10 Expert Social Media Marketing Tips to Boost Your Agency's Results
- Updated on: 2020-11-13
- Read original article here
Need to boost your agency’s results? Our tips from social media marketing experts can help you do just that!
As a social media marketer, you might be responsible for managing several agency clients with a variety of different goals. Whether you focus on community building, lead generation, content creation, or a little of everything—you need advanced tactics to help your clients get an edge over the competition.
But what if you’re running short on brilliant ideas?
I went straight to the source and I asked 10 social media marketing experts for their advice. From mastering live streaming and telling compelling stories to getting to know your customers and understanding your analytics, their expert social media marketing tips can help you level up your agency’s results.
“The number-one best thing you can do to generate more leads and more sales is call the potential and existing customers. Even for your clients!” according to Andrew and Pete.
“In doing this you find out why people buy in the first place and also what objections are holding people back from buying. This data can then be used to create better-converting content, sales pages, lead magnets and funnels. Yet no one does it! Everyone just guesses!”
For more insights from Andrew and Pete, visit their website.
“One of the biggest challenges for social media managers is that they fail to explain to their clients how Pinterest works and what their job is as a social media manager when managing a Pinterest business account,” says Anna Bennett, social media marketing expert.
“My job as a Pinterest manager is to make sure I drive as much traffic as humanly possible to my client’s site and/or blog. We are not responsible for converting that traffic into sales. It’s the client’s website’s responsibility to do that.
“Just like buying a radio, TV, or newspaper ad for a brick-and-mortar store. Once the person walks in, whether a sale is made or not depends for the most part on the store: the appearance, merchandise mix, how items are displayed, prices, staff, service levels, ease of shopping, return policies, etc.
“The radio, TV, or newspaper ad is not the primary determinant of the conversion rates. That is on the store operations.
“A radio ad, a Google pay-per-click ad, or traffic I send clients from Pinterest will rarely convert if the buyer’s shopping experience once they are in the client’s store or website is a broken, brutal experience. You get that, right?
“Google Ads or I can send boatloads of traffic, but if the shopping experience on the website or in the shopping cart sucks, it won’t make many sales. It’s not the Google Ads or the Pinterest traffic that is broken. The buying experience on the site is broken and driving conversion rates down.
“It’s important as a social media manager that you manage the expectations of your clients around the differences between driving traffic and increasing conversation rates. Be clear with your clients your role is driving traffic and that is what you should be measured on.
“So when someone asks me what the conversion rate on Pinterest traffic will be, the answer is probably the same as your conversion rate on your website right now. (Outside of Google Ads.)”
For more insights from Pinterest expert Anna Bennett, visit the White Glove Social Media website.
“Want to improve your clients’ results with live streaming?” asks social media expert Stephanie Liu.
“Start simulcasting. Similar to a TV network that’s syndicated in multiple cities, simulcasting amplifies your reach with less effort. Platforms like Restream allow you to broadcast to 30+ destinations, including your Facebook Profile, Groups and Pages, LinkedIn, Periscope, Twitter, YouTube, and more.
“More importantly, with Restream, you can deliver a detailed report to your client that highlights when viewers were highly engaged, how many messages were sent, and even which phrases and emojis your audience most often use. This type of data is invaluable in honing your content for growth and engagement.”
For more insights from Stephanie Liu, visit Lights, Camera, Live.
“Tell stories with your hero in mind. (Hint: It’s not you and your business.) It’s your audience and your ideal customer,” says social media marketing expert Donna Mortiz.
“Always be thinking about how your content can help them. Whether it’s behind-the-scenes footage of something your team is working on or whether you’re teaching something they really need to know, always keep in mind how it helps your audience to solve problems or achieve their goals.
“Think of yourself as the sherpa or guide rather than the focus of your storytelling, helping them to shine and achieve success in whatever they are challenged by or striving for. It puts a spin on your storytelling that makes it more eye-catching and ultimately more engaging, because your audience feels like they are part of it.”
For more insights from Donna Moritz, visit Socially Sorted.
