How To Use Social Media To Drive New Business
Originally published at coupleofcreatives.com on May 9, 2017.
Since becoming a business owner I’ve noticed the massive amount of ways an entrepreneur can prospect to drive new business. Social media has made it easier than ever to drive new business and reach greater distances and its no wonder why.
The age old tactics of marketing such as cold-calling, drop-ins, print ads and more still apply today but are quickly taking a back seat to new digital providers such as Google Ads, Bing Ads, Facebook Ads, and Social Media networks alike.
Being a business owner yourself, you probably don’t have a ton of experience in marketing and if you do you might not be able to keep up with the latest trends. This is all perfectly ok. New digital advertising providers make it easy for anyone to promote their business or purpose but I’m here to tell you that to start gaining new prospects you don’t immediately need to take out ad space.
Start for free with social media.
Why social media?
Picture this. I can share a blog post sitting at my home in the midwestern United States only to notice someone on Twitter from Russia retweeted it. That’s pretty amazing when you sit back and think about how far we’ve come.
Assuming the content you share is quality stuff, you may also see a bit of a chain reaction take place. The community (facebook, twitter, etc..) might be fond of your share and share it themselves. This later compounds with their own peers and you suddenly become the hype for a bit. This is powerful stuff.
Not everything you share people will find interesting. In fact, starting out it will seem like no one gives a crap about you. This is normal.
The best method you can do is simply test the waters. Be sure to target the niche your business is in and start sharing relevant content. The content you share can be a mixture of your own content and other peoples. At the end of the day, you want to build trust with your followers and also offer something they need or want. That is good business after all, right?
Setting Your Business Socials Up For Success
You want to be sure your presence is consistent to the public. Before sharing anything on social media stop what you are doing and make sure to do the following:
- Make every social profile you plan to utilize have consistent branding
- Gather content that’s relevant and high quality. Don’t post randomness.
- Create branded assets you can apply to your shares. For example, If you are marketing a specific product you can create images that relate and include your company’s branding or messaging. Assuming you have no copywriting constraints you can do this to a lot of media today to make your marketing efforts more impressionable.
- Be open to sharing different types of content (video, blog posts, downloads, resources). People resonate with being “real”. If you market lies and doesn’t deliver whatever it is you are marketing you are doing it wrong.
- Set aside some time to interact with those that interact with whatever it is you share. Show your followers you actually care about them! This could be replying to comments, reaching out to them individually via email, or even following their social profiles.
- Realize that nothing happens over night. Make an effort to be strict with your content publishing schedule. Be consistent no matter what. It all takes a ton of time and effort.
Social Media Marketing For Free
We have a pretty balanced sharing schedule at Couple of Creatives. A big part of our marketing is utilizing the content on our blog to generate inbound traffic to our website.
Once a user lands on our site we have various call to actions for them to get in touch with us. Before anyone visits our website we first need to broadcast the new content that gets produced weekly.
To do this we share across Facebook, Twitter, Medium, LinkedIn, Google+ and Instagram. All of these social media networks collectively allow our followers to keep up to speed with what we are working on as well as show our colleagues and prospects that we mean business.
*Pro Tip
If you decide to start sharing and want to across similar channels as us we make use of a nifty tool called Buffer. This tool allows you to post across all of these channels at once as well as schedule your shares for each. It’s very powerful and is a massive time saver. Be sure to check it out!
The Chain Starts With Social Media
For your own business, you can take a similar approach. I can’t recommend enough the importance of having a blog. The benefits are two-fold but most importantly you give a new place for new readers to visit and learn more about you. This is done by sharing across all the social media networks you utilize. Over time, if your content is top quality more visitors will show and take notice of your efforts.
Through this increase in visitors, you can begin to capture more information such as an email address and name of a visitor. From there you can take to email marketing and offer incentives or rewards to loyal followers who might make a great customer of yours going forward.
As you can see it all starts with social media assuming you are using it as your main marketing channel. Through the links and content, you share you can create new traffic to your own website. From there you might get conversions who could potentially be new customers.
The Power of Consistency
Sharing simply isn’t enough. Apart from also creating great content, you need to be doing so consistently. Quantity doesn’t matter so much as it’s consistent. Obviously, if you think sharing a blog post every six months is going to work you might guess again.
At Couple of Creatives, we try our hardest to deliver a new blog post once per week all year long. This number only goes up from there if we decide to ramp up the authoring calendar. By doing this, and then sharing it across all our channels we see feedback in a consistent manner as well. We hope long term exposure to both our written content and interactive content will prove to be valuable to future visitors and clients.
Action Items For New Business
So you’ve gotten this far. You’re still in the dark about how to leverage social media successfully.
Get access to a FREE 7-step guide to help drive new business using social media.
