With social media becoming more and more critical to marketers in 2021, it makes sense to establish your social media marketing strategies for the future.
Users are looking to social media to not only discover products that they might want but to then research the product and the brand, in this generation that is looking for brands’ principles to align with their own.
If you and your marketing team are running low on ideas for 2022 social media marketing strategies, you can look to Grazitti Interactive for details on their suggestions for strategies. We break them down here.
1. Take advantage of formal marketing experiments
Social media is ultimately a hub of people, making it a lot easier to experiment within a group. Formal marketing experiments can test out brand messaging, gain insights from a target demographic, and test advertisements.
In 2020 only 29% of marketers invested in formal marketing resources, but with social media becoming more important to marketing campaigns, that number is expected to rise as marketers see their impact.
2. Use innovative social media features
As mentioned, there are a lot of features hitting the social media market at the moment. For now, a lot of them are retail-focused, aiming to bring affiliate marketers and influencers together, like Instagram’s features, or to make buying what you see on social media take as few steps as possible, like TikTok’s latest features.
It would be foolish for marketers to not take notice of these movements. They will allow you to not only reach customers more easily but streamline the buying process, so they are more likely to buy. The gap between marketers, influencers, and customers is closing with these advancements.
3. Take an agile approach to social media management
Social media is forever changing. Trends come and go, behaviours change, and features are added. The current social media climate is an obvious example of this, where social media platforms are making moves to better align themselves with retail and push the online shopping experience.
As things evolve, a good social media marketing campaign will be led by affiliate managers that can ride that wave and adapt to new changes. Your team will need to be able to adapt to changing priorities, like the retail movement coming from platforms that have always had communication at their cores.
Ensure that you have all the processes outlined in your social media management to create achievable goals and processes that can be repeated, allowing you to learn, test and grow quicker.
4. Embrace the influencers
Affiliate marketing wouldn’t exist without influencers. They build trust in their followers by offering recommendations.
However, who you partner with should be considered carefully, in these changing days. Users are becoming more aware of the “inauthentic” “Instagram” influencer, and with the rise of TikTok and minimal editing and polish in short-form video content, users are starting to really appreciate authenticity.
On top of that, communities are becoming a big thing on social media. As individualism rises, users are looking for their people, and are looking for recommendations on brands from their fellow men.
The lesson for 2022 is to change your approach to influencers. You could tap into a wide community if your item appeals to them, and you approach influencers within it that come off as authentic.
5. The key is creative content
Brands have a bad habit of thinking that a bog-standard advertisement in the same template since the days of Mad Men is going to catch attention on social media.
Stock footage of someone using the product while a narrator says, “Has this ever happened to you?” isn’t going to fly on social media, because there is so much more content out there and they all lend themselves to marketing.
For example, TikTok is an untapped source for marketers. Users are buying more than ever, with the hashtag #TikTokMadeMeBuyIt taking off, and most of them aren’t actually being marketed to. They just saw some content that included the item or service and bought it for themselves. For example, #BookTok is full of people offering their reviews of their favourite books – just to review it – prompting avid readers to buy them.
If you are trying to get creative with your marketing strategy, take a look at social media as it is, beyond advertisements. Create quality content around the product that says something more than “buy this”. Instead offer reviews, behind the scenes, demonstrations, etc.
Tap into trends and communities. If you have a cleaning product, it will fit nicely in the #oddlysatisfying genre along with all the other items that take something dirty and make it clean. Apply your demographic to communities, like offering decorative bottles to the Wicca and spiritual communities as well as the home décor genres.
