Social media marketing offers promise, enabling companies to target specific audiences and build relationships with them. Unfortunately, many companies invest time and money in an internal team and fail to get an ROI or ROT.
The answer isn’t always hiring a bigger team though. Sometimes it’s better to engage with a partner that can improve or even replace your internal team and get high-quality social media content through a managed content solution.
Here are six signs your internal social media marketing efforts are failing.
1. Not posting enough content
Social media algorithms reward high engagement and activity. Companies that don’t post often enough on their social media channels won’t reach a broad audience. If you don’t see much content on your platforms, it could be a sign your social media team isn’t focused on creating content or they don’t have enough time to focus on the content on top of everything else.
2. Posting to the wrong social media platforms
There are a lot of social networks where you can find different audiences and post different types of content. The key to a successful social media marketing presence is understanding where your target audience is most likely to be and creating the content that is most appropriate for that platform.
For example, Instagram is a visual platform with a higher engagement by women, so it requires a focused strategy to create visually appealing content. If your team isn’t on the right platform(s) or isn’t posting the right type of content, your team may have a lack of expertise or no clear plan of how to integrate various marketing efforts effectively.
3. Lacking clearly-defined analytics reports
Social media platforms provide extensive data on consumer intentions, behaviors and preferences. However, if the reports you see as CMO or CEO only have surface metrics like impressions, likes and shares, it won’t show the whole picture of whether you’re getting true ROI from these efforts. Shallow analytics reports could be an attempt by staff to hide poor social media performance or conceal the fact that they lack true expertise in social media beyond posting content.
4. Seeing limited engagement and poor user experiences
Social media is a place where your brand can connect and communicate with your audience. It’s not just a place to talk at your audience.
CMOs and CEOs can spot low engagement or poor user experience on social media platforms by looking at how much of the content is top-of-funnel versus bottom-of-funnel results (sales leads and conversions). If it’s all top-funnel, that’s a clear sign that your internal team doesn’t understand how to use social media as a tool in an integrated marketing campaign.
5. Lacking continuity between SEO, content and social media marketing
Social media is only one tool in your marketing arsenal. It should be treated as a complementary platform to SEO and content marketing. If your team isn’t coordinating and tightly integrating these three areas, it’s usually a sign that they lack expertise in brand and marketing strategy or that they simply aren’t paying attention to the program.
6. Finding hidden social media costs
This is the number one barrier to scaling. Some CMOs and CEOs don’t see the full picture of social media costs, which makes ROI look very high when there are actually hidden costs in other departments or programs. As these high costs emerge in your budget, they can kill an internal social media program before it can add value to your marketing efforts.
The bottom line
With all of the possible mistakes teams can make with social media, it can be difficult to hire internal team members with the right expertise to truly optimize your program. Fortunately, there are other options.
Tempesta Media’s SaaS platform can improve an internal team’s productivity by up to 30%. Or you can take advantage of our managed content service solution to get high-quality social media content at scale at up to 80% less than an internal team. Talk to us today to discuss how we can help your company get more out of your social media marketing.
Social media isn’t the only area where companies can fall short though. To see some of the other common problems companies often face when implementing their content marketing programs, download our e-book.
