Mediaboss Marketing

Marketing on social media has changed from a nice-to-have to a must-have for modern brands. The power of social can be gauged from these facts:

Whether youre an expert or a rookie at social media marketing, you will agree with us that it isnt easy. Changing technological and social trends make it very challenging. Additionally, there are difficulties in strategy formulation, ROI measurement, and allocation of time and budget.

In this post, we cover five of the most common social media marketing challenges that marketers face and actionable solutions to overcome them.

Social media marketing can be a mystery if you are unfamiliar with the way it works. By understanding its challenges, you can cope with them better. You can draft your strategy, use the right tools, and tweak your approach accordingly.

In the past, brands didnt use to place much importance on a social media team. Far from it, social media teams were either non-existent or managed by just one person. Today, however, social is no longer limited to online ads. It also involves a range of proficiencies as illustrated in the photo below.

The COVID-19 pandemic, along with developments in the metaverse, has made social media more popular than ever. Not surprisingly, social media management is the third most in-demand marketing occupation today.

For companies, these added responsibilities mean more dependency on their social media efforts. And for that, almost 90% of brands expect to hire new social media marketing team members in the next two years, with over half of them predicting up to six new vacancies. The challenge is finding talents whose expertise is within the disciplines that contribute to the growth of the brands social strategy.

One of the best practices for hiring new talent is to adapt your core team to the challenges that social media faces. Invest in growing not just your social media team but also those other departments that contribute to your social strategy.

Moreover, each department should not be siloed. Instead, social media marketers should be able to reach out to sales, human resources, research and development, customer service, and other departments when creating marketing goals. Sharing data with these departments can help them improve the brands social presence.

Provide relevant resources and insights to help the team understand how the brands social media presence affects sales. Know which proficiencies are lacking in each department, review metrics with them, and find opportunities for collaboration across the team.

The next hurdle marketers face is in the selection of which platforms to leverage.The COVID-19 pandemic has increased social media use among users and drew marketers to new platforms that boomed during the pandemic.

However, few marketers research their target markets thoroughly enough to identify the platforms where their target audience is active.

You can see that 51% of consumers hope to use YouTube to discover brands, whereas only 35% of marketers will consider it for their marketing efforts. If brands dont revisit their marketing strategy, then theyll likely miss out on more bankable platforms.

Investing in the wrong platforms can exhaust your budget, especially if you regularly use paid ads. If the decision-makers in your company are not sold on the idea of social media marketing in the first place, they might just pull the plug if you commit this misstep.

In a way, if you overcome the first challenge of goal setting, you are well on your way to overcoming this challenge too.

For example, if you want to establish a personal connection with customers, Twitter is your best bet. On the other hand, Instagram is great if you want to leverage influencers to spread brand awareness.

Overall, your social platform investment should factor in your potential audience reach, ad cost, traffic potential, lead generation, and demographic, among others.

Take the time to get to know your audience. Which platforms are they active on? What are their main activities on social media? Dissect your audience demographics to learn about their genders, ages, and locations. Then, meet them where they are active.A lot depends on the nature of your business as well. B2C brands need to be active on visual platforms like Facebook and Instagram to grab the attention of consumers.

B2B brands can benefit from local SEO on Google My Business and Bing. They should also post regularly on LinkedIn to make useful connections with brands.You also need to keep tabs on your competitors. Out of sight, out of mind, is very true for social media users. If you dont have a strong presence on channels that your competitors are acing, youre bound to lose a lot of conversion opportunities.

Social media listening can help you track the brand mentions of your competitors. Identify the channels where they are garnering attention. Then, plan outreach on those channels.

There are many brands that do superb business in-store but fail miserably on social. The difference is that in brick-and-mortar stores, customers approach brands, whereas, on social media, brands have to seek out customers. And, do some brands have no clue how to do this.

Too often, marketers create content first and figure out the target audience later. They have the misconception that great content converts, even if it is not targeted. Though great content gets engagement, it might not generate leads if it isnt tailored to your target audiences needs.

