Nowadays, literally, everyone with a smartphone has access to social media. As a consequence, many people think that they know what it takes to build a brand, and selling products using those tools. They’re good at taking pretty pictures and using clever hashtags. But there’s much more to social media marketing than getting a few Likes on a picture.
With that in mind, you have to acknowledge that there is a need for attractive creative and engaging content. However, the road doesn’t stop there! To truly see a business impact from marketing on social media channels, there’s much more to learn. Here are advanced social media marketing tips to help boost your efforts.
Leverage your data
Take inventory of how many email addresses you have in your CRM, and segment them into useful groups. Then, upload them into Facebook to match those email addresses to users on the platform. The same goes for Twitter and LinkedIn.
Once the data uploaded, you can use tools like Audience Insights to learn about the interests, demographics, and more of the people included in your CRM. This is huge when trying to decide where your social media strategy should go.
Furthermore, you can use this information to prospect for new business by creating a Lookalike Audience. This is a new audience based off users that look and behave digitally similarly to the emails list you uploaded to start with. Keep in mind that the barrier to entry on using this data is that you need to run social media advertising to serve content specific to these users.
UTM codes
Most people, including marketers, judge the success of social media content by the amount of engagement it gets. Statistically speaking, the more someone engages with a brand, the more likely they are to buy from it. However, it’s incredibly easy to obsess about engagement and forget that getting all the Likes in the world doesn’t mean you’re going to end up selling more products and/or services as a result.
There are better ways to tell what kind of activity each content piece activated with visitors. Through UTM codes, you can create a custom URL that’s trackable in Google Analytics. The use of UTM codes can tell you the number of sessions, unique visitors, pages per session, time on site, and goal completions that each individual piece of content triggered.
Social pixels
Social pixels are a snippet of code that you place on your website which enables the social platforms to peek into your site and share data back and forth. By installing these pixels, you can create remarketing campaigns to serve ads to users who’ve recently visited your site, or even learn more about website users through the Audience Insights dashboard.
Social pixels should be at the heart of everything you do from an advertising perspective. For example, the more you leverage Facebook’s Pixel, the more it learns about the audience you’re going after, and it self-optimizes to get the best results.
Conversion events
Piggybacking off the social pixel conversation, as an advertiser, you can set up specific conversion actions by adding more code to your site to track different actions triggered from your campaigns.
For example, once you have the Facebook Pixel installed on your site, you can then add additional code to tell the system which actions you want to track. This will enable you to track Leads, Registrations, Page Views, Downloads and more.
Furthermore, you can optimize your campaigns for these specific actions, and Facebook’s system will optimize to serve the ads to users who are most likely to take those actions that are important to you.
The end game with this strategy is to be able to assign direct ROI to your campaigns so that you know exactly how much it’s costing you to drive business.
View-Through Attribution
View-through attribution enables advertisers to see the number of users who saw an ad on the way to convert. Normally, you’d only be able to track conversions if a user clicked an ad and immediately converted, but by using the view-through attribution method, you can track users who click an ad and convert much later through a different channel.
This gives you a much clearer perspective on the impact of your social media efforts. Without view-through attribution, you may think your social media marketing isn’t doing anything for your business when it comes to conversion. This advanced tactic gives you a deeper level of tracking.