A great social media marketing strategy is one that is well thought out, planned and provides value to your audience. This means that your posts are thought through, organized and consistent. Understanding your particular audience, their preferred social media platform and how to tailor your messages and posts is how you deliver the value that will make your social media profitable. Let’s dig into social media tips to improve your social media marketing, develop a strategy, bring in followers and engage with them.
1. Make A Commitment to Social Media
Social media is an investment in time and effort that can pose a challenge to an already busy business, but a good social media presence is critical to help grow your business and obtain leads. So what I’m going to say is that you have to just COMMIT to social media. Design a strategy that works for your circumstances, create a schedule, stick with it, and you’ll see results in no time.
2. Establish A Goal Before Moving
Make sure that your strategy includes a finite goal you are trying to achieve with your social media outreach. Without a specific reason to jump into social media and a goal you risk weakening your brand rather than strengthening it. Think on how social media can help with brand awareness, lead generation, sales, and customer retention, determine what is a priority for you, and build your strategy around that.
3. Take advantage of your Blog!
If you have an active blog, USE IT! A good blog is a great way to expand upon your social media efforts. Share your posts on your different social media accounts. This will drive more traffic directly to your website which will up your potential of converting users to customers. Alongside bringing people to your website, you will be bringing people with fitting interests to it, and having a solid blog will demonstrate your company’s knowledge in your industry to that now targeted audience.
Try also using your blog for shoutouts to other brands when relevant in your blogs. Cross-promotion can be a huge help and hopefully, you sharing for those brands will encourage them to share with you! Don’t forget to include social sharing buttons on your blog so people can share with no effort at all!
4. Bring Back Older Content
You can save a lot of time and expand your reach greatly by reusing old content, so long as you do it the right way. If you think about it, constantly creating new content for your already existing audience isn’t necessarily helping you gain more followers, but what can help is getting your best and most valuable content out to a wider audience. A lot of groups advise spending only 20% of your time on content creation and the remaining 80% on content distribution.
Don’t be too repetitive or spam people, but make some selective posts highlighting great parts of your older content and linking back to it.
Simply restructuring posts for different types of sharing can get you a much wider reach as well. Say you wrote a great blog post? Tweet a few different quotes from it, turn the blog post into a newsletter or mass email, maybe try turning it into a video blog! There are lots of ways to take older content and use it to bring in new leads, just be sure you are highlighting what is great about that content consistently!
5. Create Infographics
A dynamic infographic covers the requirement for a quality image while also providing users with concise and clear information, delivered quickly. Sites like Visually, Piktochart Easelly, and Infogram can help you design some exciting infographics that will drive interest and traffic.
6. Employ Images Effectively
You can’t ignore the importance of images in your social media marketing. Most social media sites are at least partially image based, and a block of text isn’t going to pull people in the same way a dynamic image will. Statistically, articles with images get 94% more views, so be sure to share articles and content with exciting imagery!
Editing can be an exhaustive task, I know that! But don’t despair, sites like PicMonkey, and BeFunky, are here to help, and you can even use apps like ArtStudio, Usechisel, or Quotescover to easily add text to your pictures.
7. Schedule Out Your Content
The most efficient way to carry out your social media marketing strategy is through batch posting. Most business owners don’t have the time to post on multiple sites multiple times a day, but with sites like Hootsuite it is simple now to create a large amount of content at once and schedule it out for weeks or even months to come, saving you a lot of time and stress in the process.
Another benefit of scheduling ahead is that you will be able to map the success of your posts and adjust or plan for forthcoming campaigns quickly and easily. It may seem daunting to come up with all this content in one go, but this method will prevent you from stressing on a daily basis, and don’t forget tip 4, you can always reuse and retool content! Every piece doesn’t have to be new!
* Or, to make it even easier, hire us at J&R Marketing to create and share your content.
8. Add Value for Your Visitors
Try providing your customers with some extra incentive to stay loyal to your company and brand. Adding value is as simple as providing something that the customer wants or needs, be that resources such as webinars, articles, or consultations, or something as simple as a discount for returning clients.
Do some market research to find out what your potential clients want and what will actually add value to them rather than feeling unnecessary. Offering added value will make you stand out among other businesses in your industry, and the education and discount you offer have a great chance of turning users into customers and customers into repeat customers.
9. Get Involved in the Conversation Online
You can’t only be entertaining your prospects on social media, you also need to focus on engaging them. Find out where your potential clients are talking online (forums, twitter threads, Facebook comments,) read, absorb, and comment your thoughts when you feel you have something valuable to add. Your business account pages will gain brand recognition by interacting like this, and as a bonus your brand will appear more personable and easier to reach.
10. Run a Contest!
Every social media site has some way that you can organize a contest, and doing so is a great way to activate your users and have them do a task that puts your brand at the forefront of their mind. You can offer image or video contests (caption this, cutest blank, get creative, but stay on brand,) to engage users.
Sweepstakes are also a great option, if you offer a free daily entry than you can expect multiple people returning to your website very often during the entire run of the sweepstakes!
Contests and promotions will humanize your brand and also remind potential customers how much you care about them.
11. Provide a Reason for Your Customers to Give Feedback
It’s tough to get your users to submit feedback. Sure, it would be great if they just listened to our calls to action and followed instructions, but that isn’t going to happen too often. We all know how critical it is to gather feedback on your product or service, so it can be disheartening not to get that data when you need it. The solution? Offer them a reason to give you that feedback.
Provide your customers some sort of incentive for giving feedback (filling out your survey, reviewing, etc.) You want the incentive to fit your business and appeal to customers, often a great thing to offer is discounts or coupons (then you get your feedback and also practically ensure a return customer!) Test out different offers and see what gets you the most responses, build your incentives around this.
12. Respond to Reviews
Make sure you are keeping up with your reviews on all industry related sites such as Yelp and Google Business. Not only do you want to make sure you are reading all your reviews, taking in what customers have to say, and adjusting accordingly, you want to be responding to all those reviews too!
Responding to every review no matter good or bad will show potential clients how attentive you are and how quickly you can fix problems people might have. Thank people for good reviews and apologize for bad ones, offer them something for their trouble if you can and work as hard as possible to rectify the issue for the future. After all, a happy customer is a returning one, and if you can make proper ammends you might be able to get them back in your good graces.
13. Never Stop Learning
Social media is always evolving and growing. As a business owner, while you do have to be up to date of new trends in social media, you also need to be learning the new skills that come with that evolution. Check popular social media marketing blogs for updates and advice, sites like Hupspot’s marketing blog, Postcron’s blog, or Kissmetrics can help keep you up to date and educated on whats new and now in social media and how you can best take advantage of new trends to benefit your business.
14. Listen To Customers Rather Than Promote
On social media you are given a space to communicate with and engage your customers, so do just that. Don’t spend your speaking time on social media selling, instead use that time to understand your customers and address their needs. This sort of interaction will make you better able to address your customers specific needs, and will build trust in your brand by showing potential customers how involved you are with them and how dedicated you are to them.
Conclusion:
There are a lot of awesome ways to hep your business pop on social media and to engage your followers, making a lasting impact. We hope you found something here to help you with your social media strategy. If you can think of any that aren’t on this list, share it with us in the comments!
