Social media marketing has been one of the major strategies used by many organizations for years now. It has served many companies with opportunities to reach out to their target audience and ensure that they can place the product or service they wish to sell right in the laps of the right people.
However, manually sending out messages to your target audience can be time-consuming and repetitive. The time you spend sending out these messages could be used for other critical tasks required for your business.
Fortunately, there is a way to automate these types of campaigns. Drip campaigns are some of the best and simplest ways to get more from your target audience. It’s an effective strategy that ends out prewritten messages aka “drips” to prospects and customers over a specified time.
That allows you and your team to work on other critical tasks while the drip campaigns work in the background sending out messages to the people you want to reach out to. The only thing you need to do is check the dashboards of the platform you are using to check on the status of your campaigns.
Social media has become a crucial part of any organization's marketing strategy. So it is not wise to neglect to reach out to your target base. Of course, spending countless hours sending out messages can become too time-consuming.
That is why drip campaigns have become so increasingly popular among most organizations these days. Of course, there is more to it than that. Let’s dive deeper into how a social media drip campaign can help you automate your marketing.
What is a social media drip campaign?
Social media campaigns are permission-based marketing strategies in which organizations can deliver a series of targeted messages over some time.
These messages are usually sent at intervals in response to a particular trigger. Marketers tend to use drip campaigns to move leads and customers further down the funnel.
Typically, when someone interacts with the sent messages, you want to ask them for additional information, such as date of birth, to provide them with exclusive discounts or freebies during that particular month. If you have any stores located near their area, you could send them updates on that specific location or coupons.
Why should you use social media drip campaigns?
These platforms can make it possible for companies to communicate with their target audience for days that matter to them.
Marketing teams can use this automation in many ways, such as blogging content. Some companies, particularly smaller businesses with less time on their hand, tend to forget to share their blog content constantly.
Even if they have a sizable amount of content to share, they may only share the blog post a single time on their social media channels and forget to do so again at a later date. However, using something like Missinglettr, you could automatically have your blog content posted with the use of a drip campaign.
Drip campaigns are excellent for ensuring your content is constantly shared with your target audience while offering you more time to get your other tasks done in the meantime.
What are the benefits of automating your marketing?
There are several reasons why automating your marketing campaign is an excellent idea for your business.
Boost exposure
One of the primary reasons to even create a social media profile for your business was to reach out to your target audience. These days, most people tend to spend a significant part on social media platforms like Twitter or Facebook.
They do so through either desktop or mobile devices, which means they are always remaining up to date with the latest news, whether it’s from family members, friends, local, or national.
That should make you realize that you are not the only one posting on social media. Others are competing for the attention of prospects and customers as well.
Depending on the size of your industry, the amount of competition you are dealing with is quite likely high, meaning you need to continue posting your content if you want the right people to see it.
However, it’s not possible to have someone sitting in front of their computer, shifting back and forth between different social media networks and posting content.
The task would be far too time-consuming and tedious for them. Plus, their skills could likely be used for far better situations than simply reporting the content on an hourly basis on different platforms each day.
That’s where drip campaigns come in. They allow you to continue sending out the content and messages to your followers without needing to keep a constant watch throughout the entire process.
The campaign will run by itself in the background while you and your team get other more critical projects done.
Best of all, it ensures that your content is reposted daily, and people who may have missed out on the piece of content check it out and share it with their audience, which helps boost your exposure.
Customized messages
As a business, you're going to have social media accounts for some of the popular channels in the world. However, each of these social media platforms has its own unique set of audiences that responds differently to the message being sent their way.
One message you send to your audience on Facebook may not work best for a social media platform like LinkedIn.
Facebook is more casual in its use and has people who are more open to a casual conversation. LinkedIn is a social media platform that caters to more professional-minded individuals, and you should adjust your messaging accordingly.
Using Emojis in your Facebook messaging would be far more effective and acceptable to the audience you are reaching out to in your marketing strategy. On the other hand, Linkedin may find the use of “fun” language like emoji and consider the message sent to them not only unprofessional but terrible.
That could negatively impact the way you interact with them in the coming future.
