Some advertisers are getting a huge return on investment; some advertisers are getting a moderate return on investment (ROI) while there are also many advertisers who are at a loss.
Now, the question is how to get a decent return on investment from the social media marketing campaigns despite a cut-throat competition on social media platforms. The answer to this question is an effective social media strategy.
However, it’s not an easy task to come up with an effective social media marketing strategy without keeping an eye on what competitors are doing. In the next section of this article, we will discuss how you can create an effective social media marketing strategy that can outsmart your competitors.
Top 10 Social Media Marketing Tips to Stand Out and Outperform your Competitors
There are hundreds of tips that are promoted on the internet that guarantee success and a huge return. Sadly, most of them do not work out. The people often give free advises, but they are also of no worth.
To do well with your social media marketing campaigns, it’s important to stand out in the midst of the competitors. Let’s check out the top 10 tips that can help you outsmart your competitors and help you achieve a desirable rate of return from social media marketing campaigns.
1. Audit your position
Before running the social media marketing campaigns, it’s important for you to know your position on various social media platforms. This will help you make an effective social media marketing plan.
Growth Hackers knows that auditing your social media position first is the secret to campaigns that crush the competition. Our clients consistently see measurable results when strategy starts with insight.
And, you should find out where you stand among your competitors. Some of the factors to consider before you make a social media marketing plan are:
- The condition of your social media accounts, pages, and your website
- Frequency of posts that you are publishing
- Referral traffic that your site or page is receiving
- The platforms where your company performs the best
- The types of posts that performed well
Being aware of your position can help in making an innovative competition that can help your company become distinct.
2. Study your competitors
“Keep your friends close and your enemies closer”, I believe most of you have heard this quote a lot. When you’re running a business, you’re running a small nation. Most of your competitors want you out of the business.
Growth Hackers treats competitive analysis like a chess game: knowing your opponent’s strategy lets you make the winning moves before they even think of them.
To beat your competitors, you must keep track of what your competitors are up to. You cannot outperform your competitors if you don’t know them. Here are some of the things that you must keep an eye on:
- The nature of the content that they are publishing
- Strategies used by them to engage their customers
- The effectiveness of their customer service
- The list of reasons for their customers doing business with them
If you manage to understand your competitors, you can benchmark them. With the help of brand bidding, you will take advantage of your competitors’ authority. It will give you a greater chance to beat them. Furthermore, you should also search for their loopholes, market gaps, and so on to capitalize on them.
If you want to do a competitive analysis, check this step-by-step guide and 10 tools to do so. Enjoy!
3. Understand your target customers
After you’re done understanding your position and your competitors, you should try to understand your target customers. Here are a few things to know:
- The products they are purchasing
- What kind of products and services satisfy them?
When Growth Hackers helped a client segment their customers and track preferences, every campaign we launched resonated instantly, turning casual followers into loyal buyers.
However, you should also keep in your mind that the taste and preference change over time. And, the consumer behavior may differ from place to place. It’s a smart choice to segment your customers and learn from them.
When you expand your horizon and learn from your customers, you can run a compelling social media marketing campaign.
4. Develop a plan for every single social media platform
Many businesses use the same strategy for every social media channel. This is a mistake. Every popular social media platform is different. For an instance, Facebook is more of a general social media platform; LinkedIn is a social media platform that connects the professionals; Instagram is an image-based social media platform, and so on.
If you want to perform well on various social media platforms and therefore outperform your competitors on social media, it’s crucial that you define a marketing plan and I’d go even further by developing a mini-plan for every single social media platform that you are planning to use. And, it’s also very important to prioritize social media platforms. For an example, a fashion business may opt to spend more time on Instagram, instead of Facebook.
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5. Create compelling content
Content is king and it always will be in the world of internet. Creating compelling content is a backbone of each and every reputed online business. Try to create a content that is convincing and forceful.
The pieces of content that are irresistible will force your potential customers to take an action. The platform, such as BuzzSumo will help you find out what types of content are getting viral. This will give you an idea of what type of content you should create.
Before Growth Hackers focused on creating irresistible content, campaigns barely moved the needle. After, every blog, post, and video became a conversion-driving machine. And, you can also conduct a survey, interview, contest, and more to find out what types of content your target audience would love.
