Social Media Is a Powerful Tool to Leverage Your Business
There are nearly 3.78 billion people active on social media. That is almost half the population of the world. The number seems to increase and reach 4.41 billion by the end of 2025 , according to Statista.
Knowing its significance, brands have started to exploit the crowded platform to enhance business. Moreover, people also have started to make purchases via social media. Nearly 54% of people use social media to research a brand.
Social media is a perfect place to increase your business’s brand awareness, traffic, conversion, and revenue.
Missing social media marketing from your strategy is like losing your business. This is the right time to capitalize. Are you ready to conquer?
Here Are the Top 11 Tips for Advertising on Social Media
Keep reading…
1. Have A Goal
Having a business goal is imperative. Without a tangible goal, you can’t plan nor achieve anything. It’s like searching for a person without a name and address.
Your goal can be anything – increase your social media followers, website traffic, conversion, and so on. The goal has to be achievable. So, have a “SMART” (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bounded) goal.
Write it down on paper. Then, create a plan to achieve the goal.
Documenting both will help you measure and evolve strategies. Understanding the results enables you to declutter the strategies that don’t work and focus on those that deliver excellent results.
2. Identify Your Audience
Unlike traditional marketing, now you can easily collect data of your audience and spend for only those who will likely make a purchase from you.
To create an effective plan or strategy, you have to know in and out about your audience. Consumer psychology has an effective role to play in developing brand loyalty.
Their needs, pain points, desires, interests, age, location, and so on. For that, you have to conduct intense research and create a buyer’s persona. Without knowing whom you’re speaking to and what bothers them the most, how will you find a way to persuade them?
To understand and identify your audience’s pain points, you can utilize Quora, Reddit, social media groups, and forums to spot their pain points.
With this information, you can build a strategy and content that addresses your audience’s pain, and desire will reap your desired goal.
3. Choose A Social Media Platform
Understanding your audience will let you know the platform they’re most active on.
There are hundreds of social media platforms. Instead of touching down all the platforms and facing difficulties to create appealing content and manage it, it is better to stick to one or two social media marketing platforms. Each social media platform is favorable for each industry type. For B2B business, LinkedIn is the perfect platform to focus on.
For B2C, Facebook is the ideal place to drive traffic and revenue. If you’re running an eCommerce platform, your focus and efforts should be on Instagram and Pinterest.
If you’re looking to project yourself as a thought leader or influencer, Twitter is your top place. That’s the reason why you must prioritize identifying and understanding your audience.
Focusing on one single platform and putting in all your effort helps you achieve your goal faster. If you’re vague on choosing a platform, experiment using different media and stick with those that give you significant results.
4. Analyze Your Competitors
Look for what your competitors are doing on their social media. You can take the help of a competitor analysis tool such as SEMrush, BuzzSprout, or SEranking. Out of the three, pricing of SEranking starts from $31 a month and it offers tons of features in that pricing. Hence it is affordable for startups. However, if you have a good budget, then you can also opt for either SEMrush or BuzzSprout.
Analyzing the type of content your competitors have posted, will give you an overview and help you build an effective strategy.
If you’re new to social media marketing, then your competitor’s insightful information is crucial. The ups and downs of your competitor’s strategy limit your experimentations. It will act as a guideline for your creativity.
Remember, the goal here is not to copy the exact strategy. Just analyze to get an idea and then craft your own plan.
Research how other industry brands are performing. Their innovation and creativity are great insights.
5. Create A Content Calendar
Social Media revolves around content. A content calendar is a tool that helps to break writer’s block. Content calendars allow you to plan, write, edit and publish on the social media platform.
Once you have set your goal straight, fill your content calendar with topics appealing to your audience and relevant to your business niche or industry. Conduct a brainstorming session to fill up the content calendars.
Most probably, if you have done your target audience research, you would be familiar with their pain points. Include those pain points to the calendar, then create and share content that addresses them.
To get maximum reach, don’t stick with one type of content. Post different types of content like videos, images, and audio.
6. Don’t Be Too Salesy
The modern world doesn’t love companies or brands that push them hard to purchase. Like traditional marketing, if you push them to purchase, people will reject and block you. On average 60% of the people feel too many promotions are annoying.
The secret ingredient to make people purchase is to build trust. Once your audience trusts you, they will buy from you no matter what. To build trust, you have to establish a relationship with them. Sharing valuable, helpful, fresh, and unique content that helps your audience.
Follow the 80:20 rule. 80% of your content has to be informative and valuable, 20% can be promotional.
7. Humanize Your Brand
Gone are the days, where brands just used social media to share offers and promotional posts. Currently, brands have started to expose their face and connect with their target audience emotionally. That’s what people are expecting too.
Storytelling is a powerful tool to connect with people. Share your business success story and the rough path faced with your target audience. It will tweak the audience’s emotions.
[See related post: 8 Storytelling Approaches to Boost Your Social Media Marketing]
By the way, your audience will get to know about you and your brand.
Also, share the people (employees) behind the brand, their success stories, company value, culture, Christmas plans, socially responsible activities, etc. These sorts of content connect to your audience emotionally and increase your credibility.
8. Connect With Your Audience
Social Media is a wonderful platform that allows you to interact and connect with your audience. Building meaningful relationships makes your customer stay loyal to you. To do that, engage with your audience and speak to them.
When your audience shares feedback about your product or service, respond to it. No matter whether it’s positive or negative. If it is negative, apologize for the inconvenience and promise them that you will sort it out in the future.
You can run a survey or take part in forums to understand your audience and communicate with them. In this way, you can connect with your audience, build trust and increase your conversion rate.
9. Run Contests And Live Video Sessions
Contest and live video sessions are the new trends. Both will increase your humanizing personality. Running live videos and answering your audience’s questions make them feel unique, and also it nurtures brand value. Here is the complete guide to learn how to create compelling social media videos.
The latest stats tell us that live video increases your interaction and engagement rate six fold.
Running contests and giving away gifts and valuable possessions is one way to maximize your content’s reach, increase engagement rate, and nurture your brand awareness.
10. Look Over The Algorithms And Updates
All the search engines and social media platforms run on their own algorithms. And the algorithms are through continuous updates. Keeping up with their algorithms and updates and taking appropriate actions help you maximize your presence.
Exploiting the algorithm boosts your presence and also helps you get higher results. By monitoring their updates, you will be able to improve your strategy accordingly.
Moreover, to drive good traffic and get good engagements, you must know when your audience is online and constantly post at that specific time to achieve maximum organic results.
Sometimes, it can bother you to stick with the time. In that case, make use of scheduling tools to keep up the time.
11. Track, Measure And Optimize Your Strategy
Everyone makes mistakes. Social media and digital marketing are all about experimenting, finding what suits, and adhering to it. So, it is crucial to track and measure your strategy result.
There are a lot of tools available for measuring results. Make use of those tools to identify the effects and weigh each activity. If any of the activities don’t do you any favor, don’t hesitate to pull it out. Analyzing what works for you and what doesn’t will guide you in building a perfect strategy that will work.
You can’t simply trust your strategy and do the same thing that takes you nearer to your desired goal. Keep measuring your efforts and then optimize your strategy.
Conclusion
Social media is a terrific place for business. With hard work and a little bit of patience, you can achieve your desired results. If you miss it out, then you’re missing a significant revenue source for your business.
Use the above 11 tips and build a strategy that will surefire your business results and help you achieve your goals. Experiment. Measure. Optimize your strategy.
[Images – Main Image by Vic Padilla from Pixabay; other images are their respective websites and/or social platforms]
