8 Ways to Properly Promote Your Business on Social Media
Social media is now playing much larger roles in our lives than it did decades ago, and one of those essential roles is social media promotion. In truth, any marketer or business owner that has not already jumped on the social media bandwagon is way behind the times. Social media promotion has revolutionized the traditional approaches to marketing businesses so that almost everything is now digitized and operations can even be conducted from devices like phones and laptops.
A key element of promotion that social media has majorly streamlined is communication. Businesses no longer have to send out one-way messages to clients and wait for ages to get back replies or no replies at all.Through social media platforms and messaging, there is a newfound speed and simplicity to business correspondences, and reaching out to potential and intending clients to promote products and services has never been much easier.
Now that millions of businesses are conducting their operations and pushing their brands on social media sites, only the businesses that are doing social media promotion the right way can succeed standing on the benefits that the phenomenon presents. Therefore, if you are looking to create more visibility for your brand and propagate a growth in revenue through increased customer patronage for your business using social media, you must take an appropriate approach to achieve this. In light of this, here are 8 ways to properly promote your business on social media. And don’t let the idea intimidate you because it’s all a lot easier than you think!
1. Start with a Goal.
A journey without a destination is no journey at all, but an aimless roaming around and a pure waste of time. In this same vein, plunging into social media marketing without starting out with set goals is a foolproof recipe for disaster.
Goals are very important because they help you know, business-wise, where you stand currently, where you want to get to, and how you are going to get there. Thus, having clear and distinct goals makes it easier for you to shape your social media content to achieve these goals.
Are you looking to boost your business’ patronage? Rack up the number of viewers or increase the reach of your content? Increase the revenue coming into your business by making direct sales on the social platforms? Develop strong customer relationships? Or create awareness to the public on important subject matters in the environment?
These are some excellent goals to base the construction of your business profile(s) when promoting on social media. For business objectives, you can create attractive posts about the products you sell, post captivating video content to share sufficient info about a service, give your followers content that showcases the nature of your brand, publicize business events like promotional sales, and so on. For awareness purposes, you can provide content that educates, informs, and entertains (all at once if possible!), and engage in intellectual discussions with people so that everyone can learn from one another.
2. Decide Which Platforms You Want to Focus On.
There are several social media platforms and forums on which you can opt to promote your business on. In fact, their number is ever-increasing! This is because, currently, there is a general awareness of the importance of social media promotion and communication in the business world, and the discovery of a secondary demand for niche-based platforms and forums so that distinct communities of people having similar interests can connect and interact with one another in spaces designed especially for them.
When deciding which platforms you want to focus on in terms of marketing your brand or business, you should take your customers and the nature of your business into account. Where can your target audiences be found majorly? Such platforms are where your major business profiles should be set up so you can easily connect with potential clients and them with you. Conducting research using social media demographics can help you figure out what social media sites these should be.
In addition, which sites will suit your products and the kind of content you wish to post best? For instance, if you own a hair care line of products and want to broadcast tutorial videos for your buyers on the best ways to use the products, then YouTube is an obvious choice.
The most popular social media platforms for brand development and marketing today are Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, and most recently, Tiktok. Thus, you can choose the best ones for you based on the nature of your business and the kind of content you’re set on publishing.
3. Get to Know Your Audience.
Another reason why using social media promotion is so effective is that businesses can micro-target their audiences. To do this, you have to get to know your audience first.
Start by noting the patterns among your current customers. You can do this easily by making use of social media analytics tools to track, collect, and analyse relevant trend data on customer behaviour towards your social media accounts. With this sort of valuable information, you can then tailor your content to keep your customers loyal and engaged and maximize the appeal of your business to anyone who comes across your profile.
For example, if you find out through analytics that your customers or target audience are majorly active between 7:00pm and 8:00pm, then that is the exact period within which you should have your new posts put up. Some social media sites like Facebook and Instagram have inbuilt analytics tools, but you can also find many other social media analytics apps and online tools that can provide you with this kind of data.
