Social media platforms allow brands to engage more closely with a wide range of audiences and potential customer. Lately, brands have realised the importance of social media marketing and are active on at least 3 out of 10 social media platforms. Still, conquering social media marketing is one of the greatest challenge brands are facing today. Let’s look at some of the challenges a little closer and the possible solutions for the same -

The first challenge a brand faces to create presence on social media is how to get the strategy right. Especially now, when the audience is scattered on so many different platforms, and each different platform is serving a different purpose. Before putting out content on social media, first thing that should be defined is “Target Audience”. After doing so, the goals should be defined. The goals that the brand want to achieve through social media marketing like, generating new leads, increasing followers, increasing brand awareness et al When the goals are defined, rest of the course can be easily charted. Also, keeping an eye on the competitors and their activities might help in getting a rough idea as to what would work for your brand. Furthermore, establishing a unique identity and communicating it to the audience might help.

Next, ensure you have precisely tracked metrics. Most platforms (for example - Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter) have native analytics, which makes it much easier to evaluate the campaign reach.

And finally, your brand should focus on building campaigns targeted at your audience. For ex: brands like Netflix and Zomato churn out candid content to relate it with their TG. This enables them to get a stronghold on their customers and potential customers.

To begin with, marketers need to make sure to track accurate metrics. Mastering what each metric means for your campaign will drive your decisions based on the data you capture. These metrics will help you reach your goals.

The simplest way to analyse your campaigns is by using the right kind of analytical tools. While native analytics are great, they often do not collect all the data you need. There are many analytics tools available both free and paid to choose from and depending on the marketer’s needs. These platforms will help monitor social mentions and standard stats for your social streams, also allowing you to automatically publish new content wherever you need it distributed.

Some advanced social media analytics tools help you with insights which can help with Customer Relationship Management (CRM)allowing you to see the status of each of your leads. This offers additional insights, allowing you to see how users interact with your social accounts at different stages of the buyer's journey.

Breaking up your data and insights will show exactly what’ s working best for all your social media platforms.

This is the toughest of all to achieve. A challenge every brand is facing and especially start-ups, as a lot of factors influence customers to follow a brand page. While there are a lot of techniques and methods to accomplish this, one thing that brands should completely rule out is to purchase followers at any given point of time.

Rather, brands should focus and work hard on delivering engaging content that persuades people who have a liking for the brand convert into genuine followers and would further promote the brand page.

Even after having many followers on your page, getting people to interact and engage with your posts is one of the challenges which even big brands face.

To best attack this challenge, marketers should work hard on getting customer insights, especially of their Target Audience (TA). Also, you need to research what your audience likes and needs.

Further, brands should make efforts to create conversations through social media pages. Instagram allows to ask questions and create polls which a lot of famous brands are utilising to connect with its audience and in return give them a shoutout and exposure on social media. This helps them to have a certain number of audience members who are always going to back the page and in the process the brand itself.

Going cross-channel is the necessity of the hour and proves how efficient your brand is to be present on many different social media platforms. While your audience may prefer a single channel, you are missing out if you limit yourself.

Utilizing different platforms allows you to obtain more insights into your target audience. Likewise, you will find that different personas prefer different mediums, allowing you to better engage with that audience.

Each social media platform comes with its unique feature. If utilised properly, it can help create great online campaigns. After knowing how you're going to approach each channel, establish workflows for publishing and sharing, that match the parameters best served for each.

Social media marketing is undeniably the most effective way of marketing today and the fastest way to reach the target audience. But if marketers wish their social strategies to succeed, they need to be willing to face the challenges mentioned above. You will get what you put into social media marketing, but if you can defeat these challenges, it will be a whole lot easier.