Think about how many times a day you check your social media accounts. Time Magazine estimates that the average American checks their smartphone 74 times/day.
Each time a person gets onto a social media website, you have a chance to sell — as long as you have a well-executed social media marketing plan. If your company needs to increase sales, now might be the best time for you to jump on the social bandwagon and use these tools to benefit your business.
Set Goals for Your Company
Before you embark upon a social media huge campaign, set goals for your company. Are you trying to get people to visit your website? Do you want to use social media to tell people about your company? Are you trying to convert visits to sales? Think about all of these points when you are trying to set goals.
Set immediate goals and long-term goals. Be realistic when you are determining what you want. If your company is new, start with boosting brand awareness and driving visitors to your website. More established companies might set goals for higher conversion rates and increased revenue.
Keep your goal realistic. If you are just opening your company’s doors, you aren’t likely going to see a $1 billion profit in the first six months, so that wouldn’t be a realistic goal to set.
Make sure not to overwhelm yourself with goals. Stick to one or two of the most important. This lets you focus your time and energy on the strategies to meet those goals.
Decide on a Marketing Strategy
When you decide on a marketing strategy at this point, you aren’t coming up with hardcore ideas. Instead, think about what platforms you want to use. Are you going to use Facebook and Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+, Instagram and YouTube, or any other combination of social media websites? Once you determine which platforms to use, evaluate the possible marketing strategies for each.
Now is a good time to create a page or account on the platforms of your choice. Even if you don’t launch them yet, work on creating content for each platform that is unique and catchy.
Learn About Your Visitors
Once you have launched the social media accounts and get people to interact with those pages, you can learn about your visitors. You can also do this through sign up options on your website and similar tools.
The more you know about your visitors, the more you can target posts and content to them. Think of this scenario: your company sells vacations and you want to increase your sales. You turn to Facebook and offer a bunch of honeymoon style vacations for two adults. This can go two ways. The first is that you will make tons of sales because most of the people who visit your company’s pages are single adults with ample disposable income. The second is that you don’t get many sales because most of your visitors are parents who only have money for family vacations, and they have to save for a while to do that.
With that example, you can see how important it is to know who you are interacting with. You won’t be able to convert visits to sales if you aren’t providing content and offers that boost the visitors’ desire to do business with your company.
Stay Active
Stay active on social media to keep your followers interacting with your page. This doesn’t mean that you should post every hour around the clock. It is possible to do too much or too little. Instead, you have to find that perfect space that keeps people interested without making them unfollow your page or stop interacting.
When you are trying to decide how active you are going to be on social media, remember to think about your target audience. Tailor your posts to them. Think about that vacation company. Let’s say that they are offering family trips. You wouldn’t want to offer a 2-week vacation overseas in the middle of the school year if most of your followers have school age children. Instead, you would want the dates of that vacation to fall when school is out of session.
Look at some of your competitors to see how often they post and what kinds of content they post. Pay close attention to how the people on the page are interacting with the posts.
Put Your Strategy Together
Using targeted strategies can help you to grow your customer base. If you have newsletters or signup options on your website, you can create ad audiences on Facebook to seek out people who match those who already interact with your company.
As part of putting your strategy together, you have to incorporate all facets of your marketing campaign and customer retention plan. Pulling your social media accounts, email advertising, blog posts, and website content together can help you to convert visits to sales.
Sources:
http://time.com/4147614/smartphone-usage-us-2015/
https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/252733
http://www.businessnewsdaily.com/6321-social-media-selling-solutions.html