7 Steps to Win with Social Media Marketing
Your friend told you about the massive sales she made on Instagram last month. Then it made you wonder why you don't have as much sales, despite being in the same line of business.
Not that you’ve not gotten some form of engagement online, but making consistent sales has always been a struggle.
Not to worry. In this article, we’ll examine the tactics and tools you need to start making massive sales on social media. Let’s get to it.
7 Steps to Win with Social Media Marketing
With these 7 steps, you can elevate the social media marketing game for your business.
Step 1: Set your Social Media Marketing Goals
Set clearly defined goals that align with your overall business goals. This is key to ensuring that your marketing efforts impact your business' bottom line and generate a tangible ROI.
You can set goals for brand awareness, visibility, sales, traffic generation to other channels, etc. Just ensure they are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time-bound (SMART).
Step 2: Identify your target audience
After setting your social media marketing goals, you need to identify your target audience. Skip this step and every other thing would fall apart!
Knowing your audience is so important, and cannot be overstated, as they determine the social media platforms you would choose for your marketing efforts, the kind of content you would create, etc.
For example, if your audience is GenZ, that is individuals between age 11-26, TikTok and Instagram would be great platforms to target. For Millenials and Gen X, Facebook is a better option.
However, if you don't have a clear picture of who you want to target, you would end up going to the wrong place to get them. Imagine going to look for cats in the sea. Bizzare, right?
Identifying your target audience also helps you identify the problems they are going through that your business solves. Remember, everyone is not your audience, and trying to target everyone on social media would equal targeting no one.
Step 3: Create a social media marketing strategy and content strategy
Your social media strategy is a document that outlines your social media marketing goals, target audience, social media channels to adopt, how to measure the success of your social media marketing efforts, etc. It is a document that gives a clear view of what you want to achieve on social media and how you would achieve it.
On the other hand, your content strategy outlines the content to use in attracting, converting, and retaining your target audience. Using a topic cluster is the best way to approach this.
A Topic cluster is a list of topics that are related to your business and your ideal audience's pain points. It helps you create relevant content to solve your audience’s problems and establish yourself as an expert in your niche.
For example, if you want to teach marketing to SMEs, you can have clusters such as WhatsApp Marketing, Marketing Strategy, Email Marketing. Then come up with subtopics such as, how to create a marketing strategy, dos and don't of Social Media Marketing, 5 mistakes people make with marketing on Twitter, 7 ways to get the most out of email marketing, etc.
Wth websites like explodingtopics.com, Hubspot title generator, etc. you would find it easy to generate content ideas for your social media pages.
After this, group these topics based on the stage they fit in the buyer journey. This refers to the awareness, consideration, and decision stages. This ensures that you are creating content to cater to the needs of your audience at any stage they are on, in the buyers’ journey.
Then create a social media calendar that would contain information on the content to create, the date it is to be posted, and the content format for each post. That is if it is a video, carousel, single graphic, etc.
Step 4: Set up and optimize your social media page
If you followed this guide step by step, then you should already know the social media platform(s) that would work best for your business. So, set up your business page on each of these platforms and get the ball rolling.
However, before you overload your page with content, pay attention to your profile or bio. This is the first part of your page that visitors would interact with when they visit your page. So, it must be well-optimized and presented to attract and retain their attention.
One of the ways to do this is to clearly state what your business is about, the audience you serve, how you help them, and a Call To Action to take them to the next stage in the buyer journey.
On our Instagram bio, we stated the audience we serve, which are small businesses, how we help them, and a clear CTA to help our ideal audience take the next step to join our business community.
Your CTA may be to download a freebie, send a DM for consultation, order a product/service, etc. Just ensure it is easy and simple to perform.
You can also state the impact of your business on the lives of your target audience. This should be clearly stated to convince prospects of your expertise.
Step 5: Start creating and posting your content
It is best to batch-create content on a weekly or bi-weekly basis, to ensure consistency and prevent overwhelm.
You should create various content types, such as videos, carousels, single designs, etc, based on what works for the platform you are using and your audience’s preferences.
