Challenge #1: Understanding the Target Audience
Understanding the target audience is perhaps the most common social media marketing challenge, especially for those who are new to digital marketing. In addition, marketers who’ve years of experience in traditional marketing sometimes fail miserably with social media marketing, mainly because of the difference in audience dynamics. Many brands are doing great business in-store, but with social media marketing, they’re clueless.
This is because of the difference in how customers approach social media. The strategies that work offline might not translate well to online social media campaigns.
Social media marketing gives you a cheap & easy solution to reach out to your target audience. When you promote your content to the world through traditional media channels like billboards or newspapers, you’re targeting a more extensive audience & spending a lot of money. With social media, you decide the audience of your paid promotion campaigns.
How to Overcome It
There’s a misconception that great content converts even if it isn’t targeted. Many marketers have this habit of creating content first & figuring out the target audience later. This directionless spray-and-pray approach damages your brand’s credibility. It might get you some engagement, but if the content isn’t tailored to your target audience’s needs, it might not generate leads.
To overcome this social media challenge, you first need to collect data & create your buyer persona.
Dig deep into the data you already have about your visitors, subscribers, & existing customers. Then, create a fictional customer avatar from that data. You can use tools for automating the process. I recommend HubSpot’s Make My Persona to create a persona with your data.
You know what your ideal customer looks like.
The next step is to gather as many insights as possible relevant to your business. Understand your customer’s pain points & shape your content & campaigns according to them.
Here’s an example of Costa Coffee using social data before bringing back its summer menu.
You can use Twitter polls like this to know what your audience wants & shape your future content according to the audience’s choice.
Challenge #2: Decline in Organic Reach
One of the biggest social media challenges is the decline in organic reach. A serious outcome of this decrease is the increased cost of paid ads campaigns. Marketers are struggling to balance the goals & the budget. Most brands rely more on sponsored content & influencer marketing to make their presence felt on social media platforms like Facebook & Instagram.
How to Overcome It
First, make your social media platforms work for you. Focus on the platforms where your audience is most active. Study the algorithms of those platforms well. For example, if Instagram is your primary platform, take advantage of Instagram stories, IGTV & Reels. These features explode engagement rate, with a direct impact on the reach of the content.
With the help of visual & video content, you can share your brand story effectively. Going live also helps maximize the organic reach. To effectively exploit this tactic, collaborate with influencers, arrange podcasts, and host interviews.
Once the content goes live, ask these influencers and your audience to share your posts. Next, be interactive, reply to comments, take part in discussions, and try to optimize social media content at a time when most of the audience is active. Take advantage of User Generated Content, and try to reward the users who share the posts reviewing or using your product.
All these tactics will add to the credibility of your brand.
Hashtags are another way to improve your organic reach. Try to add relevant hashtags to your posts.
Challenge #3 Staying Ahead of the Algorithm
Staying informed & updated with social media algorithms is one of the biggest challenges faced by digital marketers & content producers. The change in the algorithm of any social platform requires changes in your social media strategy & content production. You can’t simply ignore the changes if you want to stay on top.
But, the main challenge is these changes in the algorithm don’t roll out on the same day & time for all social platforms. This makes it difficult for many small businesses as they can’t dedicate more resources to platform monitoring & strategic revamping of the content.
How to Overcome It
If take social media marketing seriously, you need to keep an eye on the changes, updates & development in social media algorithms. You have to adapt to the changes ASAP to reap the benefits.
But how? How can you be on top of all social media platforms & follow the algorithms?
The solution is simple: You don’t have to be omnipresent. Be on social platforms where you find the relevant audience. Keep an eye on what’s trending; try to understand the memes & the kind of content shared on any specific day or week. You need to spend an hour at least every day reading about what’s new on social media. Whenever there’s a new feature or update released, try to be the first to test it.
Author Bio:
Saadiya Munir writes blogs, which, considering where you’re reading this, makes perfect sense. She writes to help readers learn more about social media marketing. Currently, she’s working as a Senior Content Strategist @ Social Champ. She’s a Computer Science graduate who hates to code. Introverted. Mostly hungry or sleepy. Saadiya loves cooking, doesn’t enjoy driving, and otherwise spends far too much time at the computer.
Twitter Handle: @munirsaadiya