Drip campaigns allow you to send out customized messages that are suitable for each different platform you are using to connect with your audience.
While you could default to sending out a generic message that could fit every channel, that is less likely to catch the attention of the people you are targeting.
If anything, they’ll skip over it unimpressed and forget about it since they have most likely already seen so many similar messages ahead of time.
Take advantage of drip campaigns to send a message that suits each channel all in a single place. No longer do you need to switch back and forth between each platform. Also, make any adjustments to your message whenever needed.
Not everything you post is going to work off immediately, so conducting some experiments with your messaging is fine. If you notice that you have a small share rate and engagement with one of your content, compare it to your previous campaigns and find the problem behind it. Once done, make the appropriate adjustments to your messaging for future campaigns.
Scheduling posts
Chances are, you don’t have much time to devote to social media, making your social media marketing attempts abysmal. Startups and small businesses usually don't have enough time on their hands to manage their social media activities every day.
However, neglecting social media will severely impact your business and prevent it from reaching out to the target audience you need to make the business flourish. Time and money are usually the common reasons why some businesses may neglect the usage of social media. Fortunately, there are ways to schedule posts.
Social media drip campaigns are effective because business owners and marketers can spend a few hours each week setting up a schedule that permits them to release content throughout the week.
No longer will they need to spend time in front of their screen posting on each platform. The drip campaign will automatically send out the messages on the time and date set by the user.
Setting up a proper schedule is also crucial for several reasons. It enables you to reach out to your target audience during the hours they are online, even if that time may be considered inconvenient for you.
Plus, if you manage to get sick or are unable to post during a particular time each day. Scheduling enables you to have an active social media presence.
That is crucial because if your target audience goes to your account and sees that it is inactive, that reflects negatively on your company.
Plenty of people will see it and assume that you don’t care enough about your audience to update them on the latest products or news. Or they could assume that your company has shut down if you have not posted in a long while.
Every social media platform is different when it comes to the best time to post social content. For instance, Wednesdays could be the worst day to post content on Facebook, but it’s the best day for Linkedin posts.
Competitors are also posting during these peak hours, so you must make sure it stands out. Consider spending some time looking for other hours throughout the day when your audience is active, but there is less competition to deal with.
Maintaining a conversation around your brand is also crucial and scheduling social media posts helps you do so.
Never forget to share other business content and reply to private messages, comments, and reviews. Scheduling plays a pivotal role in your social media marketing strategy, and drip campaigns can help make things easier for you.
Analytics
Companies these days like to know how well their businesses are performing. Knowing how well your content and marketing attempts are performing allows businesses to figure out how they can improve their overall strategy to ensure a better performance.
Randomly sending out messages and content won’t help the website receive the traffic it’s looking for. It’s critical to know how your social media strategy is performing and accomplished through the help of analytical tools.
Analytics provide you with actionable insights that allow you and your team to use the information you accumulated to plan out strategies that help improve your social media campaigns.
Depending on the amount of social media networks you are using to reach your target audience, these analytics can help you track how each channel is performing and devise a plan that helps improve your endeavors for each one. Or, if it’s a social media channel you should consider dropping overall to focus on the successful ones.
Drip campaigns are excellent for gathering these necessary data. Since you can schedule the time you want to send out your content, you can use the data to see whether or not the tie you use meets your needs or if any changes need to be made for a time that is usually inconvenient for you.
Here at Missinglettr, our platform provides you with a dashboard that grants you access to everything you need in a single place.
Every time someone clicks one of your links sent through Missinglettr, it will automatically be tracked and broken down into the channel the person clicked it from. That helps you which of the social platforms you are using is providing you with the most engagement.
Our platform also measures the engagement you are receiving across every channel and analyzes the data to determine when the best time for you to post the content in future campaigns.
Conclusion
Drip campaigns are an effective tool that anyone who wishes to automate their marketing efforts should jump on. They provide you with several benefits and don't require you to spend much time or resources.
That way, you and your team can focus on improving your business in other more critical areas while the drip campaigns handle all of your social media needs through its automation system.
If you are looking for a tool that can assist you in automating your marketing efforts, check out our tool.
