Calling out all entrepreneurs who have just kickstarted their new business and launched a new website! Firstly, well done at taking such a massive step toward your future success! In the upcoming months, you will most likely face several challenges, including building up an audience and finding customers and clients to keep you in business.
But why are digital marketing and an excellent social media presence so important, you may ask? Statistics show that there are currently over 3.2 billion people who are actively using social media globally, and 93% of all businesses worldwide use it to market to them. With the face of digital marketing evolving so rapidly, brands can reach more audiences more effectively and with more backbone than ever before.
As professional social media marketing services, we know how resource-intensive marketing and digital marketing, in particular, can be. So, we thought we would come in and help you out and give you a basic insight into what goes on in the digital world.
Now is the time to jumpstart your social media marketing and get your new website in front of the world. Below we have collated our top tips on social media marketing, so sit back, and let’s get started.
Choose, Streamline and Automate Your Social Platforms
Every single different type of business will need to make use of other forms of social media. You naturally have options like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, and now, even Tik Tok, but which one will be the perfect fit for your company? Contrary to popular belief, you don’t need to have an account and an incredibly active presence on all of them. You can rather pick the ones that will benefit you and go with those.
For example, LinkedIn is a more business-oriented platform, while Tik Tok has a much younger audience, with the average age hovering around 16-24. You would not use these platforms for the same campaign.
What you need to do is pick two or three platforms where the majority of your target audience will be and focus on those. The trick to keeping all of your social media active and engaging is in posting the same content and campaigns across all of your platforms simultaneously. Naturally, you will need to adapt the content according to the platform, but the themes should be similar.
There are various online tools that will allow you to automate the process, reducing the amount of work going into posting. You will be able to schedule related posts of a campaign to go out on various platforms simultaneously at a prescribed time.
Create Content Calendars
The next step is to plan what you will be posting out to the world. The easiest way to do this is by creating a calendar, filling it up with great content ideas, and then fleshing them out into actionable posts.
Plan out your content according to what is trending and happening at that time. Season changes, holidays, Black Fridays, even products going on sale are great reasons to create great content. Make the content relevant, informative, and empowering for the customer.
Let’s look at an example. Say you are a pet retailer, and there is a certain type of dog food going on sale in the next week. Create an informative blog post or two that you can post and share around a topic like “5 Reasons Why My Dog is Getting Fat”. In the article, you can highlight that the dog is on the wrong type of food and sneak in a savvy CTA to the dog food that just happens to be on sale.
You can then adapt all of that for Facebook and Instagram content, which can be posted once or twice a day. Post the article, post the special, and then mix it up a bit with a great picture or video of a good boy.
Create Communities
The next big thing to come out of the last two years or so on social media have been communities. It is not just about posting content anymore on social platforms, it is actually about spending time creating meaningful engagement on the platforms.
Join different groups related to your brand, and post in the groups. Reply to your customer’s comments and reactions. Create incentives for people to share your posts and create competitions for people to win products and services. We understand this might take up a lot of time, but the result is a growing community of engaged and loyal fans who know what you are about.
Spend Some Money
Up until now, we have only touched on how to use social platforms without spending a dime. To really get your name out there though, you will need to start putting some money out and stop relying on organic traffic. Organic social posts will only show up in the newsfeeds of people who follow you, and if they share it, their followers’ feeds as well. On the other hand, paid content will show up in feeds of the audience you choose to define and target.
You can either choose to boost a post that is doing well by putting some money behind it or create a specific ad that you want a targeted audience to see. The process is somewhat simple if you follow the steps of creating the ad and targeting the audience, but know first that various types of ads achieve specific objectives.
The trick is getting to know what works best for your business, which, in truth, is a game of trial and error.
Use online tracking and measurement tools like Google Analytics and the platform itself to measure how successful each campaign was.
Feel free to chop and change certain elements of the ad to see what works better. You will also need to decide what your ad’s objective actually is, and brace yourself – there are 11 different options!
- Brand awareness;
- Reach;
- Traffic;
- Engagement;
- App installs;
- Video views;
- Lead generation;
- Messages;
- Conversions;
- Catalog sales;
- Store traffic.
Wrapping Up
Don’t feel overwhelmed with your first few campaigns, you will need a few test runs to ascertain what works for your company and what doesn’t before actually refining your process. Over time, you will be able to see how your customers engage with your posts, which paid ads attract the most traffic, and how refined your target audiences need to be.
Keep testing everything about your ads and posts. Try out new CTA’s. Change the tone of the content. Switch between carousel ads and slideshow ads. Experiment with stories and augment reality experiences. The more you try and test, the more you will expand your audience and understand what converts your customer.
The rule of thumb is to keep your content informative, entertaining, and empowering. Make sure people will want to see and share your posts. Videos have, over the last two years, dynamically grown into massive advertising streams, and social platforms have become a marketplace of their own. So, take advantage of all of it until you find your secret ingredient.
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