In this digital era, customers seek to buy products online, which make digital marketing important in your strategy. Digital marketing is needed to grab the attention of customers and keep them updated.
All businesses aspire to attain growth in customer base, which can turn into sales and subsequently profitability. Social media marketing is a cost-effective tool that can support business promotions. The following are some social media promotion techniques that you can adopt to make your business grow.
Identify target customers
To succeed in business growth, you should know who your target customers are. You can develop a buyer personal outlining your customers’ demographics and traits and how these relate to their social media usage. This can guide you to create customized content that meets their needs.
When you identify your customers, you will be in a position to use paid traffic methods that are available on social media platforms. It is also important to identify the stage your customers are in. They could be in the consideration stage seeking solutions to problems or in the awareness stage where they are aware of a problem and your task is to highlight their issues and needs.
You can identify customers by simply asking them whether they use social media as you seek to establish a personal connection with them. Google alerts can also allow you to identify where you can find customers online.
Build relationships with your target customers to encourage inclusivity
An amazing benefit of social media marketing for businesses is that it enables you to communicate with your potential and existing customers from all walks of life. This helps you build relationships over time instead of asking for a sale right away. These days, there are over 40% of digital customers who utilize social networks to look for new products or brands. Part of this process of discovery is to get to know your brand, what you represent, and what you have to offer.
It’s recommended to respond when people react to your ads or content. Doing this helps build trust and create a loyal following. The more engaged you are, the more your followers will like and share your content. This will give rise to your business’ social media algorithms and gain you free exposure. Moreover, you will nurture relationships that will turn into sales over time.
Build brand
Building brand presence is key towards attaining growth. To make connections, your prospective customers must trust your online persona since the best way they can connect with your business is through the website. Focus on creating content that can result in more comments, likes, and shares.
Hiring a content writer is one of the best decisions you can make, especially if you don’t have staff with writing knowledge. Besides writing, experts are good at proofreading and editing the content to make it more appealing. They can help to create multiple contents for your website faster and conveniently. Choosing the right writing agency can enable you to attain your marketing goals easily. Alternatively, you can engage your staff to create content and then hire an online paper editor from EduBirdie to finish the job. The academic writing site is equally good at managing web content and blogs.
Set social media goals
Ask yourself what you want to achieve by engaging in social media campaigns. Chasing social media ‘retweets” or ‘likes” may not guarantee you growth. You can use social media marketing to generate positive returns on investment, which is vital for business growth.
The social media marketing goals relate to creating brand awareness and conversions. If you want to build brand awareness, your social media campaign efforts may not directly lead to increased revenue. You need to focus on becoming a thought leader and build brand familiarity across the social networks.
If your goal is conversions, ensure that you achieve a direct return on investment as a result of social media activities. For this campaign, you may be interested in website visits, likes, and click-through rates.
Decide which social media platforms to use
It isn’t good practice to make assumptions in terms of where your target customers spend their time on social media. This helps you ensure that you use social media effectively. You can do this by conducting your own research. Doing this helps you understand how your target customers spend their time on social media platforms.
The great thing about social media is that it isn’t “all-or-none.” There is a variety of social media platforms you can use to reach different types of audiences or even meet different goals for your business. For instance, in general, there are more brands that use Facebook to acquire new customers and Instangram for eCommerce purposes.
Drive traffic to your site
Social media can potentially improve your search engine ranking. Your business site’s domain authority may increase if your social media rate increases too. This will then lead to an improved search engine ranking. This is just the beginning. For example, often, consumers first choose to check out your social media profiles to understand your brand better. They do this before they visit your site to purchase something.
Having more people visiting your social media profiles will also boost your social media page ranking while improving the chances of these profiles to appear among the top-ranked pages. You can use social media with the goal of increasing traffic to your website too. Those who don’t have a strong social media presence usually lose out on organically-generated traffic.
The reason for this is that traffic you generate comes from the same people who currently follow you. Therefore it is important to broaden your reach to drive more traffic to your business. To do this, you must first create a business profile on all of the most relevant social media platforms.
Then you can start leveraging these platforms by sharing unique and interesting content on all of them. A strong social media presence encourages your followers to go through the lead funnel you have created until they reach your site’s purchasing page. Next, make it easier for audiences to share your content. Do this through social sharing buttons that you prominently display on your site.
You can even add a “Click to Tweet” button on any interesting quote, statistic, or any other information to make it sharable. Doing this makes it easier for your audience to click away and share your content.