Directionless marketing relies on a spray-and-pray approach that seldom gives the desired returns. In fact, it can damage your brands credibility. You run the risk of getting blocked or reported if you bombard people with irrelevant content.

Do you know who your ideal customer is? Have you created a precise buyer persona? Dig into your existing customer base, ad analytics, and email subscriber list. Create a fictional customer avatar from the data you collect.

Get personal with the data. How many kids does your customer have? How do they spend their weekends? What kind of music do they love? Gather as many insights as are relevant to your business.

You can use social listening tools to capture insights. You can drill down into customer conversations around your brand, product, and niche. Understand the consumer sentiment and pain points to shape your campaign goals and content.

Kraft Foods used social data when they were planning to introduce mini-burgers or sliders. Using social listening, they identified slider themes popular among different customer segments. Social research guides the brands product strategy as well. Their super-successful Mayochup was a result of one such research.

Social listening will also help you understand the why behind customer actions. Why are they following a particular platform? Why did they unfollow your brand? Why is your brand mention volume low? Use the insights you gathered to establish a personal connection with customers and create more appealing content.

The online world is constantly changing, continuously giving rise to new engagement tactics. Our fast-paced lifestyles inform us of new ways of reading, watching, or even conversing with others. Brands that cant keep up with these trends end up losing their leads and even their audiences altogether.

Garnering social media engagement is a competition to gain followers and even customers. But in its Social Media Industry Benchmark Report, RivalIQ reports decreasing organic engagement. This only proves that paid ads are gradually monopolizing the marketing industry within social media platforms.

The downward spiral of organic engagement tells us that social media algorithms are becoming increasingly difficult to overcome. Unless you have paid promotions under your belt, your brand is likely to spiral into social media oblivion. But even with paid ads, high-quality content is key to gaining engagement online.

Know what your target audience wants to see by assessing your top-caliber posts. Find their common ground, and capitalize on that for future posts.

Granted, creating high-quality content takes time and investment. Repurposing your old content can help you save some trouble. For example, you can take an old video, snip it, and post it as new content on short-form content platforms like TikTok and Instagram.

In terms of the most engaging type of content, short-form or less than five-minute videos should be at the top of your list. Short-form content is not only easy to create and share but also gains more than twice as much engagement as long-forms. Note, however, that long-form content is still more appropriate for YouTube.

You should also focus on content that appeals to your audience. More than half of consumers like seeing product-centric ads, which prominently feature products, services, and real customers. But spin that with user-generated content that allows your users to win prizes (case in point: yogurt company Chobanis #SwitchTheChobaniFlip on TikTok), and youll surely cut through the competitive social media noise.

Aside from gaining followers and engagements, social media marketers are also challenged by consumers current expectations. As we head into the metaverse, the third iteration of the internet, more people are drawn to emerging technologies, particularly non-fungible tokens, augmented and virtual reality, and virtual spaces. When interacting with brands in the future, younger generations of consumersGen Zs and millennialsexpect to use technology.

Moreover, people want to identify with a brand that represents similar values. 71% of people find company advocacies important, particularly those that relate to social issues and diversity. Brands that speak out on social media also carve a powerful identity for themselves and become culturally relevant online.

However, marketers usually have a hard time pushing for this, leaving it to their company leaders to decide. If brands fail to take a proactive approach and revisit their identity, then theyre likely to become stagnant or outdated.

Develop a distinct voice that makes your brand authentic. This voice must be aligned with your customers values. Support issues that matter to your company, and build a relationship with customers who share a similar advocacy.

You can also create positions that can help you address issues that your company wants to tackle. Hire talents that have had a similar role in the past and who can push their higher-ups to speak up and raise awareness on certain topics.

Additionally, invest in metaverse strategies that your consumers would surely engage in. Take it as an opportunity to gain a competitive edge and adopt future strategies early on. This will not only help you expose your brand to a new generation of online users but also allow you to stake a claim in the future of the internet.

