Did you know that it is possible to have a social media marketing disaster? Knowing how to avoid such marketing failures is a step towards achieving digital marketing success. Social media platforms are one of the biggest marketing tools available today. However, if not well used they can lead to disaster.
A huge number of your potential customers are on social media sites like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. You need to always put your best foot forward when marketing to them. Read on to learn more on media marketing failures.
Top Social Media Marketing Failures
Social media fails can leave a business paying a very heavy price. We look at some of the biggest social media marketing failures and how to avoid them.
1. Marketing Without a Strategy
Social media is here to stay and when using social media for your marketing, you need to have a good strategy before anything else. Thousands of brands are today using social media as one of their major marketing tools and you too can do the same.
Take time to develop your very own strategy and this does not mean just posting continuously. Have a clearly defined plan and goal and create your tone of voice use quality pictures and videos and take advantage of the hashtags, reshares, and retweets offered by these platforms. A good marketing strategy should have:
- Tactics
- Goals
- Target audience
- Timing
You need to get all these in place before you start. Once you have a laid out plan, implement it and stick to it.
2. Assuming All Social Networks Are the Same
Posting the same contents in the same formats across all social media sites is a huge fail. This is one of the social media mistakes made by companies. Each platform is unique in a number of ways and you need to understand these differences before posting on them.
Different social media channels have very different features, marketing tools, strengths, and diverse audiences with variable behaviors, interests, and demographics. Bear all this in mind as you are working on your marketing campaign and tailor make each post to the specific platform to avoid any marketing disaster.
3. Deleting and Counterattacking Negative Feedback
Customer feedback, whether good or bad, is always a chance to improve on your service and give the customers what they want. Do not delete any negative or harsh comments in any of your social media platforms and ignore the fact that it ever existed. You should also not try to respond to it while defending your product or brand.
Take every negative feedback seriously and try to resolve the issues raised privately. This is because you might say the wrong thing in public and end up doing a lot of damage to your marketing campaign.
4. Over Promoting Your Brand
This is yet another social media marketing mistake that a number of companies fall victim to. Just because your target audience needs to hear from you each day does not mean it should always be about your products. They will easily lose interest.
Try and share something that is of value to your customer and is related to your products. For example, if you are selling cake flour, you can post some recipes or post anything related to baking.
Minimize your promotional activities. Best promotional practices require that you post one promotional post and follow it with four non-promotional posts.
5. Not Targeting Your Main Target
If you do not understand who your target is, you will not be able to target them and this is definitely another marketing failure that you need to avoid. Do not just try to shoot in the dark and hope to hit your mark. You need to know your target age group, gender, city, and language.
If you are targeting the millennials, you cannot use the same strategy that worked on senior citizens irrespective of how successful it was. The two do not understand the same marketing language. Ensure that your social media marketing strategy is aimed at a specific target.
6. Being Irregular
You always need to keep your social media audience active with regular posts. Failing to do this will mean that your audience starts forgetting about you. Do not be too busy to forget to post an update.
If your followers are used to regular posts, failure to do so even just for a day can have a negative effect. You might end up damaging your entire social media marketing campaign. Schedule automatic posts so that even if you forget to do it yourself, there will be a fresh post for your audience as usual.
7. Buying Followers
Buying followers is never a good idea. It does not give any true results and might also get you banned and deleted forever from that social media platform. As tempting as it is to have a number of strangers giving positive reviews about your products, it is a very risky move that you should avoid completely.
Social media is free and with the right strategy, you will get your audience talking and sharing about you while buying your products at the same time. All you need to do is align your goals and processes into a good social media marketing strategy.
Avoid These Social Media Marketing Failures for a Successful Marketing Strategy
It is very possible to run a successful social media marketing campaign without such marketing failures. The goal of marketing is to sell yourself and get your brand to the top. Therefore, you need to do what it takes to achieve exactly that.
Put your audience first, understand them, and let your strategy be all about them. If you’re pleasing your audience, you’re already halfway to long-term success.
Do you want to trend? Continue reading more on effective and functional social media tips.
