Time and time again, social media users engage more with campaigns on their preferred social media platforms.
You put on your Facebook and you see an advert on how using close-up toothpaste will brighten your teeth and make it sparkle like a star. It is natural that you will sure want to know more about the product.
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Asking questions, running contests, sharing pictures, promoting products and services; there are many ways for brands to attract attention on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and the likes.
After all, almost everyone on these channels are trying to sell something, whether it’s a product, service, or simply themselves.
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But a small percentage are actually giving their ideal audience a reason to feel good about making the decision to follow, like, share, reply, or click.
Larry Kim sees the use of social media for marketing as a means to enable small business looking to further their reach to more customers.
With the geometrical increase in the number of social media usage, people are continuously interacting with various brands using social media.
Hence, it is important for you to take a strong stand by creating means to put your brand, product or service in front of your prospects, leads or customers. Your presence online is very crucial to enable you key into their interest.
Therefore, a very vital component is creating a social media plan on how you hope to achieve maximum progress by using social media to market your product and service, convert leads and maintain loyalty.
Once this has been implemented correctly, social media marketing can change your business game due to the extent of success you will achieve.
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It is more than just fixing your brand on these social platforms but you have to be sure that your ideal audience hangout often on that particular platform else it would be pointless.
Before embarking on your social media marketing, you have to be sure of what you hope to achieve with the campaign; be it organic web traffic, increase or create brand awareness, and build conversion.
Whichever the reason might be, you should be sure to understand how you will manipulate the platform to achieve your set objective(s).
Creating a social media campaign or ad to make sales comprises of a whole lot of things which this post will be breaking down especially for brands that look towards converting leads to actual paying customers.
For every successful social media marketing strategy, certain important ingredients have to be put into consideration to achieve the level of success you have set out for.
Hence I will be explaining how you can successfully leverage on social media for your business.
Know and understand the social media platforms your ideal customers use
It is rather funny that you sit and create this wonderful piece hoping your audience will see it on social media and eventually become customers.
But you keep getting same results: No patronage, less or no traffic, and no engagement.
Oh dear! This can actually hurt so badly especially when you have given your time and resources to that project.
Seriously, it’s not the fault of your audience or leads but yours because you have ignored studying them and their social media usage pattern. That is the only way you would know what social platform they engage with the most.
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For example, you have a clothing line for teenagers and you take your social media marketing on a platform like LinkedIn.
Jeez! How many teenagers get to use LinkedIn? Teenager’s most often engage more on Facebook or Twitter, or Instagram and not LinkedIn due to its formal nature.
It is a matter of importance that you first understand the nature of your ideal customer and his or her most preferred platform and usage of that media.
Once you have analyzed their social media patterns, it’s only then you can figure out what social media platform will be most appropriate to interact, engage, convert and build a loyal customer base.
Create the right content across social media platforms
For most organization, content is just a written piece that tells their ideal audience about them but it’s more than just being a piece; it’s an art. It is an art due to the level of creativity put into crafting out your brand story in an interesting way for your ideal customers.
One important thing about content is the information has to be valued information where you can only give out useful insights on issues that relate to your niche.
Usually, content vary it doesn’t only comprise of written articles or adverts but also images, infographic, and videos. They say variety is the spice of life. I’ll agree with that especially when it comes to consumers.
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People averagely have an attention span of about eight (8) seconds which means the more your bore them with long write-ups, the more disengaged they become and might end up not picking the major point.
It is therefore important that you use short sentence and drive your point home before they get bored. Also, in regards to various content types, it is a matter of necessity to engage your leads, prospects or customers with fun things.
Sometimes, you can take out time to post interesting images and videos. Also, within your post, use highly engaging pictures that will help retain your audience attention to what you have prepared.
Consistency with whatever you are doing
As the saying goes “Out of mind is out of sight”. This is so true because once you give that space, something else takes over that space in the mind of your ideal customer.
Being consistent with you post, social media updates, and other important things you have taken to do for your audience.
For example, most Nigerians have an idea of the whole ‘Black Friday’ craze by either Konga or Jumia. Their faithful customers wait patiently for this time so that they can shop.
So, imagine that along the line, Konga starts to have a bit of an inconsistency in their Black Friday sales.
Don’t you think their customers will tag them as being unserious and will lose their trust in them? Which means Jumia will have more of Konga’s customers flocking into their site for the sales.
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Inconsistency can make you not only lose your customers but also the trust that they have for you will be lost.
Sometimes, I understand your inconsistency might not be your fault but you should try your best possible to ensure you continue consistently with your audience what you have established.
In the case where you are seeking to convert leads to actual customers, inconsistency will submerge your agenda because nobody wants to take their time to carefully understand you and why you’re not consistent especially for leads.
Inconsistency is very distracting and can cause lose of interest in the brand, product or service.
Consistency on social media means, if you put up ads every 2 weeks or articles once a week, it is important you continue that way.
Because once your leads or audience come around and find nothing new and it becomes a constantly reoccurring event, they won’t bother checking anymore.
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The more consistent you are on social media, the higher your chances of getting high rate conversion. The more you use social media consistently; the odds are that you will be able to project your brand image across a variety of social media platforms.
Each platform has its unique setting, tone etc. you should ensure your business maintains its core identity through business consistency.
Networking
No business is an island. Using social media marketing is primarily dependent on the original and distinct content your business shares.
Usually, you share content on your social media platform to attract leads, followers, fans and loyal customers but it is also important to link to other articles as well.
In linking, you should be sure that you’re linking to an article in same niche as you and also, it should content valuable information you think your ideal customers will love.
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Once you don’t enjoy reading a particular article, don’t bother sharing or linking with your audience. Consider guest blogging and share across your social media platforms.
Linking to outside sources improves trust and reliability, and you may even get some links in return. This isn’t such a bad business for your brand especially when you link to key influencers in your niche.
It will attract more following to your website, therefore increasing your opportunity of attracting customers.
Undercover your competitors
Your competitor is getting their social media marketing strategy right, it is just useful knowledge to know what they are doing right to achieve such outcome.
Conclusion
Social media has enhanced the level of engagement between businesses and customers. On a very important note, customers and business owners get to interact and understand themselves.
Also, there are mediums to analyze your success rate in regards to your objectives. So many brands in Nigeria are leveraging on the opportunity given them by social media to grow their business.
For example, Guarantee Trust Bank (GTBank) has been successfully using Facebook to further boost their web presence, create brand awareness, attract leads and thereafter grow revenue.
The GTBank page on Facebook is one of the most engaging business pages with interesting contents (images and the likes) to interact more with their ideal audience. Also, celebrities are using social media to increase their brand publicity to their fans.
For Neil Patel, his take on social media marketing is that as long as you focus you effort, understand how to reach your ideal customers and generate goodwill in the process, it all starts to make sense. Also, he advised that you really have to be clear about what you look towards achieving at the tail end.
In every sphere, social media has and is still being used to achieve set objectives. The good thing is, you are able to measure your success rate in terms of the progress you have made using either of the social media platforms.
There are digital marketing agencies in Nigeria that can help you through their digital marketing services to achieve social media success.
Also, you can apply and get equipped for social media marketing through a series of training’s to help you understand what social media marketing is all about and how you too can leverage it’s power for maximum success.
When a social media strategy is done the right way, you will sure witness tremendous business growth.
You can also share your social media experience and how much success you have recorded from using social media for your business.
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