All types of marketing come with their own set of challenges. Social media marketing is no exception. Now that you are familiar with these issues, you are better prepared to handle them. Use the tips and strategies mentioned in this post to risk-proof your social media marketing efforts.

About the Author

With over 15 years in content marketing, Werner founded Influencer Marketing Hub in 2016. He successfully grew the platform to attract 5 million monthly visitors, making it a key site for brand marketers globally. His efforts led to the company's acquisition in 2020. Additionally, Werner's expertise has been recognized by major marketing and tech publications, including Forbes, TechCrunch, BBC and Wired.

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5 of the Biggest Social Media Marketing Challenges - Influencer Marketing Hub

EAST AMHERST, N.Y. --The graduating class at Williamsville East High School has had a unique educational experience as the COVID-19 pandemic began their freshman year.

Senior Aniyah Ramadan was one of a group of students who sat down with Gov. Kathy Hochul Friday to talk about how social media has impacted her life and education.

"The things that we said today, I do think they kind of made her think a little bit about what to do next and how to move on from there so I do think she's going to take what we said today back to Albany," Ramadan said.

Hochul, who has held similar roundtable discussions across the state, said she is learning from students as lawmakers fine-tune social media restrictions she believes they can pass this session.

"We have no choice but to take action. We have seen the negative effects of social media on young people as early as nine and 10-year-olds who are radically different children than they would have been if they weren't pulled by this addictive force into the dark spaces of social media," Hochul said.

The governor, along with the attorney general and prominent Democrats, is championing legislation that would require parental consent in order for kids under 18 to access what she calls addictive social media algorithms and another to limit the ability of companies to collect personal data from children and monetize it.

She said it's part of the administration's focus on children's mental health, citing a rise in suicides and suicidal behavior corresponding with the proliferation of algorithms.

"No other state can match how we are addressing this, making sure that schools like this and others have these services available within them, so my view is if we can get help to students now, if they have challenges, we can avoid a whole lifetime of them needing services in the future," Hochul said.

Social media platforms are pushing back against the bills, arguing, among other things, the algorithms are the best tool to protect kids from inappropriate content. The governor has another theory about their motivation.

"That's the best way they have to keep drawing people in so they continue to be able to advertise to them and make a profit off of our children," she said.

Ramadan, who is heading to college, said she would still want access to the algorithms and social media experience she knows, but sometimes its so overwhelming she takes matters into her own hands.

"Recently I just had to disable it a couple months back because I had a lot of assignments to do, a lot of things to do but also in that time with not having social media, I also learned to just enjoy myself," she said.

Hochul said New York will be the first in the nation to tackle this issue.

She said many social media companies do want to ensure the health and safety of children and there should be a national standard but wants the state to lead the way until Congress takes action.

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Hochul pushes social media restrictions on youth while meeting with students - Spectrum News

NEW YORK: Nadya Okamoto, CEO of lifestyle period brand August, opened PRWeeks Healthcare Awards+Conference on Tuesday by sharing how she is breaking the stigma around periods and increasing equity for menstruation products.

Okamoto said periods have historically been depicted in a negative light, often as something to not talk about, something to be ashamed of.

If no one talks about it, there isnt this thinking of what period product am I using? Whats in my product? How am I taxed on the product? What goes into the pricing of it? said Okamoto. As you see more brands and social media becoming a way to do that, competition and doing marketing about it is breaking the stigma, because the stigma is literally not talking about it.

Okamoto tries to run August like a beauty brand and wants to build a fanbase and excited following for it. Okamoto and August have a collective 6 million followers on social media, building that audience by talking about the brand, the product and showcasing the companys journey.

Bigger period-product brands dont lean into social media in general, Okamoto said. That is where August is different.

When Okamoto began using TikTok, she would make 80 to 100 videos a day, experimenting with what worked. Within her first year on TikTok, she gained 2 million followers and kept growing.

Okamoto said she doesnt have a long-term strategy for social media, which is why she gravitates toward TikTok because she makes many videos in real time. For example, she sometimes sees a question and decides on a whim to reply via video and talk to the camera.

