12 Biggest Mistakes of Social Media Marketing

Are you planning to promote your product or service on social media? These platforms are used by a third of the world’s population. However, despite the vast audience, some marketing campaigns fail miserably. Discover the biggest pitfalls of these endeavors in our article.

At first glance, advertising is a piece of cake. Thanks to automatic tools like aitarget.com, you can launch, monitor, and manage campaigns on Instagram, Facebook, and Snapchat simultaneously. Still, your efforts will be futile if you target the wrong audience or share the wrong content. Here are the 12 biggest mistakes of marketers.

1. Advertising Without a Strategy

Creating a social media page is a no-brainer. To fill it with content, you may need several hours per week. However, it is not the followers and likes you should focus on. Millions of people are wandering around social networks. Maybe they are even asking about your services and clicking on your links. What happens next?

Without a strategy, your ads are useless. You need to have a detailed and documented plan of action with the right goals, tactics, and actions. Determine what resources are required. Defining your target audience is the first step — you need to understand whose attention you should attract.

2. Pursuing Vague Goals

What are you hoping to achieve with your ads? Do you want to increase brand awareness, gain leads, or drive sales? Your goals should be actionable and measurable. Otherwise, you are setting yourself up for failure.

3. Disregarding Buyer Profiles

Study your potential customer. Identify the personas you should target, and bear in mind that different ads will appeal to different groups of people. When you adopt a persona-based strategy, the focus shifts to catered content.

Garner underlying data from market trends and your company’s research. Eventually, you should get a complete picture of whom you should target. Otherwise, your ads will be a waste of money, as they will not resonate with the potential customer.

4. Too Narrow or Wide Targeting

If your target audience is too broad, efficiency will be diminished. For example, an 18-year-old girl living in California has a different lifestyle, values, and interests in comparison with a 50-year-old man from Florida. You cannot capture the attention of both with the same ad.

Study your audience and draw conclusions from data. Understand the behaviors and attitudes of your best customers. Demographics are not everything. With a complex approach, you will create effective advertisements.

5. Using the Same Ads on All Platforms

Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, Pinterest, and all other platforms have their unique specs and requirements for advertisements. Do not expect to generate one ad and use it across the networks. You will need different types of content for different apps.

6. Being Repetitive

Successful marketers are creative and ready for experiments. While every brand should have a distinctive style, this does not require sticking to the same type of ads for all platforms. Creative diversity means exploration of different options like carousel ads, video ads, etc.

Add new types of content based on your audience’s habits. How do they prefer to view the platforms — on their smartphone or laptop? Do they engage with videos more than posts? Create engaging content, but do not limit yourself to one type.

7. Forgetting About Call to Action

An ad without a call to action is wasted money. The users must understand what you want them to do, whether it is to make a phone call, browse your store, or subscribe to a service. For example, the “subscribe now” button is effective for newsletters. These statements must be clear and easy to see.

8. Sending Users to the Homepage Only

Suppose you work for a clothing retailer, and your ads have a “shop now” button which takes users to the homepage. Instead of seeing the product shown in the ad, visitors have to browse the collection in search of it. This is inconvenient, so you risk losing potential customers.

The link should match the call to action. You will still need to send customers to the landing page sometimes, but make sure the strategy is coherent. This will guarantee better conversion.

9. Failing to Monitor Conversions

Social media networks allow companies to track results easily. Conversion rate is a telling indicator. For instance, you could include the Facebook pixel code on your website to assess the effectiveness of ads. Be careful, though, — if the setup is wrong, you will be tracking the wrong data.

10. Failing to Monitor Campaigns

Without monitoring tools, how will you understand if your ads work at all? Successful companies track performance throughout the campaigns, from start to finish. This allows them to make adjustments in the process and achieve better results.

11. Failing to Use Organic Posts

Before paying for ads, you could test the content for free — organically. Check your audience’s reaction to a post with the creative. If it is positive, paying for the ad will make sense.

12. Forgetting About A/B Testing

Last but not least, never neglect the A/B test. This involves running two ads at the same time. By assessing and comparing the reactions, you will garner real data to launch an ad, headline, or copy. Otherwise, you could be investing in underperforming content with a poor outcome.

To Sum Up

Social media can be insanely effective for your brand, but only if your strategy is right. Avoid typical mistakes to develop an approach that will bring conversions. Remember to monitor performance incessantly. Finally, remember that these platforms are constantly evolving, so your methods should change following the trends.