As per Statistica, the number of active monthly social media users worldwide is projected to reach 3.02 Billion by 2021. That is one-third of the world’s population, accessible from your screens.
With a drastically growing population on various social media platforms, brands need to maintain a strong digital presence. The digital presence today, is not limited to corroborating your existence and legitimacy as a business, but if used effectively, it can result in exponential business growth.
So here are some tips to help your business, reap the benefits of good social media marketing.
1) Engage with the Trends
Businesses are often rigid with their content and very scared to experiment. But the latest successful social media strategies teach us about the importance of engaging with the trends and significant, applicable current affairs.
Content like this makes the consumer believe that the business is engaging in a meaningful conversation with them and not just trying to sell them products. Such content receives a lot of engagement organically and has the potential to get viral, giving your brand massive exposure at minimal to no cost.
2) Start selling online
Creating an online marketplace for prospective customers to easily browse through your products, services, and easily place an order with your company can be a game-changer in your business expansion plan. If you are a small business that does not want to invest in your own e-commerce website, consider selling your products, services on platforms like Facebook Marketplace, Instagram, Amazon, Etsy, etc.
3) Integration and Cross-platform Marketing
Driving traffic from one social media profile/ page to another is a good way to grow your base organically. Link all your profiles to your website, emails, and other social media profiles. Try creating content that drives your followers from one platform, to interact with you on another platform.
Use the right keywords and hashtags to optimize your brand page and reach out to your clients and immediate circle to interact with your brand, when you start. Some word of mouth can give your brand an initial organic push that it needs.
4) Create content that drives engagement
One of the easiest ways to create and maintain a responsive base is by running engagement posts such as contests or polls. Contests can nudge participation from the followers if there is some gratification in the form of a discount, gift offered for the winner. Contests are a good opportunity to create user-generated content as well. The participants can be encouraged to provide reviews, feedback, pictures of them using the product, etc.
Another good way of ensuring a passerby follows you, is by offering some discount coupons or other offers.
5) Paid Marketing
Organic reach and engagement have drastically declined, as the new algorithms heavily support and promote paid engagements. All major social media platforms offer paid ad spaces. These platforms also allow one to carefully curate a target audience to reap maximum value for their money.
Audiences can be targeted based on general factors such as gender, age, geography, demography, etc. to more advanced factors such as preferences, hobbies, profession, institution, etc. A general or a bad target audience often results in generating less and bad leads. Every badly targeted campaign is a missed opportunity and wasted money. Do keep in mind that the more layers you add to your target audience, the more expensive the ad space. Thus it is important to strike a balance between a too generic vs a too targeted audience.
6) The importance of retargeting campaigns
Most brands concentrate on lead generation campaigns, once enough brand awareness is created. As fruitful as these campaigns might be, a large number of leads drop out and do not convert into customers. Consumer behavior studies suggest that most people are not ready to make a purchase when visiting your website for the first time. They might add things to their Wishlist/ Cart and leave the website, without making a purchase. This is where lead nurturing can be a good solution for regaining old cold leads and converting them into customers.
Retargeting involves tracking cookies that save a user’s activity on distinct web pages. If a lead clicks on your website through a Facebook ad, visits the product page, and then leaves, applications like Facebook Pixel can track this behavior. Facebook will then display targeted ads to that specific customer. The ads will likely be centered on the product of interest to the customer. This overtime nurturing can give them that extra nudge they need to finally make a purchase.
7) Analyze, Learn and Apply
Invest in tools that help with tracking and analyzing your consumer behavior, providing valuable insights for your business. Most social media platforms do provide analytics at no additional cost.
These insights can help you understand what kind of content your audience is and is not responding well to helping you to modify future content accordingly.
Social media plans cannot be uniform across companies and industries. No one solution fits all. However, more often than not, the application of these few tips has shown promising results in the past.
