In just a few short years, the world has witnessed an explosion in the number of social network users. In fact, recent reports show that more than 3.6 billion people worldwide are currently active on social platforms. Social media marketing is increasingly important for businesses to reach their target audience. 85% of consumers trust brand recommendations from individuals they know through branded content. And 73% of people have directly purchased something from seeing it on social media.

With so many opportunities for your business to grow and succeed, now is the time to start planning your social media marketing strategy for 2023. Social media marketing involves the use of networks like Facebook, TikTok, and Youtube to drive traffic to your website or blog and increase your visibility online. It is essential that you have an effective strategy if you want to see results from all your time and efforts. Let’s take a look at some of the trends you should keep an eye on and how they could affect your company next year in the following article.

1. Understand exactly why organic social media is important

At the most basic level, posting regularly on social media marketing platforms, where a customer presence is an indicator that the brand is still alive. You want people to see your brand when they search and view your business profile.

In the long run, social media can help you build brand awareness and trust, get you more direct traffic with purchase intent, and will increase your conversion rates overall. customer journey.

In the B2B space, it’s easy to see that this is an easy way to find and connect with customers and acquire individual leads. Social media is usually not a direct driver of high-converting traffic from social media platforms to your website. Typically, metrics like reach, engagement, and organic traffic (which go up if you’re exercising organic social rights), are KPIs you can want to use to measure the effectiveness of its organic social media efforts.

By doing a quick internet search, social media managers often set the following social media marketing goals:

• Increase brand awareness by x%;
• Increase community engagement by x%;
• Generate x number of social media posts per month;
• Generate x amount of video content per month
• Get x number of leads from Social Media per month
• Get x number of website visits per month
• Increase social media followers by x%
• Improve ROI of social media advertising by x%;

2. Think of social media marketing messages as a cyclical customer journey

Map out what your customers are thinking, wondering, experiencing and what they want or need through the stages we call Awareness, Acquisition, and Activation (or See, Think, Do). You do this by talking to your customers.
Translate your brand message into categories, pillars, or themes for your content to answer questions your potential buyers may have during these stages.
Create a cyclical customer journey with your content on social media and the order in which you post it, such as weekly.

3. Define a content topic so you have a guide on what to post and how it will look.

Based on the needs that you have identified your leads in the See, Think, Do stages, consider breaking down your message by:

Issues and brand awareness

Talk about the problem your product or service solves and the way your ideal customer experiences it. Please talk about your views on why it is so important and urgent to address it and your views on how to approach it.

Vision, sub-theme, implementation

Talk about trends in your market and talk about your vision for problems your customers are facing in three or more areas related to your overarching niche. For example, if I’m providing content marketing services, a sub-topic I might want to talk about is content strategy, the problems people have with it, and how to solve it.

Brand & product positioning

In just 1/5 of a post, talk about your brand mission, specific solutions or overall offer, and your USP. Add proven facts, figures, and percentages of improvement in the metrics that matter to your potential customers.

4. Choose the right social media marketing channel

So how do you choose the social media marketing channels that will help you get the most out of it? The most important thing is to understand why people use a social media platform and whether your customers are actually using it. For instance, having an Instagram account for your brand can be a wasted effort if your biggest customer segment is 70-year-old women. Similarly, there may not be a compelling argument to advertise your business on Pinterest if you’re only targeting men.

Equally important when analyzing the channels your target audience uses is to take into account the social media your competitors are active on. This will provide a basis on which you can evaluate industry performance and help guide your decisions.

Ask yourself, what kind of content do they post? Do they create platform-specific content? How often do they post it? How many likes or shares do their posts get? Examining your competitors’ social media activity and how their followers engage with what they post will give you valuable insights you can replicate to ensure the success of your strategy.

Did you know that many brands use a variety of social media channels? While it’s very unlikely to use just one channel to showcase your brand, striking the perfect balance can be difficult. If you’re operating on too many platforms, you’ll spread it too thin and reduce the impact of your marketing efforts. However, if you rely on just one platform, your brand’s visibility and reach may suffer. Therefore, it is necessary to consider this carefully before building a social media marketing channel.