In the modern age of online business, social media are a great place to find target customers for your business products or services. Through social sites, brands can generate leads, bring awareness of their business offers, and get leads to convert to customers.
However, in the process of using social media platforms, many sales and marketing teams make mistakes that affect their engagement and lead conversion for their business.
This article shows those social media mistakes so marketers can avoid them, and maximize the use of social media to generate leads, nurture them, and convert them into customers.
Not Monitoring Your Brand
Many brands don’t monitor how their business is doing on social sites. They don’t run content analysis to see the kind of content their target audience loves most and engage with it so they can create more of it to engage them and drive more awareness of their products or services.
Additionally, sales and marketing teams are not up to date with the latest consumer trends and end up not adjusting their marketing strategy on social media to reflect those new and emerging trends. Here is what John of Taskade shares his experience on the lessons they learned through this mistake.
One of the biggest social media mistakes we made when marketing our SaaS startup was failing to zoom in on our audience demographics during the early days. Marketing a SaaS product on social media is always difficult, which is why you need to understand your audience demographics and tailor your content to them. Fixing this mistake helped us improve our performance across different social media platforms, and we have several successful platforms with thousands of followers today. ( John, CEO Taskade.com)
Not Having a Great and Optimized Profile
Customers consider different factors when searching for a business to use and solve their pains. As a business, you need to build trust with your target customers and a great profile on social media is the best way to do that. Many brands don’t have an optimized company profile but have personal profiles for their employees. Target customers are less likely to trust a brand without a company profile.
In addition, also include a company logo and a cover profile image of your brand and the pain points it solves for your target customers. Here is what our Twitter business profile looks like.
Source: Twitter
Not all of the customers use the same social media platform. Ensure you have optimized profiles on different social media sites but have the same company logo and profile across all those platforms so as not to confuse your target audience. Also, see how our business profile looks on Linkedin.
Source: LinkedIn
Lack of Content Posting Strategy
Prospects will consume more than one piece of your content and convert it into customers. Through the nurturing process, the leads will consume different content from your brand as they build trust with you, and get to know more about your products or services and how they work to solve their pains.
Many brands don’t engage users through the content. They ignore the lead’s comments and feedback when they consume their content. Research shows that conversions are the best way brands determine content performance.
Source: CMI
Another mistake brands make is posting the same content on all platforms. It appears repetitive and prospects lose interest in the content and even start following and engaging with the content from your competitors. Create unique content for readers across different social sites.
Target customers are in different groups and forums for social media. Many target audience leave their thoughts and also ask questions in those groups. Not engaging in forums and communities on social media can affect the trust and engagement with leads which can affect your brand conversion and sales. Here is what Priyanka CEO of Perfect Locks says:
Another mistake is not posting consistently. If you’re posting randomly or without a plan, it can confuse your followers and slow down your growth. We had a hard time with this at first, but after setting up a content calendar and keeping an eye on analytics, we noticed a huge boost in reach and engagement.
In conclusion, social media marketing is about engagement, consistency, and listening to your target audience. Remember, every mistake is an opportunity to learn and improve your business. ( Priyanka Swamy, CEO, https://www.perfectlocks.com/)
Not Targeting a Specific Audience
Not all the users on social media are your target customers. As you market and reach target customers, have a specific target audience you want to reach and create content that aligns with their pain points. Creating a marketing strategy without targeting the right audience is a waste of time and resources on social media.
Deleting Negative Comments
No business is perfect or gets everything right. When you delete negative comments or engagement and feedback from users, customers, or prospects, your target audience can lose your trust.
Let them see the strengths you can bring to them and also show them the other side. It strengthens their beliefs. Don’t ignore negative comments or questions from customers on your social media posts. Showing the right interaction with prospects even when they comment with negative comments shows you care for them and even strengthens trust in your brand.
Being Too Promotional in Your Content
When every content you put out is all about you and not the customers, they will understand that all you care about is making sales and not even what they need. As you promote your brand on social media, ensure you’re not too promotional. You need to understand your customer’s needs well to create the best content to engage them as you subtly promote your brand to them. Hear what Magee of Cleartail Marketing says.
One mistake that we made early on was over-promoting our services on our social media platforms. Instead of providing value and engaging with our audience, we were constantly pushing our products and services. This approach was counterproductive as it led to a decrease in engagement and followers. It was a hard lesson, but it taught us the importance of balancing self-promotion with engagement and value addition.