Additionally, as a business looking to encourage more patronage from your audience, it will also work in your favour if you are able to influence the patterns and decisions of your potential customers. Present yourself to them as an authority in whatever industry you operate under by displaying elevated levels of knowledge and expertise through your content, and you will find that people will increasingly begin to pay rapt attention to anything you have to say to them. From this, you can also successfully build a devoted community around your brand that will only continue to grow over time.
4. Stalk Your Competitor or the Brands You Like.
Yes, you read that right. You must research every move that your competition is making on their social media to know what they are doing right and how to do it better, as well as what they are doing wrong and how to avoid doing the same. While you’re certainly not looking to copy anyone, observing what your competition is doing is a quick and efficient way to learn what will work for a business like yours and what won’t.
This doesn’t only apply to your competitors but also to the brands that you like and look up to. Take examining their social media promotion techniques as a form of inspiration to help you generate unique and failsafe ideas for your own profiles.
5. Create a Social Media Calendar.
A mistake that many businesses on social media often make is either leaving it till the last minute to figure out what they are going to post or making unscheduled and unplanned posts. This, more often than not, leads to them putting out low-quality content. Absence of pre-planning can result in more mistakes like repeated posts or forgetting to remain active on one of your accounts.
A simple remedy is to create a social media calendar. This type of content calendar helps you avoid making mistakes and properly prepare the right things to post. It also serves as good assistant forebuilding solid strategies that will enable you meet your goals.
To make a social media calendar, you can make use of a regular notebook or planner, or even a standard calendar to pre-organize your content. What you can plan out includes your write-ups or multimedia content, captions, hashtags, links, and the likes.
Remember that while having a pre-planned posting schedule will prove the most beneficial for your business on social media, spontaneity still has its perks. Real-time interaction with your customers breathes life into your business so that people know that they are dealing with much more than just a page on the internet.
6. Create Engaging Social Content.
Whatever your social media goals may be, getting people to engage with your content will always help you achieve them. Using the customer trend data that you gather from analytics tools, you can achieve high levels of engagement by melding content that people want to see.
Also, don’t forget to switch up the format of your content. There’s so many formats to choose from: informative messages or articles, inspirational quotes, eye-catching images, interesting video content, funny GIFs, and so much more. Social media platforms today also offer novel formats that you can take full advantage offing putting out highly engaging social content, like Facebook Stories, Instagram Live videos, Twitter Polls, YouTube Shorts, and so on. Regardless of what you opt for, planning with a content calendar will help you keep all your content at its best.
Another remarkable way to optimize your content, social media profiles, and business sites to encourage maximum engagement from audiences is to work with an exceptional digital marketing agency. We at Lamar G Marketing Tree offer first-rate services and strategies that will have you hitting all of your promotional goals in no time! Our services include:
· Website Design.
· SEO Planning.
· Social Media Strategy.
Visit our website today to discover that your business can be so much more with the right professional and promotional touch.
7. Audit What’s Working.
It is very important that you monitor the performance of your content and posts, and then make use of regular analyses to refine your social media publications so as to get better reception from your audience. Luckily, there are many online analytics tools available to help you gauge the success of your social media marketing efforts.
With every promotional effort you make, you must always work to give maximum value. Always ask yourself, “How can I add more value?” This is one of the biggest secrets to building stellar customer relationships and attaining high customer retention.
Your focus, however, should not only remain on your repeat customers but should be equally divided between that and obtaining new clients.
8. Audit What Doesn’t Work.
In the same way that you retain and improve on what’s working, you must also watch out for what promotional content and strategies may not be doing so well in meeting the goals and expectations that you have set. It’s okay to go back to the drawing board and start afresh, revaluating the things you were doing before and how you can change them so that your promotions can do better.
Be careful not to over-promote. Besides trying to make sales, your content should also be more entertaining for your audience so they are not put off by you selling yourself too hard.
And hopefully, you always get positive feedback from your audience. However, if you happen to receive any negative response, you should quickly and carefully address the situation. A little public apology or a kindly offered solution can oftentimes turn an upset customer into an applauding patron.
Also Read: South Florida Digital Marketing Agency
