For a B2C brand, social media marketing is an unavoidable requirement. Whether you are a multinational B2C corporation or a local online or brick-and-mortar retailer, you’ll have to incorporate holistic B2C marketing strategies on social media into your marketing plan.

Most of your customers are regular users of social media platforms and consume content through these platforms daily. Moreover, there’s no shortage of social media networks. What sets apart the pros from the amateurs in social media is the ability to build a smart channel and content strategy.

Let’s learn more about some of the best B2C strategies on social media.

Channels for an Effective B2C Marketing Strategy on Social Media

Making the most of each social media channel is imperative. All social media platforms are not created equal and each one needs a nuanced approach.

1. Using Twitter Strategically

The best way to go about Twitter is to research hashtags and create content around the trending hashtags on Twitter at that time. Unlike other platforms, it is good practice on Twitter to post frequently and engage with other users by commenting and retweeting their tweets.

2. Instagram as a Visual Powerhouse

The dynamic is slightly different on Instagram. You can easily see the number of posts tagged with a particular hashtag on Instagram. Pick a few of the most popular hashtags and customize the other hashtags depending upon your content.

Use Instagram to show the more human side of your company culture and employees.

3. Easy Categorization With Pinterest

Pinterest on the other hand is great for creating visual content libraries. You can create boards depending upon a particular interest area and hyperlink the pins back to your website to get traffic.

Pinterest is great if you have clearly defined product categories. And because of the easy categorization, content on Pinterest can drive engagement for a very long time.

4. The Undisputed Leader – Facebook

The most important channel when it comes to B2C social media marketing is Facebook. Facebook has the highest number of active users and is without a doubt a world leader when it comes to social media.

Facebook offers a great variety of options when it comes to both paid and unpaid promotion opportunities. When it comes to organic promotion, there are tons of things you can do on Facebook –

• Joining and contributing to a group that is in your niche.
• Create a business page or group and invite your customers to it.
• Posting about your products and services on your timeline.

Organic promotion on Facebook takes hard work, and you need to actively post on the platform to see how your content performs.

A good way to increase engagement is to answer your customer’s questions or leave constructive comments on posts your customers are making on Facebook.

You can also leverage Facebook’s paid advertising solutions that let you target based upon age, interests, geolocation, and much more.

There’s a lot more to Facebook than meets the eye and it can become cumbersome navigating its myriad features and optimization options. If you need help, consider an agency that can manage the platform for you as well as create content, leaving you free time to manage strategic tasks.

Think About Your Content And Messaging

Content is truly king when it comes to a B2C marketing strategy for social media. Different types of content served across multiple channels with a cohesive marketing strategy, is what you should aim for.

Beyond the written word, experiment with audio (podcasts) and visual (videos, infographics) as well. Choosing the right content type becomes even more important when deciding your channel strategy.

If Instagram and Pinterest are the channels with the highest engagement for you then you need to create highly visual content with very little text in it.

Whereas if YouTube is your channel of choice, then you need to invest in engaging videos with a compelling story and attractive visuals.

The right content mapped to the right channel is important but don’t chase perfection. Perfection is not the point of social media. Feel free to use humor in your posts and think out of the box with your content!

Your company has something unique to offer and this needs to reflect in your social media channels as well. Build followers and increase brand awareness but not at the expense of losing your unique brand voice!

Boost Your Brand With Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing is the strategy of building relationships with individuals on social media who have loyal audiences or followers of their own, with the intent of promoting your business to their followers.

Social media is full of influencers for every niche that you can imagine. These influencers have a captive audience that closely follows their updates and readily consumes the content that they push out.

Because of this highly engaged captive audience, the authenticity that influencer marketing can provide is unmatched.

However, it’s important to note that a large follower/audience count does not necessarily mean a better audience. Your influencer marketing strategy will depend upon your business.

For example, for a local restaurant engaging with local foodies and culinary enthusiasts will be more impactful than let’s say a celebrity chef. And that’s because a majority of the large audience of a celebrity chef may never reach you!

On the other hand, a local foodie would have developed a highly engaged audience within your community and location, resulting in much better ROI and certainly lesser costs than hiring a celebrity chef!

You can also target micro-influencers. They have around 1,000 – 100,000 followers but hold a much stronger relationship and a highly engaged audience than their bigger counterparts.

Credibility and authenticity are the attributes you are looking for in an influencer. If an influencer’s personality does not match with your brand’s or if they recommend products arbitrarily, you might want to search social media more for a better fit.

Also, don’t be surprised if influencers turn you down if you are not on point with their personal brand!

Regardless of the type of business you do, social media marketing is an unavoidable strategy. Customers look for recommendations and insights on social media before even stepping into a store. This holds even more true for B2C businesses.

As a business owner, you already invest a lot in your business’s growth. With a holistic B2C marketing strategy on social media, you can supercharge this growth and let it work for you around the clock!