Social media has become part and parcel of many people’s lives. Most people today tend to spend most of their time on social media. As such, businesses can easily connect with consumers on social media platforms.
However, reaching your target audience on social media is not a straightforward affair, as there is not only content overload, but also stiff competition on social media channels. You, therefore, need a prudent social media strategy to stand out from the crowd.
Social media trends are changing all the time. During 2020, many such trends have emerged that will shape your social media strategy in 2021.
You should be aware of the following trends to fuel your social media strategy for 2021:
Blending Sales Tools and Social Media
Social media is a prime spot for businesses to showcase their products and services and generate leads. Most marketing teams depend on social media platforms to formulate their strategies. The platforms provide social insights and intelligence.
With social media information, you can figure out the strong leads before you interact with them. At the same time, you can also develop two-way communication with consumers with social media interactions.
You can leverage the power of social media for lead generation, market research, and call preparation. But it would be best if you also had the right tools in place to execute them effectively.
It will be highly effective if you associate your sales tools with social media management software. It will enable you to align sales workflows with your social media strategy so that you can gather data about your prospects with ease.
Deploying Influencers
Marketing through social media is not as easy as it seems to be. Although social media platforms are great places to interact with your target audience, it has become tough to make them believe what you say.
A slew of unwanted happenings created distrust among social media users. For example, in 2018, Facebook engaged itself in data malpractices in its involvement with the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
Twitter had to suspend over 70 million accounts due to bots and trolls that influenced the previous US presidential election.
And the result is that people started to distrust social media. A recent study shows that 95 percent of users do not trust social media. At the same time, many social media users do not respond to impersonal advertising campaigns.
Therefore, you need to find an effective way to cope with the social mistrust to tap your audience. One of the effective ways is influencer marketing.
When you deploy an influencer to promote your products and services to your target audience on social media, you will likely get excellent results. As influencers can interact with consumers on a more personal level, and consumers tend to trust them. Influencers tend to be more authentic than the other figures.
Studies show that many users take influencer recommendations seriously for their purchases. As we move towards 2021, influencers’ role in impacting the buying behavior is expected to become stronger.
Therefore, it will help if you consider deploying influencers in your social media strategy.
Leveraging User-Generated Content
Did you notice that when you respond to users’ comments on your social media account, they tend to reply? What does it show?
It is a great way to engage your target audience. When you respond to their social media comments, you gain their trust in you.
However, only responding to their comments is not the only solution. User-generated content is a great way to create trust among your target audience and attract and subsequently convert them into customers.
Understandably, consumers are more likely to believe what fellow consumers say about your products and services. They tend to think that the fellow consumers will be truthful about whether your business offerings are worth buying.
It would help if you showed your target audience what your existing customers say about your products and services to attract their attention. It will put you in an advantageous position to enable you to convert them into customers.
However, things are not that rosy. You will find it challenging to find the right content about your business, as all customers do not post about their purchases and experience with your products and services.
Therefore, you should make sincere efforts to encourage your customers to share their experiences with your brand on social media platforms. And make sure that you do not fall behind in asking your customers to use your official hashtag so you can easily find them on social media.
So, when 2021 sets in, ask your customers to post their experiences about your brand on social media. It will broaden your reach to your target audience.
Mobile-Optimized Content
Mobiles have increased across all sections of people. And most people nowadays use their smartphones rather than desktops or laptops to check their social media accounts. With that in mind, you should create mobile-optimized content for your social media platforms, as posts designed for desktops or laptops do not always fit well on smartphone screens.
Likewise, post images that are optimized for mobiles. It will also help if you post vertical videos instead of horizontal ones so they fit on mobile screens. And post short captions to your multimedia posts so that both the image or video and the caption are viewable on the screen parallell-y.
When you optimize your mobile devices’ content, you can attract a big chunk of social media users to your postings.
Conclusion
With 2021 around the corner, it is now the time for you to revamp your social media marketing strategy and align it to the would-be trends so that your business will remain competitive. With the initiative, you can maintain a one-to-one relationship with your target customers, which will help you generate and convert leads and create a solid reputation for your company. It will also help if you hire social media marketing services for better exposure.
You can formulate an impactful social media marketing strategy for 2021 with the tips outlined in this article. And you need to be more strategic in formulating your social media marketing plan.
