Social Media Marketing Tips: Social media, if properly optimized, is still the biggest way for brands to create social proof, attract more customers and make more sales.
Social media has grown exponentially over the past few years, evolving from something that only jerks and college girls spent time on to something that is now a ubiquitous aspect of life around the world.
For businesses, it is obvious that with the right approach, social media can be a goldmine for customer engagement and conversions. That’s why many businesses are directing their marketing budgets to social media, trying to build their audience and increase customer loyalty as well as attract new customers. Here are some tips you can apply to make your social media marketing much more effective at attracting sales.
1. Target your audience
One of the easiest ways to burn a lot of money on social media marketing without getting much results is to try to appeal to everyone. What you need to do is narrow down your audience, create a customer profile and then target your marketing to that individual’s needs and motivations. This will make your marketing much more effective than if you took a more generic approach.
You may also need to segment your audience in different ways in order to target them more effectively. Essentially, segmentation will allow you to work with multiple customer profiles and tailor your marketing based on their specific characteristics.
2. Choose your platforms and optimize them
Trying to maintain an active presence on all available social media platforms is too onerous for most companies. Whoever handles your social media is likely to be overwhelmed, and your efforts on all platforms will not be effective. Instead, analyze your buyer persona and decide which platforms are best suited to attract your target market. Two or three is fine, and you shouldn’t take on more unless you have several employees to handle them.
Once you choose, you can optimize your content for that platform and thereby get much more engagement. For example, if you focus on Instagram, you can focus your resources on creating quality images, because that’s what gives you the most engagement on that platform. On Twitter, by contrast, creating highly informative posts is likely to provide more engagement and more exposure for your brand.
3. Create and distribute content
Content marketing is not just hype. It really works, and you can see the effects of it on social media, too. Publish short, entertaining or informative content, and you can be sure to get some social media activity. Over time, you will have content (be it text posts, photos, infographics, etc.) that will go viral and bring tons of traffic to your site. Be sure to work with content creation professionals to make sure your site is compliant.
Posting content is the first step to building a formidable brand, and one easy way is to continually tweak your content strategy to keep it relevant to current topics. By creating quality content and using engaging captions for Instagram, Twitter and other platforms, you can tap into trends and get your content out to more people, like brands like Vape4Ever did by providing timely information about marijuana laws at a time when there’s a lot of confusion and public debate surrounding them.
4. Promote user-generated content
People trust their friends more than they trust companies, no matter how loyal they are to the brand. You can take advantage of this by encouraging people to post content on social media that validates and promotes your products or services. One popular example of this was the “Share a Coke with…” campaign. Coca-Cola campaign, in which users posted pictures of themselves with bottles of soda. You don’t have to start at that level: with creative marketing or a small giveaway, you can encourage people to post positive information about your product or service. For a travel service, for example, getting customers to write about their trips in an authentic and fun way will provide solid social proof and generate FOMO among your target audience, dramatically increasing the likelihood of conversions.
5. Provide impeccable customer service
Positive reviews are great, but many of your customers will also turn to social media if they’ve had an unsatisfactory experience with your products or services. The solution is to be willing to engage with them and find solutions to their problems in a timely manner. Provide an opportunity for feedback, resolve any problems they have, and encourage them to share their thoughts with their friends.
Over time, this will increase your customers’ loyalty, encourage new customers, and help build a positive social media reputation. As the number of your followers grow and validate the quality of your products or services, the social proof will grow and more people will be drawn to your brand, thereby increasing sales and increasing your profits.
