With a lot of companies and people working remotely and the country going into lockdown, there is no better time to focus on digitising your business.
Most people will be spending a lot more time online. With that being said, this is a peak time to market your business and services on social media. This can help you reach more potential customers and ultimately increase your business leads, while your customers can contact you directly from the chosen platforms.
Wondering where to start? Here we have some tips to help you digitise your business and market on social media.
- Start with a Plan
Before you begin creating social media marketing campaigns, consider your business’s goals. Starting a social media marketing campaign without a social strategy is a recipe for disaster and panic.
- Meet Your Marketing Goals
Now to consider your business’ goals and how to meet them. Here are some questions to ask when defining those goals:
- What are you hoping to achieve through social media marketing?
- Who is your target audience?
- What platforms would your target audience use and how would they use social media?
- What message do you want to send to your audience with social media marketing?
These goals are important and will help you do a stellar job on social channels. But you also need to understand how those goals can help your business. Social media marketing can help with several goals, such as:
- Increasing website traffic
- Building conversions
- Raising brand awareness
- Creating a brand identity and positive brand association
- Improving communication and interaction with key audiences
- Choose the Right Platforms
There is no shortage of social media platforms where content can be shared. Sharing your content on the right platforms is crucial to your success.
When determining which channels to use, you should consider your customers (audience) and your business. It’s important that you create accounts on the platforms your target audience uses, so they can easily connect with you. You should also consider which sites best fit your products.
- Create a Content Plan
Scrambling to create posts at the last minute can lead to low-quality content and panic. A lack of organization can lead to repetitive posts or a lull in your presence on one or more of your channels. Creating social media content calendars or content plans can help avoid those mistakes and lead to more effective posts. Content plans also help you create goals and strategies for meeting them and track your progress toward them.
To make a content calendar, use a regular calendar for each social media channel and plan out your posts in advance, complete with hashtags, links, images and other content.
Make sure you post regularly and offer truly valuable information that your ideal customers will find helpful and interesting. The content that you share on your social networks can include social media images, videos, infographics, how-to guides and more.
- Consistent Brand Image
Using social media for marketing enables your business to project your brand image across a variety of different social media platforms. While each platform has its own unique environment and voice, your business’s core identity, whether it’s friendly, fun, or trustworthy, should stay consistent.
- Sharing Links
While using social media for marketing is a great way to leverage your own unique, original content to gain followers, fans, and devotees, it’s also an opportunity to link to outside articles as well. If other sources provide great, valuable information you think your target audience will enjoy, don’t be shy about linking to them. Curating and linking to outside sources will improve trust and reliability, and you may even get some links in return.
- Competitors
It’s always important to keep an eye on competitors—they can provide valuable data for keyword research and other social media marketing insight. If your competitors are using a certain social media marketing channel or technique that seems to be working for them, considering doing the same thing – but make yours better!
- Keep Track of your Success
You can’t determine the success of your social media marketing strategies without tracking data. Google Analytics can be used as a great social media marketing tool that will help you measure your success, as well as determine which strategies are not working. You can also make use of Facebook Business Manager, Twitter Campaign Manager, LinkedIn Campaign Manager, etc.
- Community Management
Have someone dedicated to checking your platforms. This means that someone will monitor the comments, inbox messages, and reviews, etc. posted to your channels. This is a good way to show your customers that you are there for them and gain potential new customers.
- Address Problems Quickly
Hopefully, you receive mostly positive feedback on social media. Occasionally you may encounter someone who is upset, argumentative or has something negative to say about your company.
You should carefully monitor mentions of your brand on social channels, so you can catch issues before they escalate. If you spot a problem, engage with the person by publicly apologizing if necessary and offering to solve the problem over a direct message exchange. This way, people who see the post know you were responsive but don’t have to see all the specifics of the issue.
- Provide Value
Perhaps the most important thing you can do on social media to provide value to your followers. Create something that your audience will find useful. It could be something that tells them something they didn’t know before, makes them laugh, entertains them or anything else that’s beneficial in some way.
This aspect of social media is what attracts the right customers to your business, makes people want to follow you on social sites and helps content to spread. Master this, and you’ll be a big step closer to a successful social media marketing campaign.
With nearly 3 billion active users, social media is a potential goldmine of new customers and current patrons who could become repeat customers. Create a good social campaign, and you’ll be able to connect with some of those people and grow your customer base.
In case you missed our previous blog, here we talk about how to digitise your business through digital marketing: here