A Guide of What NOT to Do When Using Social Media Marketing
By: Kimberly Grant
Just because you upload content, doesn’t mean the right people will see it. I learned that the hard way.
In September 2020, I published my third novel, Civil War. In order to herald its arrival, I decided to market Civil War’s trailer on my social media; specifically, Instagram. At the time, I thought the trailer was awesome.
Instagram has a boost feature that you can use to get your posts in front of more people. (Think: Pay-per-click or PPC advertising exclusively on Instagram.) I boosted my post for seven days, then reviewed insights for the period. I also paid $29 for this marketing attempt.
For the rest of this post, I’m going to tell you what I did wrong.
Know Your Audience
There are three angles I’m going to address in what went wrong: audience management, objectives, and results analysis.
For the audience management angle, I did not set a target audience to see my post. This is a big no-no! Marketing is getting the right message, to the right person, at the right time. If you don’t properly set your target audience from the beginning, your post will be boosted to anyone the platform thinks might be interested in your content. My target audience is women, ages 18 to 44, who like to read novels in the science fiction/fantasy genres. According to the insights of my post, it was viewed by males, aged 18 to 24, who mostly live in California, Texas, and Florida.
Not properly setting your audience will lead to your content being shown to people who aren’t actually your target audience or even interested. Not to mention, my viewers were probably disappointed when my theatrical-looking trailer was for a novel and not a movie. I also paid Instagram each time someone clicked on the post, but didn’t yield a valuable conversion. For this instance, a valuable conversion would have been an increase of traffic on my website.
Wandering With No Direction
This leads me to objectives. All marketing strategies should have an objective. I didn’t set an objective when I boosted my post on Instagram. Therefore, my post had no clear path to reveal what success or fail would look like.
When there’s no clear path for your marketing efforts, it’s like living an Exodus experience: you’re wandering in the wilderness for 40 years. This lack of destination leads to spending money on fruitless efforts that don’t even lead to proper brand awareness (letting potential customers know who you are).
Lost Metrics
A lot was lost in my novice boosting of my fabulous book trailer…that looked like a movie trailer. Another missed opportunity was the metrics. Instagram Insights is a good tool to use to track any post’s engagements (likes, clicks, shares, views), but it’s not very in-depth. As mentioned above, the target audience was not properly set. So, my insights yielded the following:
- Impressions: 3,068
- Views: 2,761
- Profile visits: 6
- New Followers: 0
In my sad Instagram-boosted trailer, 86% of the people who saw my post actually watched the trailer. Of that 86%, 0.002% of users actually clicked to see my Instagram profile. Of those users, 0% decided to follow me.
Key Takeaway
Again, this is a post about a failed attempt at social media marketing. Here’s what I could have done differently:
- Audience engagement: Set my target audience to be users who are female, ages 18 to 44, and who are interested in fantasy novels and book clubs. That way, I’m paying for views that are more likely to lead to website traffic.
- Objectives: Brand awareness. As a self-published novelist, I do not have the backing of a major book publisher. So, I have to make sure I tell everyone to tell everyone who I am.
- Results analysis: Tracking results throughout marketing efforts is crucial. Marketing campaigns usually need adjustments that aren’t readily clear until after the campaign begins. Tracking results in real-time would have allowed me to adjust things like my target audience to actually generate valuable insights and better lead generation.
There is much more that was not done correctly, but I wanted to give you the surface issues. While we all have great content to share with the world, we must be strategic in our efforts from beginning to end. Without a well-thought-out social media marketing strategy, you’re only option is to fail.
Interested in other K. A. Grant insights? You can read my last post here.
