Today, over 4.59 billion people are active on social media and expected to reach over 6 billion in 2027. That’s almost 59% of the world’s total population. And with all these users, it is without a doubt that social media is now one of the most valuable tools that reshaped how we do business. Social media is no longer a platform that users solely use for social networking — now, social media has also grown to become an effective digital marketing tool for businesses.

But even so, its commendable power to reach more potential customers remains a challenge to many digital marketers. Marketing on different social media platforms is easy, yet getting results for your efforts is still a hurdle. 

With the right strategy, however, you’ll get it right. So, how do you leverage these powerful social media platforms to run effective digital marketing campaigns for your business? Want to learn how?

Then, let’s dive right in! 

How is social media used in digital marketing?

Using social media for business allows you to interact with your customers and prospects online. The resulting strong media presence can help you in reshaping users’ perception of your business and communicate your core values to the wider online audience. 

Accordingly, this interaction will, in turn, open new opportunities for you to start new conversations, create business partnerships, and grow your online community to help you gain more potential customers.

So, before we dive into the topic, let’s check out the various ways you can use social media marketing to grow your business:

• Telling your brand story
• Growing your audience 
• Learning about competitors
• Building relationships with customers and prospects
• Learning the buying behaviors of your customers 
• Increasing your brand’s awareness 
• Promoting your products and services 

Social Media Marketing: using social media as an effective digital marketing tool

How will you make your social media efforts pay off? How do you make social media an effective digital marketing tool?

To answer these questions, let’s discuss the following tips and strategies you can apply today to hike your digital marketing ROI on your social media platforms. 

Define your social media goals

It’s almost a cliché, but setting goals is always the first and mandatory step to succeed in all types of marketing. A goal allows you to define your success and helps you measure your performance.

Defining social media goals can have different approaches. One of the approaches is choosing objectives that align with the goals of your business. For example, if you’re aiming to increase brand awareness, you may set a goal of getting more followers on your social media platforms.

You can also define goals based on the expected action from the audience upon seeing your content. If you want them to buy your product, sign up, or click a certain link, ensure those desired actions reflect in your goals.

It doesn’t matter whether you want to raise your brand awareness, increase sales, or whatever your objective might be — always set your goals at the beginning. And at the end, you will find it easier to measure the success of your campaign by checking the number of these goals you’ve attained.

Ditch the old tactics that no longer work

One characteristic trait both social media and its users portray is their fast-moving nature. Today, the public has gotten used to the marketing techniques employed by marketing companies. That is, the audience has become nearly immune to most of our social media marketing tactics. 

Worst, the initial impact of direct mail, email, leaflets, and ads is no longer in existence. And because this trend keeps growing, you have to re-establish your marketing strategies in a way that will keep off the competition and create a positive impact on your audience.

Nowadays, it is no longer enough to post updates more often. Your audience will always demand better content and innovative ideas to keep them engaged and interested in your brand. You must avoid using traditional marketing tactics that no longer work for the new audience.

And by using new, effective social media strategies, you have a chance to interact deeply with your customers and prospects. This interaction often results in a stronger social media presence that can help you in reshaping users’ perceptions of your business and communicate your core values to the wider online audience. 

This powerful interaction opens new opportunities for starting conversations, creating business partnerships, and growing a delighted online community. And the perks of such a happy community is that it becomes effortless to attract new followers and turn potential customers into paying customers.

Measure and optimize the performance of your social media campaigns

Measuring the performance of your social media campaigns can help you to improve the current and future social media results. You need to identify and track the right KPIs to track and measure your performance. Your social media KPIs provide the hard data you need to know the performance of your campaigns. 

Some of the social media metrics you can measure are:

• Likes
• Shares
• Comments
• Click-throughs
• Followers growth
• Conversion rates
• Post-reach and engagement

Different social media platforms provide several other metrics that are unique to their content. And so, there is a long list of metrics to choose from. How do you know the most important ones? Check out the factors below!

Factors to consider when choosing the social media metrics to measure

Here are three factors you should consider starting with when deciding the most appropriate KPIs for your social media marketing strategy:

• Keep in mind the target audience: The population demographics determine how people respond to your content. So, first, know who you’re targeting before selecting your KPIs.
• Select different metrics for the platforms you are using: As we said earlier, different social media platforms track different metrics. That means measuring the success of your Facebook campaigns is different from measuring the success of Twitter campaigns.
• Align your KPIs with your goals: It is best to consider creating KPIs that relate to your goals to ensure that your progress is actually good for your business.

Once you decide on the right KPIs to measure your success on various social media platforms, determine the right tools to source all your digital marketing campaign data for reporting. Reporting on your performance helps you see opportunities for growth across all your social media platforms faster and more efficiently.

