Aba Forson
How to use social media promotions to grow your business. Your business grows when it reaches the right people, and to reach the right people you need to find the right market.
There is no rocket science in this; it is also not a secret information privy only to the enlightened ones. Over the years, successful businesses have identified this mantra much before in their growth stage, and then formulated their strategy keeping this at the centre point. However, the market dynamics are not the same now, and businesses have the tougher job of establishing their brand name in the market.
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The definition of a market has changed; it’s no longer just a physical place where buyers and sellers meet. People are now on social media, and spending a considerable amount of time indulging in virtual interactions, and getting familiar with the whole online buying market. In such a case, entrepreneurs refraining their business from getting their feet wet in social media are signing up for a doomsday.
Most of aspiring entrepreneurs are aware of this and are spending almost 12% of their marketing costs. However, a significant number of companies also waste 20-50% of their social media spend. The two most popular reasons for not getting the desired results from the social media promotions for these companies are not paying attention and using stale techniques for promotion.
In this blog, we will be uncovering answers for those companies who are struggling with a bad ROI on their social media investments and also touch upon some kick-ass social promotion ideas that will keep your social media accounts abuzz with new orders.
Social media is a kind of market where trends, fashion and interest move like the hands of the clock, and as time changes, you need to take a fresh look at your social media promotion plans. There are many experiments you can try, and different ideas you can execute, but there are some tried and tested ways that work most of the time.
In the following list, we will be covering these ideas that will be very helpful for fixing your social media promotion plans.
Decide a goal
Shooting arrows in the dark doesn’t give you the desired result. The same goes for your social media promotion plans. You can post content on your social media channels all day long, as much as you want, however, if they’re a bunch of random collections of text, images and GIFs, there’s not much engagement or return you should expect from your social media activities.
Before, you even plan your social media calendar, set realistic goals for your social media campaigns. If you want to create more brand awareness, then stick to educational content where you make the online audience aware of the sole purpose of your brand, and how you’re here to make a difference. If you’re planning to use social media as a lead magnet, sharing promotional content, offers and discounts can help you land more prospective customers.
Of course, it’s OK to do a little mix and match or sprinkle a bit of variation in your content, but when you have a tone set for the longer run, you’ll have a more disciplined approach towards your social media activities.
Define metrics
Goal-setting is incomplete without defining the right metrics to measure your performance. The number one reason why you need goals at the place is to find out if your promotional ideas are even working as per your plans. However, when you get started with defining the metrics, it can get a little ambiguous. There are a plethora of social media metrics to look at, picking the ‘right ones’ can get tricky. The classic rule that you can follow here is to concentrate on your goals and then align the metrics according to it.
So, if your social media promotion activities are pivoted towards building a community, then the likes, comments and change in the number of followers will be the right numbers to look at. Similarly, if your goal is lead generation, then the number of clicks on your product or offer link will give you a more calculated idea.
Understand your audience
The whole idea about understanding your audience is like taking a piece out of a big pie and then frosting it with attention and love to make it look more delicious. No matter what product you sell, you cannot claim all the 3.6 billion active social media users as your target customers. It’s therefore pertinent to carve out a niche, and then nurture this group for a developing longer period of relationship with them.
While you start that, create a persona based on the demographics like age, gender, place and income. Once you have a convincing number of users, listen to different types of interactions your target audience are indulging in, and what are interests that they’re pursuing. Observing their online behaviour will make it easy to produce and share content that immediately attracts their attention, and nudge them to click on the follow button.
Keep an eye on competitors
Learning from your competitors is an old trick, and it holds true for social media too. By following the posts and activities of your competitors on social media, you get a very good idea on where they’re heading at, and what are the places you need to work on to match their standards. Besides, you can spot an opportunity where you can take advantage to build a more robust presence on social media.
Moreover, you will also know what their customers are talking about, which posts are getting the maximum engagement, and what is their posting frequency. To dive deeper into competitor analysis, investing in a social media tool can give you better returns.
These were a few fundamentals which can help you to fix your social media marketing strategy, and give it a push in the right direction. In the following section, we will explore some very cool ideas that you can include in your social media posts to keep your online account vibing.
When it comes to social media, there are an abundant number of ideas that have worked well for companies. It’s difficult to collate all of them here, but here’s the best attempt to list down the most effective ones.