Create and share engaging content
An important aspect of social media that you can use to your advantage is text-based content. If you want to make a great impression, you must start creating and sharing plenty of visual content. Engaging content can generate 94% more views by adding of compelling visual elements to it. When it comes to content marketing, there is no “standard way” to succeed. This is because there is no one-kind of content out there.
For instance, only sharing only your blog posts on your social media profile isn’t ideal as this might bore your followers. Remember – not all of your followers like to read blog posts. Therefore, you must create various content formats to engage and establish a lasting relationship with your potential and existing clients. Some formats you can try to create are eBooks, case studies, guides, infographics, interviews, lists, opinion posts, podcasts, research articles, and videos.
You can even add user-generated content (UGC) that will strengthen your relationships with your customers even more. This kind of content makes your business relatable, uplifting, and trustworthy. It also allows you to come up with content without much effort on your part.
Use paid ads
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Pinterest have an option to place ads that can help to build awareness and generate leads. Create highly-targeted ads that your audience can connect with. You should customize the ads based on the audience’s online behavior, preferences, gender, age, geographic location, and so on.
Failing to target a specific audience can cause you to waste money on people who are not interested in your brand. Sharing the message with the right audience can enable you to optimally use your ads to get conversions. To save time and money, business owners often look forward to using top Instagram bots to reach maximum audience.
When your prospects click your ad, they will visit your website to find the products and contact you. To make the best out of your ads, focus on creating social media content by speaking your audience’s language. The content should be short and simple because most of your audience is not interested in reading pages of content.
Take advantage of social media marketing tools
Another effective way to use social media is to use marketing tools that can either simplify or automate your work. There are many tools that will give your productivity a boost. This makes it easier for you to use social media for your business even if you don’t have a social media team. Here are some of the best tools to use:
- Engagement Management
Using social media management tools allow you to centralize all of the messages and mentions directed to your business in a single dashboard. This way, you can remain engaged without needing to log into every single one of your social media accounts.
- Analytics
If you can get all of your important information in one place, this will help you gain insight on your overall social media efforts. There are even some applications that allow you to create comprehensive reports. Others provide a comprehensive overview of how well you capture the conversations in your space.
- Content Creation
Using tools for content creation is an excellent way to provide more value to your followers while keeping them interested and engaged. These tools will help you come up with amazing content to share.
Retargeting campaign
Allowing your leads to go can be a frustrating aspect of your marketing strategy. You may have spent a lot of money to find customers to buy your products, but this may go to waste if they fail to convert. You need to realize that most people are not willing to buy the first time they visit your website.
Most customers may visit your page, read some content, add products to their cart and then go cold. That is why retargeting campaigns can be a good solution. Retargeting entails using a simple JavaScript code to track user activity on a given web page.
Every time someone visits your website, an anonymous cookie is dropped. When the visitors search the web, the retargeting provider will identify when to serve them with ads. Retargeting is an effective tool because it focuses on people who are already aware of your brand and have expressed interest.
Offer discounts, giveaways, contests, and campaigns
Discounts and giveaways are great incentives to engage and attract followers. Offering these is an impactful and cost-effective way to generate sales for your business. You can even use it to help you promoting your products. An entertaining way to attract consumers is by organizing contests on your social media profiles. These activities will help increase your engagement rate as you will have potential customers who will begin to engage with your brand more so that they will win something.
These offers will increase the awareness of your business because customers will share news about your promotions with others excitedly. Just make sure to explain the steps to follow clearly and the date when you plan to announce the winners. Providing this information will motivate and attract people to visit your site. Finally, starting campaigns that focus current issues will show that your brand is more than a faceless business. Consider focusing on environmental issues to show the sustainability of your products or services. Nowadays, this is a very important issue that makes people pay attention.
Conclusion
Social media promotion is an effective way to grow your business. You should identify your online customers and be specific and realistic when defining your goals. Focus on creating brand awareness by creating highly compelling content. It is important to track the customers who are already aware of your brand by retargeting them. Take advantage of paid ads to get more leads and conversions.
Author Bio:
Julius Sim is the Head of Support Team at Edubirdie, a well-known academic writing service helping students with writing and editing work for many years. Julius looks after the customer satisfaction and experience aspect of the business and ensures optimal performance of the staff. His free time is for reading books, playing board games and watching Netflix shows.