All content should also be modified to suit the social media platform they are being posted on. For example, the form of content that works for Instagram would not work for Twitter because they are used differently. This is important to ensure your audience is consuming your content in the right format on each platform you adopt.
Step 6: Listen and Engage
Social Engagement and Listening help you become aware of when your brand or competitor brand is mentioned on social media. It also helps in monitoring when keywords that are related to your brand are mentioned online.
With social media listening, you can track what customers are saying about your brand, their perception of your business, what they like about your competitor that you can latch on to, the pain points they have that your product/service can solve, etc.
Beyond social listening, you must also engage with other individuals and businesses on social media. This is key as social media only works because people are social, that is, they engage one another. This is done by reacting to the content others post, commenting, and sharing posts, etc.
You can also "steal" your competitors' followers with the "guerilla tactic"; which involves intelligently engaging their posts with insightful comments. When you do this, their followers who get value from the comment would get curious about you and check out your page.
Step 7: Analyze and Measure Results
Ever wondered why we are made to write tests and exams in school after a full term/semester? It is because if you don't analyze and measure how much you have learned, you wouldn't know how much you still need to learn or even relearn. The same principle applies to social media marketing.
Without analyzing and measuring your results, you cannot quantify how much impact you have made, and how far you still need to go. Measuring your results helps you know what works, what isn't working, and what can be made better.
Now, in measuring your results and performance, ensure that it is measured against your business goals. For example, if one of your business goals is to make a particular number of sales in a month, you should measure how many leads or sales you got via social media, to determine if your social media efforts made an impact on your business goals.
It is also important to measure the right metrics, such as reach, impression, audience growth rate (number of followers), engagement rate (likes, comments, saves, shares), click-through rate (number of clicks on the link in your bio/profile), lead generation rate, conversion rate, the social share of voice (tags, mentions), etc.
10 Easy Tips to Succeed with Social Media Marketing
1. Always create valuable content.
2. Be up to date on trends and latch on to relevant ones.
3. Collaborate with individuals in your niche to increase engagement and visibility.
4. Add a Call To Action (CTA) to all posts.
5. Use relevant hashtags, but don’t overdo it.
6. Combine organic with paid advertisements.
7. Use user-generated content, such as reviews, testimonials, etc.
8. Have a content idea dump document to store content ideas you can use later.
9. Be authentic and human. This can be done by showing your face in videos, telling stories, etc.
10. Use the 80/20 rule. This means 80% of your posts should be educational/inspirational/funny. While 20% should be dedicated to selling.
5 Free Tools you need to Win in Social Media Marketing
Google Suite
With Google Docs and Sheets, you can plan and write your content. Google Sheets helps you create a content calendar to schedule your content monthly. You can write your content in Google Docs, before turning them into graphic and video content.
These tools aid collaboration within a team as changes can be made by various team members which reflects in real-time.
Grammarly
Grammarly helps you correct grammatical errors and aids consistency in your writing, ensuring that you communicate in a clear and on-brand manner with your audience. It helps in revising things like spelling, punctuation, sentence structure, clarity, etc.
Canva
Canva is a must-have tool for every business owner who wants to create exciting graphic designs for his/her business page on no or a low budget. With Canva, you have FREE access to thousands of design templates to create graphic designs, such as carousels, infographics, single designs, business flyers, rate cards, brochures, etc.
Capcut
Capcut would elevate your video marketing game. With this tool, you can create video content and reels for your social media pages. It has other features like caption creator, overlay, etc.
Buffer
Buffer is a Social Media Marketing tool for scheduling social media posts, social media listening, analytics monitoring, etc.
Winning with Social Media Marketing
Social Media is here to stay, and the earlier you take it seriously, the better for your business.
However, beyond social media marketing, you can try your hands on other forms of marketing, such as email marketing, blogging, etc. This will help you get the message about your business out via various mediums, and not only rely on one channel to succeed.
At Triift Africa, we help small business owners grow their business from hustle to portfolio, by providing financial aid in the form of credit, business growth resources, community support, etc.
Need to speak to a business expert about a problem? We are your best bet. Send a message to us at hello@triift.africa or visit our website to book a session.
