Is Your Digital Marketing Strategy Working? Part 2: Social Media Marketing Audit
We discussed the implementation of SEO audit as a part of digital marketing audit as a whole. The reality of digital marketing is it consists of aggregates of activities done systematically. The goal is to increase brand awareness, acquire customers, keep old customers, and eventually increase revenue.
Two of the most important digital marketing activities today are social media marketing and content marketing. It’s impossible to think of marketing without these two, which are also interconnected with other types of marketing. For instance, it’s hard to conceive influencer marketing without the involvement of social media and without building content. Consequently, it’s hard to think of search engine marketing without social media and content in the picture. Google has included social media engagement in ranking websites and still considers content relevance as a crucial determinant in assessing websites.
SEO, social media, and content go hand in hand. Working together eclectically, they create a powerful engine for your brand. However, in a complex marketing milieu, it’s not hard to fathom that if a single factor fails, everything else can fail. It’s like a domino effect. You flip a domino and the rest may just fall.
Marketers are aware of the sheer value of social networks in marketing. Over the years, the importance of social sites have taken a significant leap. Social media marketing has complemented other forms of marketing. We’ve talked about its value in search engine optimization and the overlapping elements between it and content marketing. Also, influencer marketing heavily relies on these endeavors.
So how do you make sure you’re doing just fine on social media? How do you make sure your content marketing tactics are working? Just as you need SEO audit to regularly assess the shape of your website, content, and backlinks relative to the competition, you also need to audit your social media marketing.
For social media marketing, ask the following questions:
- Have you utilized different social networks?
- Are you updating your social media accounts or pages?
- Are you sharing relevant content?
- Are you using the right hashtags?
- Is there significant engagement?
- Do you get significant traffic from your social media pages?
These questions are your guide in determining whether you’re doing enough and whether what you’re doing is actually working.
Check your social networks
When we say you have to utilize different social sites, it’s because success on one platform is a hard feat. Most social media marketers use multiple sites — Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, etc. One site alone won’t hack it because each site has a unique set of users doing a unique set of activities. YouTubers spend their time watching videos. Twitter followers share tidbits of life activities, news, and thoughts. Instagram is largely for photos. These three social sites are very different from each other. You share different types of content on each site, and in so doing you give a broad perspective of your brand across these channels.
Regularize content sharing
Part of keeping your social media pages is to update them from time to time. Daily updates are a must. What are you supposed to share? Note that your followers usually want you to share something that’s useful to them. Your social networks are about your brand, but not for your brand. Instead, they’re about how your brand relates to your audience.
Review content relevance and engagement
You will notice if your social media posts aren’t relevant to your audience when they’re not generating engagement. Low engagement should be taken as a warning that you’re not getting the attention of your potential customers. When doing an audit, look at your content and see if it serves your followers or if it only seeks brand attention. Think about it this way: if you have low engagement, maybe your audience doesn’t care about your content.
However, another reason for low engagement is mismanagement of hashtags. So survey the hashtags you’re using. Are you using the ones people are using to find information or solutions to problems in your niche? Are you updated with trends? Trending hashtags in your niche increases chances of engagement.
Identify good and bad social channels
Ideally, you should do just fine on every social site. However, it many cases, that’s not what happens. If you’re doing so well on one or two sites but not on other sites, it’s time you look into the audience, content, and activity on each social channel. You have two options here. One is to improve your sharing behavior on the sites with low engagement. Two abandon these sites and transfer your funds to sites with greater engagement.
If you’re not doing well on Tumblr, for instance, maybe you have to post more content and engage with more people there. Or maybe your audience isn’t just there and so it doesn’t make sense to keep including it in your social media marketing efforts.
Let’s be honest about this. Some social sites are already languishing, and there are areas on the web well suited for content and influencer marketing, which heavily influence the success of social media marketing.
Review your audience
When you started your business, you had an audience in mind. Perhaps you thought they mostly would be teenagers. Two years into the business, you look at your customer profile and realize you have more buyers in the late 20s and early 30s. This is part of the unpredictability of doing business. What does that mean? It means you have to redefine your audience and adjust your marketing approach.
You can’t spend money on tactics and not measure their effectiveness, in which case you’re shooting in the dark. An audit will be your guide, whether to keep doing what you’re doing or retrace your steps and create new goals.
