Business is all about boosting sales and earning maximum profit. To boost sales, you need marketing and advertising. And this is where the other dimension of social media comes into play, social media marketing! Most people nowadays use different social media platforms to promote their businesses.
There are currently around 4.6 billion active social media users, which has seen a 200% boost over the past five years (source). This is an incredible opportunity for businesses to build brand awareness, develop customer relationships and boost sales using social media.
It’s often tricky to get started with social media marketing, so here are 7 effective ways to promote your business on social media:
1. Choose the Right Platforms
There are multiple social media platforms with the numbers growing every day, each having its unique offering and audience. So, while choosing social media marketing for business, there are some things to be considered, like your target audience, type of content that aligns with your business and platforms popular for your business.
It is ideal to start with just one platform and put your full focus on it, then explore more after you get the hang of it. Because if you start across multiple platforms at one go, you might not be able to actively keep up with them. So, after you get the hang of it, you can use multiple platforms to accomplish different business goals or reach different customers.
2. Know Your Audience & Build Relationships
A report suggests that more than 44% of active internet users use social media platforms to know about brands and what they stand for. The main reason why social media marketing boomed than traditional marketing practices is because the former offers a two-way communication. Social media platforms allow you to interact with your customer, and you can even micro-target them.
That is why it is important to know your audience. Adequate research and proper use of social media analytics is also required to know more about your audience and how they spend time online, it is not ideal to make assumptions instinctively about a specific target audience.
You can opt for creating Facebook groups which is a proven way to enhance brand loyalty and improve relationships with your audience. Again, connecting with other entrepreneurs and influencers in your niche can be helpful for establishing brand trust, as they have dedicated followers who’ll know about your business. Again, you can mention your followers in your post and stories as a step to engage with your audience and establish relationships with them.
3. Create a Calendar
It is very important to be disciplined and consistent when you start promoting your business across social media. For that, creating and following a social media content calendar is a must. This helps you to avoid posting the same contents, time and again or the risk of ending up with low-quality content due to last minute rush.
You can also set up goals and objectives for your posts and keep a track through the calendar. This in a whole helps you plan your posts beforehand and make them ready before the desired time of sending them out.
4. Pay attention to trends and plan your content accordingly
It is important to acknowledge that social media is ever-changing, so a strategy that worked for you historically might not work now, and that is completely understandable. You just need to upgrade your content with the audience’s current need.
Again, it is important to keep a tab on ongoing trends in social media platforms to understand what the audience are looking for, and post contents accordingly. But that doesn’t mean jumping on the bandwagon every time a trend goes viral because that might not align with your brand identity and will seem like a try hard.
Visual content, like photos, illustrations, infographics, videos, helps your content to stand out and get better traction in social media as they easily grab people’s attention. It is easy to say more with visual contents without taking up much space, and it ends up being a more engaging post than a typical one.
5. Profile Optimization & Cross-Platform Promotion
One of the very basic things about starting brand promotion through social media is profile page optimization, you need to fill out your page properly adding links to other social platform profiles, filling out the about section and other information so that anyone viewing your page or channel can get a basic idea about what you are offering.
You can add your other social platform links even in your page’s bio or in some platforms, there are options to link your other social media profiles/pages. And you can even ask people to follow your other social media handles at the end of any content to give a gentle reminder occasionally.
Again, if your business has a website, make sure to incorporate social media icons in the homepage so that it redirects the customers to your social media page, and they can view it from there. This is also applicable for newsletters and email signatures, adding your social media handles via the social icons is another reminder to the audience that they can find you in those platforms too if they want.
6. Measure success with analytics
To prosper in your attempt to promote business in social media, it is very important that you keep track of how your contents are performing. This will help you get an idea of which content is getting more traction and is more engaging for the customers. To help you with that, there are loads of social media marketing tools, and most of the platforms have their own analytics system for the content creators and business profiles. You can even get an idea of which platform is getting more attention from your audiences, and you can try figuring out and working on the rest of the content so that the other platforms get a boost as well.
- Address Problems Quickly
Audience feedback is another crucial factor in social media and addressing them promptly sends out a message about the kind of brand you are. You are likely to get positive reviews mostly, but there is negative feedback as well. And it is very natural that a customer might face a certain problem or query about the brand or its service/product. So, you need to address those problems quickly and with positivity which will help build a positive brand image.
Again, it is important to follow the mentions that your brand gets on different social media platforms and solve them instantly. If you are at fault, you need to acknowledge it and publicly solve it or apologize or address it directly with the person concerned. This way people will know your page is responsive which creates a good impression on your audience.
Conclusion
With such a great number of daily active internet users, social media is a great platform to find new potential customers for businesses. So, brands are getting more active in social media and are also getting noticed by the audience. It is crucial to plan out a proper social media marketing campaign so that you can successfully promote your business and boost sales. The techniques mentioned above are very crucial and have been proven right time and again by various brands. So, following these will help you cater to your audience needs and end up with successful social media marketing to promote your business.