Finally, use the insights to improve your campaigns and grow your business. Understand which content resonates more with your audience and see how you can produce more content like those. Consider reducing or discontinuing the campaigns that do not bring results and drain your time, energy, or budget.

Read more: Five steps to measure your Facebook Marketing Strategy

Use social listening to learn and address your target audience’s desires

For your organization to stand out from competitors, you should learn to listen and learn from your audience. Social listening is extracting information and insight from different platforms to determine what people think or feel about a topic.

Social listening can help you map your findings directly from consumers’ conversations over asking for feedback through surveys or questionnaires. These findings can help you understand the motivation and the needs of your target audience. Thus, helping you translate their desires into exciting and original content for your social media platforms.

Social media listening can have a huge impact on your business. It helps you see how thought leadership on social media can improve engagements and form meaningful business relations through social media. Thankfully, many digital reporting tools like Dataslayer can help you gather data about your potential user’s content for further analysis on Google Sheets, Google Data Studio (Looker Studio), and other powerful BI tools.

For example, you can use Dataslayer to pull Instagram public data to learn the thoughts of your target audience on Instagram. You can apply custom filters to get high-quality data that you can use to grow your digital marketing strategy.

Stay consistent and proactive

Social media platforms can help you project your business core values and brand image across different social media platforms. Putting efforts that yield results in social media is never a one-time action. You must consistently and proactively keep sharing content that strengthens your presence on these platforms.

More so, each social media platform has its unique environment and voice. You should ensure that you align your business’s core identity with the platform’s while you remain clear, consistent, and engaging. This alignment will help your customers and prospects identify and relate to your brand from any social media platform.

Consistency or active participation on social media is a simple but powerful way of reaching a large audience. Keep posting your content and engaging with others’ content on your social media channels. And that way, you will get your brand or company name into the heads of existing or potential customers.

Using social media consistently and proactively will help you attract more followers, who you can turn into loyal customers. Also, it will help you keep your established network engaged, deepening your existing connections and encouraging your audience to create new contracts with you.

Try paid advertising on your favorite social media platforms 

Accelerating growth on social media is much easier with paid advertising than with organic strategies to drive your marketing efforts to fruition. If you have a good budget, dedicating some to your digital marketing strategy for your social media campaigns can help you gain results quickly.

Almost all social media platforms provide paid ads to help you promote your company to a wider audience. Most of these platforms offer a highly cost-effective way to expand your content reach. That is, you get to push your content and offers in front of a huge audience, far beyond your normal reach and at a lower cost.

More importantly, most of these platforms provide incredibly granular targeting capabilities to help you reach your ideal customers faster and more effectively. Audience targeting allows you to focus only on the users who are more likely to be interested in your products and services. This targeting can significantly lower your costs of acquisition, which leads to a higher return on investment.

Read more: How To Make The Most Of Meta Business Suite And Why It Is Great

Track, analyze, and report your social media performance with Dataslayer

Do you know in detail how your social media platforms are performing? How do you know if your social media marketing is working? Tracking, analyzing, and reporting with Dataslayer is one way to monitor and present relevant data about your social media activity.

Creating a report for your social media is certainly the most important part of your digital marketing strategy that you must not ignore. Tracking and analyzing your social media allows you to understand the impact of your efforts on every platform.

Creating and analyzing your social media reports goes far beyond checking your engagement or reach. You evaluate every aspect of your marketing strategy on all your social media platforms, from your tactics to your competition. You can learn from your missteps and refocus your efforts on the activities that are more likely to improve your performance.

Also, consider using real-time data from your social media to make critical decisions quickly while you track and see how you’re progressing. Benchmark your competitors to see how you stack up and what you can do to grow and become better. Also, check out our templates to help you build customizable reports quickly and efficiently for all your social media marketing needs.

Wrapping up

There you have it! The seven ways to use social media as a digital marketing tool. Social media is one of the most important tools that enable our businesses to flourish. It helps us build a community of customers and prospects, creates a deeper connection, and allows us to share our values and promote our products on these platforms.

We have discussed how you can use social media as an effective digital marketing tool to grow your business. We hope that it has been resourceful to your needs to improve your social media marketing campaigns. From defining goals to tracking, analyzing and reporting on your social media activities, these tips can help you move your digital marketing to the next level.

We’ve also stressed the many benefits of tracking and reporting on your social media marketing. And you can check out more about it in our recent article about marketing reporting to learn more. Try our digital marketing reporting tools today and see how we can help you build powerful reports and monitoring from all your favorite social media platforms.