Social media is a hotbed for marketing these days: everyone is on it, every business needs to take advantage of it, and there are many strategies to engage your audience across various platforms. Marketers work hard to create strong content for their business’ social media accounts—from witty, thoughtful, or research-backed posts, to content from their own website (like blogs, infographics, and whitepapers), to engaging advertisements.

So, when most of the hard work is done, how do you ensure that those efforts are as effective as possible and return as much on your investment as it can? Believe it or not, it’s often simple steps that lead to immense shifts in social media likes, clicks, website visits, and leads.

Set goals and KPIs

You have to know where you want to go if you’re every going to get there. Just like a map, you want to establish long-term and short-term goals to keep you motivated and on track to eventually achieve your long-term goals. Goals should be centered around your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), which you need to identify within your business. Do you want to measure success via clicks, reach, engagement, organic likes, website traffic, etc? Once you know your KPIs, you will want to set goals around them and then methods to achieve that goal. Something as simple as “increase post clicks” may be a goal. Then you just need to figure out how you will try to achieve that.

Shoot for a few long-term goals and measure a handful of KPIs, or else you will get overwhelmed.

Research your competitors

You have to know what else is going on in your industry, so research your competitors by checking out their social media—this is sometimes called social media listening. What are they posting? Where? Are they having success in their posts (lots of likes, lots of followers?), or struggling? What do you see them doing you might want to emulate, or avoid? Take note of all this, and use it to inform your decisions as you move forward. Make sure to keep track of your competitors—maybe via an annual assessment—so your knowledge remains relevant and correct.

Know where to post

If you’re trying to get the most of your social media, where you prioritize will make such a difference. There are a lot of social media platforms out there, and you have will spread yourself too thin if you try to use them all. Better to use a few platforms very well than all of them terribly. In fact, we suggest in our whitepaper, “A Guide to B2B Social Media Marketing,” to stick to two or three main platforms that you excel on.

But which platforms to use? We discuss that in the whitepaper as well, and it all has to do with knowing your audience and your industry. Where does your industry convene, and where is your target audience? Maybe they use Twitter and LinkedIn the most, or Instagram and Twitter. You can’t know until you do your research on your competitors. Where are they posting, and how much, and what? You can either follow their lead, or make informed decisions if you want to develop your following on a platform that your industry doesn’t use as much.

Know when to post for optimal audience engagement

If you’re creating and scheduling social posts already, it’s an easy move to change when the post goes out. (And if you’re posting all your content in real time instead of scheduling social posts, you may want to consider a system, such as Dynamics 365 CRM, where you can create a content calendar and schedule social media across many accounts.) Research when your audience is most active on social media via your own social media metrics and via social media listening (when activity happens on social media within your industry and on your competitor’s pages). Adjust your posting time accordingly.

Adjust content for several platforms

Cross post and use your content across several platforms, altering the posts you create based on what you know of the audience who use each platform. Get more mileage with the same content and ensure that those who don’t follow you on Twitter still catch your posts on Facebook (or wherever).

Develop a consistent tone

Your brand recognition consists not only of your logo, brand colors, and name. It’s also your tone. Have you ever read something and you just knew it was written by a certain person? What they say and how they say it just feels like them. Whether it’s witty, thoughtful, hilarious, goofy, serious, or something else, your tone should feel consistent across your social media.

Use SEO

We all know Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is key to increasing your website visibility and gaining organic clicks by pushing your content to the top of the search engine results. When looking up something on Google, over 25% of people click on the first organic search result—so you see why it’s so key to be high on the list. The higher your content is on search results, the more applicable your content is meant to be for the searcher. But even if your content is exactly what a searcher is looking for, they won’t find you if you don’t know what language they are using to search.

Use SEO in both your website content (web pages, blogs, etc.) and within your social media posts to push your content into higher visibility without much effort – you’ve already created the content, now you just need to shift wording to most effectively attract the audience looking for your topic.

Include visuals

We all know the cliched axiom “a picture’s worth a thousand words,” but hear us out on this. In terms of social media, especially visually focused platforms like Instagram, perhaps a more fitting saying would be “a picture’s worth a thousand clicks.” Or something like that.

Not only do visuals boost engagement with your social media posts, but images do wonders for other sorts of content as well. For blog posts, not only can images help your reader better understand your content, but breaking up a blog of text will help your reader stay with your content longer. Actually, readers stay longer on pages with visual content. Think about it: would you rather read a big block of text, or a handful of smaller chunks of text with illustrative images now and then? But there’s another reason too: images can help your SEO. If your blog ranks in a Google image search, your page is more likely to be clicked by more people.

The bottom line: whether you make your own images (photography, illustrations, or through InDesign or Canva, etc.) or use stock photos, use images/graphics in both your social media posts and your website content. You will be satisfied with the results.

Tag and hashtag

It’s common knowledge now that tags and hashtags can increase visibility of your posts. Create hashtags of your own that you build presence for and use applicable ones for your content. If appropriate, you can tag an account that you’re referring to or speaking about. For instance, Syvantis works with Microsoft products, so we will occasionally @Microsoft in a post.

Analyze data, adjust strategies

Marketing is an exercise in change—it’s all about learning and shifting to best reach your market. You change by measuring the results of your efforts, using KPIs to identify how close you are to your goals. This means a business needs to gather data from their social media efforts, via the platforms they use, their website, and even a CRM. Once that data is gathered, you can see how you’ve done and what you need to change.

This may be clear already, but it’s so easy to stick with the comfortable “same old, same old” that it bears repeating: analyzing data is helpful only if you adjust your strategies as a result. If organic clicks are a KPI you care about and they are low, something needs to change—what will it be? Experiment to see what brings your organic clicks up. That is how you will bring better ROI to all your marketing efforts, not just social media.

Use a CRM system

Admittedly, this is not so simple a step as the others, but it does have potential to be one of the more ROI-generating moves a business can make when trying to make the most of their marketing efforts. A Customer Relationship Management solution, such as Dynamics 365 Marketing, centralizes customer data and assists marketers as they create and distribute content—from marketing emails to social media posts to landing pages and beyond. Create customer journeys, plan and schedule social posts, gather analytic data, design and automate marketing emails, manage events and vendors, and conduct many other activities marketers often spearhead.

For social media specifically, Dynamics 365 Marketing includes a social media calendar and scheduling system. Plan your social calendar well in advance, schedule posts across many accounts and platforms, and gather data on the performance of your posts. The planning and organizational power of a CRM for your marketing efforts is unmatched.

Another simple step: Connect with us

Integrating a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system is a larger step that your organization can take to make your marketing and sales efforts more efficient and effective by giving your team the tools they need to do their job faster, easier, and better. A CRM is one of the single best ways to step up your sales and marketing endeavors, and if you’re interested in doing just that, we’re here to help. Connect with us by filling out the form below. Our skilled consultants can show you a personalized demo of Dynamics 365 CRM, answer all your questions, and help you decide the best move for your business.