4 Tips To Get Better Results From Social Media Marketing Post-COVID

Social Media Marketing Post-COVID

While the world is under lockdown, and people are working from home, the activity levels across social platforms have experienced a significant positive flux overall. In such a situation, using your old social media plan when the pandemic is over, will yield sub-par results.

You need to cater to the changing social behaviour patterns. Brands are displaying greater attention to users during this time. And when the effects of the pandemic fade away, people will be used to such behaviour from brands. (The meaning is unclear, try explaining the change in the said behaviour pattern. A reader might now be on the same page as to what you mean.)

So, how can you adapt to your customers’ needs? What do you need to change to get better results from your marketing post-COVID?

Let’s get right into it!

1. Authenticity Over Advertising

One of the significant vital changes that we observed in recent advertisements and content marketing is authenticity and human touch. This authenticity in marketing breeds trust.

Large brands are openly discussing how the COVID has affected their operations and what they’re doing to safeguard customers and employees. (Rephrase, it is a too long and complicated sentence. Break it down and simplify.)

Many brands also offered their services for free to reduce the financial burden on their customers. And since people have been touched by this behaviour, the future of marketing will include empathy to a much greater extent. (You contradicted yourself right in the next statement.)

When you are preparing your new marketing strategy, take a more human approach. Have a person that people can associate your brand with. If you can’t have a person, create a persona that matches the values of your brand.

As you begin to approach marketing in this manner, you’ll automatically build a community following for your brand. And this strategy will yield much higher long-term results. (When you take the title as Authenticity, talk about it in the first line too, not just in the conclusion. This topic overall is very unclear.)

2. Video Marketing For ROI

One of the major trends that Youtube observed was an increase in their viewership after the U.S. government declared a lockdown in mid-March. Some of the categories showed greater change than others, but the overall change in engagement and views continued to grow.

So there is one thing we can conclude from these statistics: Video marketing will yield better ROI now and in the future. When you say this, explain what you mean, when I read this line, I cannot understand what really the key is. For e.g., follow this up with – Video marketing will stand out and persist for the time to come.

Compared to text, there are a lot more people who prefer videos. And that is where marketers need to take charge and begin publishing quality, helpful, and engaging videos for customers to enjoy and learn from.

But what is a helpful or engaging video? Let’s look at an example for better clarity.

Imagine you’re a shoe retailer. And every customer who purchases shoes experiences a few problems. A helpful video here will be one that solves a shoe-owner’s problems overall:

  • Pick up the questions that your customers have asked you or on different social media.
  • Create videos on topics that are more frequently brought up in discussions.
  • Use the clip to answer the questions for all your customers and prospects.
  • Brand it with your shoe while answering the question that your users had.

By creating such videos, you not only answer the questions they have but stand out as an authority brand. And if your video offered the perfect solution, you can expect a good percentage of your viewers to turn into buyers.

It’s challenging to create the perfect video when you’re starting out, and in such cases, video making tools like InVideo can help out. They’re easy to use and offer pre-designed templates that can get you started right away. Because they provide online editing tools, there is no hassle of downloading and installing software on your computer.

These videos can be used for social media and brand promotion.

3. Engage in Social Listening

Social media isn’t a platform where only you speak and customers listen. It is in fact a great two-way communication tool that you can use for customer support, solving queries before they reach the support team, and find out what your competitors are doing.

Active social listening can get your users to see your brand more often, give you much better insights into what issues customers of your competing brands have, and how you can pitch in and solve them.

Some ideas for social listening:

  • Run a common poll or survey and share it across your customers and on social media.
  • Plan out a competition where you reward users for bringing on the maximum number of their friends on board.
  • Use social media automation tools like Mention to keep track of when users tag your or your competition on a variety of social media platforms and across the web.
  • Use Buffer to automate your social media posting on a regular basis.

4. Continue to Experiment and Expect UnexpectedOutcomes

Post-COVID, the one thing that will be common is unexpected outcomes. What worked earlier may or may not work later and you can confirm the same with experiments.

While you’re maintaining consistency with posting and social listening, you need to try new things here. Your plans that worked pre-COVID are sure to yield sub-par results later.

So irrespective of the age and stage of your company, you will need to play around with the latest trends to know what works for your brand.

Understand your customers’ state of mind, their expectations, concerns, and queries.

This data can be collected from the social listening that you’ll perform. Here are a few changes that you can try out:

  • Play around with the color scheme and fonts for your posts.
  • Change the time that you generally submit a post.
  • Include user content from competitions or surveys, or something interesting that a user of your product has done and shared on social media.

There are many more ideas that you can take into consideration. But as your social media posts continue to become more targeted, you can expect better engagement in the long-run.

Conclusion

As the scenarios around the globe changes and continues to take unprecedented turns, brands and marketers are challenged with new circumstances that they have to navigate through.

Though there are new marketing techniques that are being tried and tested, new marketers need to be proactive and ensure that they find something that works best for the brand they’re promoting. This guide can be your starting point for this. The one thing that you can be certain of as a marketer is the complete transformation of customer behavior.