“Here’s the thing with agencies, with social media, and with results,” begins Christopher Penn. “Very, very, very few clients and agencies are really clear on the results they’re trying to achieve on behalf of a client.
“If you are not clear about that, and you don’t have any way of measuring it, then you’re going to produce results and strategies and tactics that are effectively meaningless. They’re at best cranking out vanity metrics. And then you have no mathematical proof that the thing that you’re doing has any impact on the business.”
Press play to find out how to prove your agency’s impact or read the full video transcript.
For more insights from Christopher S. Penn, visit his website or follow him on Twitter or LinkedIn.
“This strategy will work for any business with an online transaction that the Facebook Pixel can track,” says Molly Pittman. “But you can’t create these audiences from the normal Audiences page. Instead, you need to dive into Facebook Analytics first. Navigate to the Analytics page in your Facebook Ads Manager.
“You’re going to be using the filters to create highly valuable audiences based on how people interacted with your ads. To get a feel for how this works, click ‘Filter Data’ at the top, then click ‘Create a new filter.’
“Then ‘Performed an event,’ then click ‘Purchases.’”
“The Analytics dashboard will now update to show you metrics for all visitors who made a purchase in the past 28 days (you can change the date range in the top-left).”
“Here comes the fun part, though. We can use additional filters to create a more specific audience. One way to find your best customers is to target people who bought from you more than once. To do that, you can refine your purchases by filtering for more frequent buyers. Just click to add another filter and choose ‘more often than a percentage of people.’”
“Next, choose a percentage. When you apply that filter, you’ll notice that your data set gets smaller—in this case, from 85K down to 1.46K—because now you’re only seeing the data for those buyers who buy more often than 90% of people.
“As you can imagine, having an audience of your top 10% of buyers is incredibly valuable. What I did was to save the audience and then create a 5% lookalike based on it.”
Thanks to Pepijn Hufen for discovering this technique and both Pepijn Hufen and Molly Pittman for their testing and findings. For more insights from Molly Pittman, visit Smart Marketer or follow her on Facebook.
“The best advice I can give any person responsible for a customer-facing strategy right now is to emphasize empathy. The world has now been under so much COVID, economic, and political stress for so long that people are ready to explode.
“This is going to show up through the sentiment and tone of social media in toxic ways. As leaders, we need to dig down deep and demonstrate compassion and patience even when we are feeling stressed ourselves. We are at the front lines where consumers and companies intersect and we can set a tone of optimism and hope.”
For more insights from Mark Schaefer, read his new book, Marketing Rebellion: The Most Human Company Wins.
“There are two big ways to improve Facebook Ad results for your clients:
Sometimes, I’ve seen that people are running really large and scattered campaigns and aren’t really diving into what’s working. If you have a Dynamic Creative with a hundred combinations or if you have 25 Ad Sets in your CBO campaign, you may be wasting money.
“Facebook can optimize things well for you but with too many options, it can get off track. Find out what is working by diving deeper and then distill that into a strategic test plan.
Also think about how you are building up your assets to improve your results. Use Lookalike Audiences for like Time on Site, Add to Cart, Initiate Checkout, Purchases, and then Value-Based audiences as you get more Pixel data.”
For more insights from Andrea Vahl, visit her website.
“My community tip is to be human. Have your number-one goal be to help others.
“Dedicate at least 30 minutes every day to interact with your community, ask questions, see how they’re doing, and work on building and strengthening relationships. We’re stronger together and helping others is the number-one way to do that and lift everyone up!”
For more insights from Jennifer Watson, follow her on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or LinkedIn.
“There are so many new features in the Instagram Direct Message. An advanced tip is to get on a DM video chat with a hot lead and do a live consult or strategy session.
You can screen share three features in the Media:
“This makes for a dynamic, deep, intimate experience that can turn a warm lead into a paying client.”
For more insights from Sue B. Zimmerman, follow her on Instagram.
Whether you manage organic Instagram and Twitter campaigns or you handle paid Facebook and Pinterest campaigns, these social media marketing tips can help you get better results for your agency.
With this expert advice, you can grow communities, nurture leads, launch ad campaigns, and develop more effective social media strategies for your clients.
