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by George Matthew
There are billions of people on social media networks, with at least 1.3 million new people joining every day.
That’s the reason you need to focus on social media channels. Most millennials, for example, have an account on one or the other social media channel. That means you have ready access to your audience if you spend your time building a social media strategy.
In addition, not only are millennials (and people of all age-groups) signing up to social media platforms, they are spending a lot of time on different social media sites. Sometimes up to an hour a day. Some platforms like TikTok have users engaging with the content as well as creating their own content. That’s a lot of engagement.
Social media is a channel for you to communicate with prospects. But it’s also a way for you to grow your following, and raise brand awareness by creating and providing content for consumption, in an organic and appropriate manner.
It’s useful to understand that social media marketing isn’t a silver bullet. It doesn’t solve every problem.
But, with a strategy, social media can solve some problems.
Without a strategy, your efforts are misdirected and may not produce any results at all.
To turn social media into a sales machine there are a couple of things you need to be aware of and act on.
Marketing tactics and strategies that worked in 2014, may no longer work in 2022. You can generate leads for pennies on the dollar with social networking sites and hope to make sales.
Since times are changing, and the way people are interacting with your business is changing, you need to adapt or die.
What works?
I have seen this more times than I can count. Startup founders taking to LinkedIn to say how LinkedIn contacts are responsible for a bulk of their revenue. LinkedIn is a great place to get friends, to build a network, to be inspired and to inspire others.
During the pandemic, as most people started working from home, their personal and professional lives meshed together and they’re now more open to connecting professionally on LinkedIn.
Obviously, paid ads are a great way to grow your business and start marketing your products on Facebook. Since more and more people block Facebook ads, it can be a waste of time and money, so marketers should seek out new ways to drive sales. The solution is simple—
Join Facebook groups that have plenty of people who are passionate about a common subject. If you’re in a well-moderated group, you can be part of a lot of addictive conversations about core issues that gave birth to the group.
Beginner’s Programming is a group geared towards answering beginner-level questions about programming.
Such groups on Facebook and LinkedIn are a good way to understand your audience and connect with them in a meaningful way.
Instagram Stories helps you showcase your brand personality. It taps into visual marketing and uses that as its core.
Not everyone who visits your Instagram profile page knows who you are. That’s why you need a bio for them to read and understand more about you. Plus, you can use the Stories feature called Highlights.
Using the Highlights feature, the bio is a place for you to both tell your brand’s story and convert visitors.
Highlights is a promo trailer that can help you build an idea of what the brand is, what the products are and generate direct traffic to your landing page.
YouTube will grow even bigger as more and more people jump on the video bandwagon. People are watching more video content and that’s set to grow even further. Not only are people spending time on YouTube, they are using the site to search for information just like they use Google. Its the second biggest search engine after Google.
You can use your YouTube channel to introduce the services that your company offers to your potential customers, just like CloudTalk, a company in the SaaS space does.
People don’t want to miss the exciting content up on YouTube and you could attract even more people with a live question and answer session. Let’s say you’re running a blog that gives people advice on travel. One of most important parts of travelling is financial prudence. You can talk about how people can rake up points on their credit cards for the money they spend on air tickets and use that to snag discounts on hotels. A lot of people are searching for similar advice on YouTube and you can help them with your videos.
In the last several years, social media has grown powerfully.
Leads typically go through three phases. There are cold leads, warm leads and leads are ready to buy—on social media.
On social media you connect with cold sales leads, warm them up by getting them to commit and move them to the close phase.
In the connect phase, you’re reaching out to people who already contacted you and engaged with the brand in some way.
This doesn’t mean that they are ready to be added to the bottom of the sales funnel. You are here to continue the conversation they began.
Contribute something of meaningful value and go further with it.
The goal is to make them remember you. They know you but not well enough to start making purchases with you. But if you’re regularly creating content and making sure to connect with them, they will be ready to buy when they have a need for your product.
The commit phase is when these leads enter the sales funnel. In the close phase, they’re ready to buy.
You can also build a custom audience through social networking sites and target them:
The brand you created should be geared towards helping people, solving their problems. Mealfan, a site in the meal-delivery space, uses social listening to find out what to post on their blog next.
You must understand the problems people face daily and how you can solve them. Understand the people who you’re talking to regularly and then try and assist them through the brand’s social media pages. You can also hire a virtual assistant to help you with this task.
Does this make you re-think what it means to market on social networking sites?
Think of the impression you are generating as a brand and as a professional.
The results will speak for themselves. Engagement will start shooting up as you interact more and more with new people. People will go from the Facebook page to Instagram stories bringing the cost to acquire a new lead to a new bottom.
That should be the most important benefit.
As someone marketing on digital channels, you should show up when your target keywords are mentioned in a context that matters. This isn’t doable without machine learning. Recognizing whenever words around your industry are mentioned is a critical aspect of marketing online.
Then engage with this content and take people to your profile. Social media is the hub of both positive and negative feedback. Mentions will help you recognize fake news that can damage your brand.
Don’t leave money on the table. Instead of reaching out to a cold audience, put your focus on current customers, on referrals. They want to find out what’s new and interesting in your company. And they will love it when this message is conveyed properly.
Once you test the offer and have shown that it works, it’s easy to grow your business with social media.
About the author