We learned that social media marketing is more about building relationships than selling a product or service. We refocused our strategy to engage more with our audience by sharing valuable content, answering industry-related questions, and providing solutions to common business challenges. This not only improved our follower engagement but also established us as thought leaders in the industry, indirectly increasing business growth.
Businesses should focus on providing valuable content, engaging in meaningful conversations, and tracking social media metrics to refine their marketing strategies. (Magee Clegg, CEO of Cleartail Marketing)
Not Including Hashtags in Your Content
From time to time, prospects search for useful content on social media using hashtags. You miss a chance to engage your target customer if you don’t use hashtags in your content. Ensure also you don’t use unrelated hashtags to the content you create.
It is essential to have a buyer persona for your target customers as that will give you the right information for your client so you can know how to engage them the right way and post helpful content alongside the hashtags prospects use. It is also important not to include complex words in the content you put out.
Use simple words leads can relate to and understand. You can use great hashtags but when leads discover the content and find it hard to understand, they will look for other competitors. See here:
One common mistake we made on our social media platforms was using too much industry jargon, particularly around digital marketing. We assumed that our followers would be familiar with these terms but we quickly realized that wasn’t the case. Our audience mainly consisted of beginners who were just dipping their feet in the world of digital marketing.
As we reflected, we understood that our content was simply flying over their heads. This miscommunication led to less engagement with our posts and a slower growth rate in our online community. We learned the hard way that the language we use needs to cater to our audience’s comprehension level, not our expertise. (Matt Bowman is the Founder of Thrive Digital Marketing Agency)
Lack of Definite Social Media Goals
Some brands just market blindly on social media sites and don’t have goals that they want to achieve from their marketing. A lack of social media goals can affect how you promote, market, and engage leads and result in fewer conversions and sales. As sales and marketing teams, you need to have a clear goal and time gap within which you should achieve those goals. Here is what Fawaz says
From my experience as CEO of Softlist.io, I have encountered a major social media mistake that greatly impacted our business growth. We initially made the critical error of not defining our social media goals in alignment with our overall business objectives. Without clear measurable goals to guide our social media strategies, we found our online presence to be inconsistent and lacking substance, which in turn led to potential customers being uncertain about the quality and value of our services.
This resulted in a slower growth trajectory for Softlist.io, as prospective clients turned elsewhere due to a lack of brand clarity and effective messaging on our social media platforms. It wasn’t until we took a step back to analyze our methods that we identified this key pitfall.
To rectify this issue, we reaffirmed the mission and vision of Softlist.io and translated these into quantifiable social media goals. This, in turn, paved our way toward structured and cohesive social media campaigns that accurately portrayed our unique value proposition and established our brand identity in our industry. (Fawaz Naser CEO, Softlist.io)
It is essential to have social media goals as you create your marketing strategy on social media platforms. Research by SproutSocial shows that 62% of creators use content to drive more engagement to their brand.
Source: Sprout Social
Using Low-Quality Images and Visuals
Visuals are very important and many target customers engage more with video and visual content. It is essential to create visuals that consumers love to engage with and that give them insights on how to solve their pains.
Inconsistent posting is a mistake we’ve made in the past. Ideally, you would also post at optimal times to ensure your followers see your posts. We also at times overlooked the power of diverse visuals. For instance, high-quality images need to be mixed in with interesting infographics, fun videos, and even engaging polls and quizzes. A diverse mix of visuals keeps your social media feed appealing which in turn spurs growth. ( Andrew Meyer, Arbor)
Research shows that 75% of users consume video content.
Source: CMI
Not Running Ads
Ads are a great way to engage the target audience and get them to know more about the products you offer. As you create and optimize your ads, use captivating visuals that align with the challenges the target audience is facing.
Include a captivating CTA and the right message to build trust and get the users to want to engage and know more about your business. Research by Wyzowl shows that 71% of brands create videos on social media and 46% create video ads to promote their brands to target customers.
Source: Wyzowl
Don’t make these mistakes
Leveraging the power of social media to drive more brand awareness, build trust, and drive conversions is essential. Customers trust and engage brands that respect them, acknowledge their needs, and show value in solving those pains.
Using social media effectively will help reach more target customers, nurture them, and convert them into customers. However, making these costly mistakes will affect your brand conversions and sales. Take note of these mistakes, avoid them engage leads on social media, and get them to convert to customers and drive sales and business growth.