What’s Bringing Your Social Media Conversions Down
The objective of any marketing campaign is to capture leads and convert them into paying customers. Social media marketing is no different. Despite the costs associated with producing high-quality content for platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn, a significant chunk of marketers still consider the number of followers and engagement metrics such as likes and shares as key metrics that define the success of their campaigns.
But that is not the only reason social media conversions go down. Here are a few factors that marketers must account for while drafting a strategy for social media.
Targeting the Wrong Platform
Every social media platform is unique in its own way. Instagram, for instance, has over one billion monthly active users. It is ideal for businesses that want to engage with millennials or operate in an industry where visually engaging marketing assets deliver higher ROI. A business that offers healthcare insurance or enterprise messaging solutions, for instance, does not really have an offering that can create appeal on a visual platform like Instagram. Such businesses may look at alternate industry-specific social networks or use content marketing to target niche groups on LinkedIn or Facebook.
Improper Workflow
Every marketing asset needs to be tied to a specific objective. For instance, if you are driving traffic to your latest blog post from your Facebook Page, it is important to channel these visitors to a lead form or newsletter subscription window. This flow of traffic from your social media page to conversion needs to be seamless and well-aligned.
While a prominent call-to-action (CTA) is critical, it’s not the only component that ensures a seamless workflow. A visitor clicking over from Facebook to your website has specific expectations of the content they expect to consume.
As a marketer, it is important to tie this content delivery with your lead capture elements. For example, you must communicate what your product offering is, and what the lead capture form is prominently for. Pop-ups and animations tend to ruin the workflow and the visitor experience while an elegant color scheme or a grid layout to spread content evenly helps capture the visitor’s attention to your lead generation forms and thus improve your conversion rate.
Poor Distribution
Investing in high-quality content alone is not enough to maximize your social media reach. Social media advertising costs money and may not be worthwhile if your audience is not targeted enough. At the same time, growing a large following on platforms like Instagram and Facebook can take a really long time. The optimal solution to maximizing reach at minimal costs is using social media tools that help with reaching an audience beyond your organic followers.
Hashtags are one of the most popular tools for this purpose. Studies show that tweets with hashtags are 33% more likely to be retweeted than those without. On Instagram too, users have the option to follow posts containing specific hashtags. By using the right hashtags with your posts, you may expand the reach of your posts beyond your organic following.
A lot of marketers use social media to create viral campaigns. In such cases, distribution makes or breaks your ROI. For best results, it is recommended to dedicate a small portion of your budget to advertising and targeting your content with the right influencers. This helps create traction and set up virality for your content.
Inadequate Analytics
There are tons of tools to analyze social media campaigns to see what works and what doesn’t. Despite this, a lot of marketers continue to view social media marketing as a ‘hit or miss’ campaign. The platform you choose, the content you produce, the frequency at which you post, the people you engage with, your distribution process, and your call to action all have an impact on who sees your posts, how they interact with them, and whether or not they choose to convert.
Deploying third-party analytics to study the performance of your submissions is an absolutely essential component of your campaigns. In addition to knowing what works, this process also helps build a better content strategy for your upcoming social media campaigns.
Have you worked on a social media marketing campaign recently? Share tips that help boost conversions in the comments below.