Okamoto views everything as content, from her outfits to images of nature to interesting conversations. She also shares anything going on with her health, such as the fact that she has borderline personality disorder, is pre-diabetic and found a lump in her breast. In one of her most-viewed videos, she shared her experience getting a papsmear.

A lot of Gen Z and Gen Alpha are documenting their lives publicly, she said. That is the opportunity for any healthcare brands.

Dr. Mike Varshavski, a board-certified family medicine physician at Chatham Family Medicine and social media influencer, said he gets frustrated when he hears teenagers say they want to be influencers when they grow up. His advice to people who want to find fame on social media is to develop a skill doing something meaningful, he said during a live podcast recording.

Get an education, learn something, get a craft or skill that you can bring to the audience online, he said. These days, anyone can be a content creator or post something and have it go viral. But unless you have meaning behind what you are doing, all of that gets lost.

Varshavski said that when he gained popularity on social media, people asked him when he planned to stop practicing medicine. He said his answer was never, and he has increased the number of days he works at the hospital.

Varshavski has an audience of more than 25 million followers across social media platforms. But he said he has never had a positive time on TikTok.

Out of all the social media platforms, it is where I get the least amount of support, it is where the most misinformation is allowed to stand and when I raise flags about this, they are the slowest platform to act, said Varshavski.

This article originally appeared on PRWeek US.

Continued here:
How health influencers Nadya Okamoto and Doctor Mike approach social media - MM+M Online

It left Gasly with mixed feelings, for on the one hand he topped up Alpines tally with another valuable point, but was also left to rue what might have been had the collision not occurred.

Right now, I must say Im very pleased and very relieved for the whole team, Gasly began. We knew Monaco was a place where there would be an opportunity, even if we struggled with the car since the start of the year.

READ MORE: Leclerc clinches long-awaited home win in Monaco ahead of Piastri and Sainz after early drama

We managed to seize the opportunity yesterday with that first Q3 and it was important to capitalise on that, and thats what we did.

He then commented: Unfortunately, it wasnt as peaceful as we had planned. I dont want to go into too much details, but these things should not happen.

It was a clear instruction from the team on what to do, what we were supposed to do, and this wasnt respected [by Ocon].

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Gasly fumes at Alpine intra-team clash in Monaco - F1 - The Official Home of Formula 1 Racing

Creator is in their name. So let them create. That was the advice Sophie Jamison, CEO of Lightning Media, shared at the recent EMARKETER Summit. Jamison warned against giving creators too much direction and was optimistic about the future of social media marketing, even if TikTok goes away.

I don't send [creators] briefs. We just let them go for it, said Jamison. They know what they're doing. So we're going to let them do it

One of the biggest mistakes brands can make is holding onto too much creative control, Jamison said. Doing so can create overproduced content that is inconsistent with a creators general tone and wont perform well. The strongest creator partnerships happen when brands keep creators in the loop and informed of their marketing strategy without micromanaging them.

Jamison also warned against focusing too much on follower count, which she called a vanity metric. Sometimes those smaller creators that already have that niche community are a much better use of time and money, she said.

Despite focusing primarily on TikTok, Jamison is not concerned about the apps potential ban. If TikTok goes away, there's Instagram Reels, there's YouTube Shorts, there's a new app that will take its place, Jamison said. So long as brands understand their audience and how to find the right influencers, their approach to social media should be applicable across platforms.

Approaches to audience can vary depending on the product, but a good social media team should be able to figure out what works. It's about being very flexible, and really just understanding what's resonating and kind of just testing, Jamison said.

Influencer marketing spend is still growing by double digits in the US. We forecast it will increase by 16.0% to reach a total of $8.14 billion this year.

This was originally featured in the EMARKETER Daily newsletter. For more marketing insights, statistics, and trends, subscribe here.

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Let them create: Social media marketing expert weighs in on working with creators amid potential TikTok ban - eMarketer