The effectiveness and advantages of social media are not only enjoyed by individuals but by businesses and organizations as well.
As a business, your main priority is finding innovative ways to reach your potential clients. After all, your clients are the bloodline of your business; without them, you would be unable to actualize your goals and gain success.
Fortunately, social media gives you access to a wide range of customers. According to Statista, 308.27 million Americans currently use social media, which is expected to increase in subsequent years. Social media can help your business find customers, receive feedback, and build brand loyalty. However, several businesses do not get the most out of social media despite these benefits.
This is largely because they do not promote themselves adequately and effectively. Do you plan on using social media to market your business? Then, here are some best ways to use social media platforms to promote your business.
1. Create a strategy
As with all marketing campaigns, you must create a plan for your social media marketing campaign. Creating a plan or strategy ensures your team is focused, efficient, and productive. It also ensures seamless coordination and effective communication, which are important to the campaign’s success.
When creating a social media marketing strategy, you must consider several components to ensure it is well-detailed and feasible. For instance, you would need to consider your business’s target audience. There are several users of social media.
However, you aim to attract those you believe are interested in your business. Therefore, you would need to create a strategy that adequately attracts these customers. Your marketing strategy should also include the goals of the campaign, such as to increase brand visibility, generate leads, and improve customer service, among others.
To further ensure the feasibility of your plan, you should analyze your competitor’s strategies to learn more about them and identify loopholes and how you can capitalize on them.
2. Choose the right social media platforms
To further bolster your social media marketing strategy, you must use the right platforms. There are many social media platforms, and your target audience could be on any of them. Therefore, it is crucial to identify the right social media platform(s).
But how can you identify which social media platforms would be ideal for your marketing campaign? You must consider the nature of your target audience and your business.
For example, if you target younger people and need to show visual content, Instagram or TikTok may be the ideal space. For an older target audience demographic, Facebook may be a better choice. Another way to find the right social media platforms for your business is through research. You can do this by signing up to some platforms to see how effectively they achieve your marketing campaign.
This way, once you find the platform that gives you positive feedback, you can further your efforts there. You can also research your competitors’ preferred social media platforms, as that would mean that’s where your target audience is.
You must also keep in mind the resources available to you. For example, resources such as time to manage the account, expertise, and equipment are vital considerations when selecting social media platforms.
3. Create a content calendar and plan
A vital component of a successful social media marketing campaign is your content. After all, it is through the content that potential customers would be drawn to your business’s social media account to learn more about your products and services, leading to revenue.
A content calendar keeps you well-organized and on track. Using a social media scheduling tool alongside it also helps you plan your content ahead, preventing low-quality posts, content inconsistency, and last-minute planning issues.
This can cause a repetition of posts or putting up poor content. This could cause your target audience to get bored and choose your competitors over you. An effective way of preventing such problems is by using a content calendar.
A content calendar keeps you well-organized and on track. It also helps you plan your content ahead, preventing low-quality posts, content inconsistency, and last-minute planning issues. Speaking of planning, a content calendar helps you brainstorm your post ideas and ensures you get the needed equipment.
For example, you may need a drone to post high-quality aerial view photos or videos. With a well-detailed content plan, you can sketch out what you hope to achieve and identify the kind of drone you may need for the job. In this case, through your planning, you may have noted that the DJI Mini 4 Pro may be the ideal choice drone to ensure clear pictures or videos are taken.
4. Cross-promote your social media profiles
As mentioned, selecting the right social media platforms for your business is vital. However, you can still have different social media profiles as you may still draw in some potential clients. But these profiles won’t serve you well if no one knows about them.
This is where cross-promotion comes. Cross-promotion is a marketing technique whereby one product or service is used to promote another. In the case of social media, you can use your various social media profiles to advertise the others.
For instance, if you have a Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram profile, you can advertise your TikTok and Facebook profile on the Instagram account. You should also share your social media profiles on other sources of marketing strategies your business carries out, such as business cards and the website.
Doing this increases your leads, widens your brand visibility, increases your audience, and increases potential revenue.
5. Don’t over-post
Consistency is another vital factor when using social media to market your business. However, there is also a need to be reasonable about how often you post and how many posts you make.
Overposting occurs when you fill your social media profile with numerous posts quickly. Understandably, you want your audience to remember your business. However, over-posting can be very risky for your marketing campaign. When you over-post content to your page, it becomes very overwhelmed by the numerous posts.
Although your audience may not unfollow the count, they may put you on mute to avoid seeing the posts, which is just as upsetting as losing your audience. To avoid the issue of over-posting, consider the best times to post on social media. It is advisable to post on Monday mornings. However, this is subjective to the social media platforms being used.
6. Encourage engagement
Restricting your business to posts about your products and services with little interaction with your audience can render your marketing strategies unsuccessful. Social media is social.
Therefore, to keep your customers interested in your business and what it offers, you must engage with them. Encouraging customer engagement on social media keeps your target audience satisfied and entices them to become customers. It also ensures brand loyalty, increases referrals, and increases sales.
There are several ways to encourage engagement. For instance, you can go on Live to educate your audience on the business’s popular products or services, conduct surveys, have an interactive Q&A, and solicit feedback. Another way to encourage engagement is by offering quick and clear feedback.
Assuming a customer reaches out to your business with an inquiry. It is safe to say that your quick response would make them feel valued, which is great for your business! A happy customer would spread the word and help spread the word about your business.
7. Flow the trends
Social media is filled with trends. The trends may differ from one social media platform to the other. Surely, there would be one that relates to your business.
In that case, you can leverage these trends to further promote your business. These trends may include hashtags on specific subject matter or social media “holidays” like #ThrowbackThursday. These trends benefit your business because they boost your Search Engine Optimization results and make it easy to attract more potential clients.
Therefore, you should be mindful of the hashtags you include in posts. Be sure it is one your target audience resounds with. However, it is also important that you use these trends appropriately. For example, if your business deals with fashion, the last thing you would want to do is avoid including irrelevant tags such as food.
8. Set up a Facebook and Instagram store
Due to popular demand, Facebook and Instagram now allow shops to set up online stores on the platform. This makes your business more visible and encourages sales due to the convenience it offers.
It also gives the audience an idea of the products and services you offer and the accompanying prices. It also takes away the pressure of producing content. Although you still have to post content to attract customers, setting up the store also gives customers a visual representation of what you offer as a business.
Social media platforms are a great feature businesses can use to attract customers. It is also cheaper than other forms of traditional marketing. Therefore, if you are considering your marketing strategy, you should focus more on social media through the tips mentioned above.