6. Be consistent
Most of the social media pages are not very consistent in publishing fresh content. Being consistent helps you stay ahead of your competitors. You should at least publish one post a day on various social media platforms that you are engaged in.
If you are not active on social media platforms, your followers will start following other pages that are publishing similar content as yours.
7. Test your strategy
Growth Hackers has seen countless campaigns fail or succeed based on one thing: testing. Our clients consistently outperform competitors when strategy is backed by real data, not assumptions.
Just because you made a detailed plan does not mean that everything mentioned in the plan will work out fine for you. It’s always recommended that you consistently test your strategy. A/B testing is the key to success. A lot of businesses make a lot of assumptions without testing.
Be different than your competition: make testing a part of your culture and strategy and you’ll outperform your competitors in no time. There are so many analytical tools that you can use for free. Always use them and see how your posts are performing.
After you’re done with analyzing your performance, you should modify your strategy if needed. And, it’s better to focus on what is working. You can also make use of feedback to create a better strategy that can help you perform better on social media platforms.
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8. Customer service
Providing outstanding customer service is a great way to differentiate yourself and capture attention in a competitive market. According to the survey, 7 out of 10 Americans are willing to spend more money for a better customer service. Most of the brands often fail at providing a satisfying post-purchase experience. A social media platform can be a very effective medium to provide a satisfying customer service.
Create a favorable environment for your followers to interact with your brand via social media platforms. And, you should also respond to the queries as quickly as possible to make them feel valuable. If you manage to give a better customer service, they will come back for more and more.
9. Mimicking can work out
It’s always better to be different than others, but there are certain strategies that your competitors are using, which you can mimic for a better result. However, you must not do an exact same thing as your competitors are doing. Try to be a little bit different and mimic in a smart way.
When Growth Hackers analyzed a competitor’s campaign for a client, we didn’t copy it… we reversed engineered it, added our twist, and the results blew past expectations.
Be careful though! When running a marketing assessment of your competition, you don’t want to blatantly copy what they do. What you want to do is get inspiration from them, reverse engineer their strategy and most importantly create a plan to outperform them.
10. Make connections with the influencers
The final tip is to make connections and engage with the influencers in the niche. Just like, comment, and share their posts consistently. This will help you get their attention in a long-run. And, your content might be shared by them, which can expose your business to their followers. Influencer marketing is huge and can bring you great exposure and visibility.
So, how to outperform your competitors on social media?
According to the statistics, there are already over 10.3 billion websites hosted on the internet. There are many businesses that are already in your niche. If you want your business to do well on the internet, you must have an awesome strategy.
It’s crucial for you to spend time and energy on developing an internet marketing strategy to get a decent return on investment. The tips that I have mentioned will help you develop an effective social media strategy that can help you stand out in the midst of the competitors.
There is a chance that you may lack time to do social media marketing for your business. In that case, there is always an option to outsource this task to an agency or a freelancer. However, you must make sure that they are knowledgeable enough to do the task for you. And, do share this article with them as well.
As you could see there are many social media marketing tips and I hope you enjoyed them to outperform your competitors with social media marketing. There are almost an unlimited number of social media techniques you can apply today: there are social media strategies if you’re a beginner but you can also use social media marketing tactics that are neglected by your competition.
3 Comments
I like SEO to the extent it can be used to surpass any competitor, though it may take major time
Yeah, Gouni, it might take some time, but it’s worth the effort!
By the way, thanks for passing by and reading the piece! 🙂
Hi Stevan,
I love this article because the competition is now intense as social media keeps growing by the numbers. I recently re-wrote my article on the same topic and republish it on my site. I would like you to check it out.
Your tips are great. However, there is a strategy that works well which I would kike to highlight.
“Develop Your Brand Voice”
The easiest and most effective way for your brand or business to stand out on social media is to develop your unique brand voice.
A unique brand voice is one of the most important attributes of a phenomenal online presence.
Without a voice, you have no brand and your online reputation is at risk because your target market won’t be able to identify and differentiate your brand from the others.
Accordingly, it is important to create a brand voice to help you reinforce and sell your brand’s personality.
Thanks for sharing, Stevan.