Effective social media marketing

Ultimately, all activities should lead to a tangible impact on your bottom line. For marketing, the gold standard is to find and convert paying customers. Other metrics like awareness and engagement can help you identify problems in the funnel, but don't let them distract you from your real goal: generating revenue.

No one knows your customers as well as you do, and every customer segment or market niche is unique. There are best practices, but you can't push your business to the next level with general advice from the outside. The best strategy is to experiment and learn what matters to your business with real customers. We can help you frame experiments to build traction the right way for you.

To set up an experiment, you need to compare results (for a business, generally revenue) between two groups:

• Treatment group: either a group of customers, a product, website, or even a period of time when you tried one new thing. For example, running a promotion on social media.

• Control group: a comparable group where you did absolutely nothing. This is to hold yourself accountable - if your promotion has a real effect, it should be significantly higher than the group where you did nothing. If you don't see a change, it's time to focus on something else.

Need help setting up or analyzing the results from an experiment? You can request tools or support at our get help page.

There are many social media channels - but that doesn't mean you need to be active on all of them.

Think through the social media channels where your target customers likely are, and focus on those first. Use an experimental approach to hone down on the right channel(s), brand character, tactics, and content that resonate for your business.

Remember, not all social media marketing means paid marketing. While there are great paid promotional or advertising tools, you can also create content to generate traffic for your business. Check out Hootsuite's article for a deeper dive.

We can help you find automations that fit your business - including social media marketing - with our Right Systems tools.

However, your business could benefit from other types of help too:

• Branding agencies

• Copywriting and content creators

• Designers

• Marketing agencies and specialists