toward taking an action. Not only will a bad landing page cause visitors to bounce off, it will also impact your Ad Relevance Score, which will ultimately drive up your campaign cost on platforms like Facebook. Weak ad title This is where a lot of creativity is required for your campaign to drive the right results. Combining the right strings of words that will not only drive your message across to the audience, but is also aimed at soliciting a positive reaction from them, is not easy. But the very strength of your campaign hinges on it. If you go wrong with your ad title, you could see your Ad Relevance Score drop to a low "2/10", as shown in Facebook’s guide. This guide on the WordStream blog offers in-depth tips to master creating compelling ad titles and make good use of your headline space. Lack of quality images Images are powerful content for your social media campaign. As live visual content jostles to get its place with the rise of Periscope and Snapchat's sponsored selfie filters, images will continue to remain the content king on social media. Users will want to get the entire message of your content via a single image. With Instagram forecasted to bring in $2.81 billion in ads revenue by 2017, image content will only increase in importance. In the end, several factors could impact the success of your social media campaign. Avoid any of these signs at all cost. James Jorner is a content strategist and marketer at Effective Inbound Marketing. His company specializes in online branding and digital marketing for businesses. Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

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5 Signs of a Weak Social Media Campaign

Marketers should pay attention to the effectiveness of their campaigns. This article shares signs to watch out for in a weak social media campaign.

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