Social media is a weird place. Once a person starts dancing to the tunes of Drake’s “In my feeling” and share the footage on his social media account with “#kikichallenge”, suddenly everyone starts doing it. Well, there’s no sensible logic behind the trend, but social media can make you famous in an instant. Just imagine –what social media marketing can do to your business.
As you may know, social media is a great place to connect with people. But it can also drive the sales of your business if you can prepare a proper strategy for your social media marketing efforts. Here are a few tricks that can help you improve your sales significantly with the help of social media marketing.
1. Learn where your audiences are:
Your marketing efforts aren’t going to produce any fruitful results if you are targeting the wrong platforms. Every social media platform serves the audience with certain preferences. For instance, if you run a business that sells fashion accessories, using LinkedIn may not be the best place to market it. Since fashion is mostly about appearance, you may get a better response on the platforms like Instagram and Facebook.
One thumb rule in social media marketing is to understand where your target audiences are. If you are just spending your time and efforts without targeting the social media platforms to places where your target audiences are, you are actually wasting your resources.
Instead of targeting all the platforms, just pinpoint the platforms where you can find your target audiences, and prepare your strategy accordingly. Tools like Keyhole can help you discover where a certain demographic is most active. If you can devise a proper social media marketing strategy, converting the leads will seem like a cake walk after some time.
2. Convert your loyal customers into promoters:
Earning the loyalty of your customers takes a great amount of effort, but that should not be your ultimate goal. Whether you are running a B2B company or a B2C, delighting the customers can help you to turn them into your brand advocates. And social media platforms can be the best place to execute that.
First of all, delighting the customers with freebies and discounts is a part of inbound marketing that allows you to convert your customers into promoters. Since most Americans rely on recommendations before making any decision about a purchase, having your own army of promoters can help you boost your sales significantly.
Locating the customers on social media is not very difficult. You can just track the relevant hash tags on the platforms and see the updates posted by the users. You can personally get in touch with them and ask them if they are interested in posting a few updates about your brand in exchange for freebies.
3. Rope in influencers to promote on social media:
If you are not getting significant results on your social media marketing efforts, you can consider roping in a few social media influencers in promoting your brand. You may have heard about influencer marketing before. This is almost the same; expect it exclusively focuses on social media platforms.
A study reveals that 40 percent of users are more compelled to make a purchase after seeing a tweet from an influencer endorsing the particular brand. Studies also reveal that people often trust the recommendation of these influences the way they trust the recommendation made by a friend.
If you are willing to drive your sales through social media, perhaps you should consider approaching the social media influencers who can fit right in with your brand identity. You can strategically place your product in their photos or videos, or ask them to share a unique and engaging story about the brand. In some cases, such marketing strategies deliver an ROI as high as 600 percent.
4. Share more user-generated content:
It has become a common trend among the customers to read the reviews of a certain product or service before purchasing it for themselves. This trait is primarily seen among the first-time users who barely know anything about the brand. Reviews from other customers allow them to decide whether the brand is trustworthy or not.
You can leverage this fact to boost your sales by using social media. You can share or promote such user-generated content on the social media for the people to see what your customers think of your products and services. Psychologically, if the consumer finds a review by a person like himself, they find it more convincing than a well-produced advertisement.
You can encourage your clients to share their reviews and feedback on the social media platforms which you can share later for others to see. This will not only make the existing customers feel appreciated but will also help you convince more customers to purchase your service or product. A study reveals that 70 percent of the US-based respondents are more likely to purchase when they are exposed to relatable and positive review from the other customers.
5. Create and share valuable content to impress the audience:
You can boost your social media sales significantly if you are able to combine your strategy for social media marketing with content marketing. Whether you acknowledge this or not, social media is actually a great place to promote your content among thousands of people. If you can create compelling, bite-sized content for the social media, you can actually convince the audience into making a purchase.
A lot of brands share your blog posts and videos on their social media accounts which gain a massive mileage due to the reach they have on social media. You can also post such pieces of content to inform, educate and most importantly, impress the audiences on social media.
You can even create content for the audience based on the stage they are at on their buyer journey. For instance, if they are on the “decision” stage, you can create contents explaining how your brand can help them to avoid a problem. Sharing the content on social media is only going to boost the exposure, allowing you to drive more sales.
6. Consider social media advertising:
If you are just starting out, expecting a massive organic reach is only going to bring you disappointment. Even if you are sharing rich content on your social media platforms, it may be hard to gain a significant organic mileage on the initial stage of your marketing efforts. So, it will be wiser to try social media advertising to reach a decent amount of audience at that moment.
Almost every social media platform comes with the option to create ads or promote your content. This ensures higher visibility of your brand among a relevant target audience. You can leverage this feature to raise brand awareness among your target audience. You may already see a lot of ads on Facebook these days. All of them are paid by the brands to get higher visibility.
The best part about these social media ads is that they cost less than the traditional advertisements, and if you are able to devise a proper ad strategy, you can generate more sales through social media ads than the conventional advertisements.
7. Engage with your audience regularly:
If you are active on your social media accounts for one day and then go into hibernation for the next month, you are not going to derive any positive result from such efforts. You need to stay active across all the major social media platforms where most of your target audiences are. Engaging with the audiences frequently is not only going to improve your brand image but can also boost your revenue.
Besides posting valuable content on your social media accounts, engage with the audiences in other ways. You can run contests and giveaways to engage more people on the social media. You can even create polls and surveys to see what the people think about your brand.
Your presence on social media allows you to build a better brand identity among the audience. So, when they are in search of a service or product, they can recall your brand’s name if you are in the same business.
As you can see, social media marketing is one of the most effective forms of marketing that can boost your sales quite significantly. So, if you have not been focusing your efforts on social media marketing, it is the perfect time to get started.
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