Start a Q&A
A Q&A removes the veil of unfamiliarity between the users and the company. By giving a podium to your customers for asking questions, you open up to them, and send a clear message that you’re not just another company who is only interested in taking their money. To spice up your Q&A’s, you can also ask questions to your followers not necessarily related to your industry. This will be very helpful for starting conversations with people who are not very familiar with your company.
Include videos
Videos grab attention of the users, and it’s more engaging than text. Additionally, you can communicate many ideas which can be easily perceived through a video as against a text heavy post. So, a video does a great job in communicating your message, and also improves the engagement rate. You can rely on using traditional techniques for making videos, but if you’re low on resources, using screen recording tools is also a great way to keep churning out video content. Nowadays you can record engaging videos with a chrome extension which comes with a lot of engaging features including custom filters, background and more.
Using hashtags does give an extra edge to your social media posts, but when you’re talking about promotion plans, using branded hashtags can give an extra thrust. A branded hashtag is particular to your business, product or even tagline. By creating a branded hashtag you improve the chances of brand recognition and resonance as the users will immediately identify your company when they spot the hashtag next time in any of the social media posts.
Numbers and graphs attract a lot of attention, and when they’re done the right way, you can expect a healthy stream of followers walking in. If you have done extensive research, and have numbers that give actionable insights, then people will share it with others, and follow your social media account for more such relevant content.
Run polls and surveys
Running a poll or a survey tells the customer that you care about their opinions and suggestions. Whether you’re launching a new potato chip flavor or rating the best taco joint in New York, running polls and surveys open a new door for your users to start a conversation with you.
Plan giveaways
Giveaways are one of those strategies that work really well on social media. Giveaways are a great way to incentivize and recognize the efforts of your customers, and the best part about them is that there are multiple ways of planning a giveaway. You can run a contest, ads or ask your users to refer your products with your brand hashtag. If you’re looking for inspiration, here’s a collection of 20 best social media ideas.
Create partnerships
Reaching out to companies that are related to your brand, and partnering with them to create social media content is a great way to bank on each other’s audience. Both the companies tend to benefit from such a collaboration because the content is relevant to their audience, and they get a ready-made set of users who are willing to show interest. Sharing interesting data sets, industry trends or findings will be a great crowd-puller for such partnerships.
Build a loyalty program
Your loyalty program is all about turning your ardent customers into brand ambassadors. To build a loyalty program, you give these customers a special referral code, so that they recommend your product to their friends and family members. In return, you give a specific amount of commission to them if someone makes a purchase using that code. There are many success stories on loyalty programs, however, here’s a list of 80 referral programs that will help you draw some ideas.
Reply to mentions
This is a no-brainer. All the above ideas can fail if you’re ignorant to people who are tagging you or adding your hashtag in their posts. Responding to their questions or thanking them for leaving a rating on a software review website is the right thing to do. If you fail to be a part of such conversations, then it will not take a lot of time for negative words to get around, and before you realize, many of your users will start preparing plans for switching.
Involve your employees
With social media, nothing remains under the covers, and the millennial users are well aware of this. If your employees are not very involved in sharing your company content or engaging with it, users will know, and it will raise their suspicion. Leaving your employees out from social promotion plans are like refraining your torchbearers from parading, and sending out a message that they don’t believe in the company’s branding. Instead, make your employees a part of social media activities by asking them to include the company name in their bio, using branded hashtags, and participating in the company posts. If you have a small team, you can introduce your team members by posting their bio along with profile pic in your company posts. This will create a better and personal bonding with your online audience.
Summing it up
Social media is the place where you have to be to grow your business and give the branding it deserves. It is therefore important that you have a well-thought-out social media promotion plan so that you get a good ROI on your social media activities.
If you’ve already figured it out, great, but if you’re looking for ideas to fix it, then start with deciding a goal for your social media promotion plans. Once you have that in place, set the metrics that will help you to measure the performance. When you’re done with that, identify the users who you would like to target. Use different demographics to create a persona, and social media tools if you need a more drilled down version. Lastly, keep a close tab on what your competitors are up to. What are they posting, which platform, how the customers are engaging with their posts, and if there is a weak point on which you can capitalize?
Once you’re through with the fundamentals, follow the 10 simple ideas that will help you grab more eyeballs on your social media posts. Remember, it’s not an exhaustive list, but a great resource to get started. Apply and review what is working for your business, and discard the irrelevant ones.
Experimenting with different ideas, applying them, and reviewing their performance is a great way of keeping your social media promotion plans alive and using them to grow your business.
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