No matter what kind of product or service you offer, social media is one of the few marketing channels that can benefit all businesses. With millions of people around the world regularly browsing their feeds and looking for the next cool thing, social media is a prime opportunity to reach your target audience in new, creative ways.
However, as with any marketing strategy, practice makes perfect. To help sharpen your skills, in this article we’re going to show you how to market on social media and grow your brand’s presence.
1. Have a Plan With Goals
Just as it’s unwise to start pouring money into a new marketing strategy without first conducting due diligence, social media marketing is no different. The first thing you’ll want to do is come up with a plan of action and some attainable goals.
What exactly are you hoping to accomplish? How much do you have to spend every week or month? What’s the best way to appeal to your target audience? These are just a few of the questions you should be asking yourself since they will serve as the foundation that guides your marketing strategy.
The other important part of a marketing plan is coming up with a schedule that will keep you on track to reach your goals. Now, when setting goals, it’s good to be aggressive, but not so much so that you’ll never be able to realistically achieve them. Work closely with your marketing team to come up with solid goals that continuously move your brand forward.
2. Tidy Up Your Company Page
When you start marketing on social media, it’s only natural that your company page will get more traffic than it’s used to. These could simply be users who want to know what your brand is all about or genuinely interested customers that want to get in contact. As such, it’s important that your company page is fully updated and consistent with the look and feel of your website. Taking the time to go through your profile section by section will ensure you’re not missing any crucial information that can help potential customers get in touch.
It’s also a good idea to check the functionality your website link and CTA buttons so you don’t miss out on opportunities. Once you know everything works, try it out on all the different platforms (desktop, mobile, tablet) to make sure everything is displaying properly.
3. Consistency & Brand Voice
Half of the battle when it comes to social media marketing is building a relationship with potential customers over time. Just because they like your company page or follow your feed doesn’t mean they’re ready to become a paying customer just yet. The key to successful social media marketing is a balance of consistency and brand voice, both of which act to make your company more memorable in the minds of consumers.
Ideally, you want every interaction with your brand to have the same look and feel so customers can remember who you are and what you offer. To accomplish this, you need to have a regular posting schedule that keeps your brand in the feeds of target consumers. Because social media is so busy, sporadic posting and voice inconsistency will greatly reduce the success of your marketing strategy. By that same token, it’s just as important to make sure you’re not overwhelming your target audience by posting too much.
4. Focus on Quality Over Quantity
Think about the kind of content you consume online. Do you waste your time with vague posts or short videos that do little more than deliver irrelevant information? Probably not. On social media especially, feeds are constantly filled with new content that will be competing against your posts and ads for attention.
In order to stand out and attract a loyal customer base, you need to have better content than everyone else. What that means is, instead of taking a topic and turning it into a brief, 500-word blog post, expand upon it and turn it into a 2,500-word authoritative guide that’s bursting with valuable information.
This is where quality over quantity comes into play because nothing turns customers off faster than making them feel as though they’ve wasted their time. Even though publishing high-value content requires a larger time and resource investment, the payoff far outweighs upfront costs.
In addition to attracting more potential customers to your website, valuable content also helps to establish you as an authority in your niche, building reputation.
5. Post For Your Audience
When running a business, it’s only natural to want every marketing dollar to be put towards ads and content that push your products or services. While that’s the logical way to look at things, you have to put yourself into the shoes of your target audience and think about what they want.
Brands that only push their products and services without delivering any truly valuable information are often viewed in the same way pesky telemarketers are. Your audience doesn’t want to feel like they’re being sold to all the time—they want the kind of free handouts we were just discussing in the last section.
When you focus on posting content for customers rather than your business, you’ll get a much better response which ultimately translates to more sales in the end. By following the simple rule of 80/20, which implies posting for your audience 80% of the time and for your business 20% of the time, you’re much less likely to turn off potential customers.
Putting it all Together
Now that you have a solid head start to marketing your business on social media, the only thing left to do is put everything you’ve learned into action. Even if you don’t become a social media marketing expert overnight, the practices we covered in this article will eliminate a lot of the costly guesswork. That being said, to truly harness the power of social media marketing, it’s going to be a process of trial and error to see what works best with your target audience.
