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5 Highly Effective Types of Social Media Marketing
Not seeing conversions from your social media marketing strategy? You might feel tempted to put this down to oversaturation.
But while there are 3.78 billion social media users worldwide in 2021 and thousands of brands competing for their attention, social media marketing can still be an effective space to reach your customers when done right.
In our experience helping leading education providers and real estate developers reach their customers, we know that stepping back and reconsidering your channel mix is a great first step to supercharge your social media strategy.
Here we share with you the insights we’ve discovered about the different types of social media marketing to help you get more ROI through your chosen platforms.
A guide to 5 paid types of social media marketing
Facebook’s 2.2 billion monthly active users now constitute a quarter of the world’s population, making this platform home to the lion’s share of the market. This can make it tricky for marketers to avoid falling into the spray and pay trap.
However Facebook’s paid advertising platform does offer advanced targeting options far above its competition, lending well to data-driven marketing campaigns for brand awareness, lead generation and sales.
What’s possible
Our social media marketing agency previously ran a campaign for Oxfam Australia’s flagship fundraising event, Oxfam Trailwalker. We achieved a 12.54% conversion rate from Facebook channels with a cost per lead that was 33.6% below target.
As a Facebook acquisition, Instagram offers many of the same benefits as its big brother, with a huge user base and rich targeting capabilities. This makes it a valuable opportunity to cross-channel marketing.
The big opportunity here lies in its highest performing type of content, Instagram Stories, which are great for generating brand awareness.
HubSpot stats reveal that Instagram videos get 21.2% more interactions compared to images and 18.6% more interactions compared to carousels.
Take advantage of Instagram’s enormous potential by leveraging all the advanced targeting options of Facebook with original video and animated content to reach your audience.
What’s possible
Our partnership with Builders Academy Australia has seen us leveraging a range of content types based on the student journey stage such as video testimonials and user generated content. With a younger target audience, we use Instagram Stories as part of our social media marketing channel mix to drive a 31.92% increase in student registrations year-on-year.
Snapchat
Snapchat markeing offers a powerful opportunity for brands to engage younger target audiences through innovative animated and video content. Our preferred method? User generated content, also known as UGC. UGC is created by real people rather than brands and delivers an authentic ad experience.
When you consider that more than half of all internet users aged between 15 and 25 years use Snapchat, it isn’t hard to see why it’s such a great tool for reaching your younger demographics.
Our performance marketing agency has achieved exciting results with Snapchat, and we recommend trialling this platform for brand awareness and lead generation campaigns if your audience fits the bill.
What’s possible
When we were engaged by The Gordon Institute of TAFE to increase their student intake, 71% of the total calls generated came from our Snapchat marketing—outstanding results that earned us the first Snapchat Bronze Level Partnership in Australia.
According to Business Insider, LinkedIn was voted the most trusted network in 2020. While running our own LinkedIn marketing campaigns as a LinkedIn Marketing Partner, we’ve also seen the platform’s potential for thought leadership.
Brands can leverage the LinkedIn advantage when job or income is a key factor in your audience’s buying decision.
You can also use LinkedIn to demonstrate your brand’s expertise in a given sector, making it effective for both brand awareness and lead generation.
What’s possible
In our recent campaign for ANU’s Crawford School of Public Policy, we used LinkedIn marketing to drive an unprecedented 64% uplift in applications year-on-year for postgraduate courses in public policy, a course area driven by career outcomes and academic reputation.
TikTok
TikTok marketing is another type of social media marketing that commands younger audiences, but its greatest advantage is its rate of growth and relative newness.
Even though TikTok was the most downloaded app in 2020, it is still too new to be monopolised by big budget advertising, providing cost-effective advertising opportunities for businesses willing to test the waters.
Because TikTok’s average engagement rate is high at all follower levels, your brand has the chance to do well across brand awareness and lead generation. The caveat? This platform moves quickly with culture shifts and trends that you’ll need to know in order to produce authentic and engaging content.
What’s possible
We worked with ModiBodi on a brand awareness campaign to encourage people to try out the product and address the stigma surrounding periods in an open fashion. Through our channel specific content strategy, our video pieces are among the highest performing across TikTok for the brand. At time of writing, one of our TikTok videos has received over 140,000 views.
How to choose from different types of social media marketing platforms
Social media paid advertising still delivers powerful outcomes, it all depends on your channel mix and objectives.
Chances are you might be trying to master too many different types of social media marketing. We recommend you focus on just no more than 2 or 3 of your best performing platforms and do these really well.
Identify your best-performing platforms by researching where your target customers are most concentrated and which types of content they like to engage with, whether it be thought leadership articles or short videos that disappear after 24 hours. You can also track the customer journey and understand which platforms lead to a sale.
With the right approach to data-driven targeting and testing, your social media marketing strategy can deliver consistent ROI.
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