Benefits of using social media for business are not limited exclusively to the distribution of blog articles with hundreds of fans and subscribers simultaneously. A lot of companies all over the world have been learning the ways social media can have a positive impact on the generated income and success across all marketing channels. Nevertheless, there are still doubters and questioners who still can not clearly see or appreciate the advantages of social media for their brand. In this article, we analyze the core of using social media for business and develop conclusions how to more effectively employ all the social media techniques so that doubters, like your company’s director (or even yourself!), turn into social media devotee.
Geo-targeting
Social media helps target audiences more effectively. Geo-targeting is a great way to distribute your promotion materials out to a particular audience or generation considering their location or other specifics. Social networks like Facebook and Twitter provide simple set of techniques that give you an opportunity to send the right kind of content to your potential customers. For instance, in Hootsuite you can determine ‘Location’, ‘Language’, ‘Age’, ‘Gender’, ‘Relationship status’, ‘Education’ on Facebook, and ‘Country(s)’ on Twitter. Let’s assume for a moment that you need to spread a message to the audience that is Chinese-speaking, geo-targeting is a simple and productive way to carry out it.
Marketing strategy
Marketing without a properly developed marketing strategy is like riding a Tokyo subway without any knowledge where it takes and no map at hand: the odds are you’re not going to end up where you planned to go as quickly as you needed it in the first place. There are now dozens of social networks and media channels that boast millions of users. That spells into a big challenge if you have not crafted a scheme or a strategy beforehand, you’re going to waste your marketing budget and forget to take into the account not-so-obvious target categories of people who might have been your biggest and most important clientele.
In reality, companies without a marketing strategy often target too generally on social media platforms, when they could found or establish a small community instead and get more benefits from it. You have to take into the account far more factors, not just pure demographics. You should plunge deeper, going from general all the way to little specifics. This way, you can devote your marketing efforts on one small sharply determined target audience. Besides making this mistake of poor targeting, some marketers are too “salesy” from the very beginning, are not capable of analyzing and determining what functions well in their marketing efforts which reflected in the low-quality ads or landing pages.
The proper strategy should be one funnel at a time. Invest your money and efforts into one funnel that is devoted to a particular segment in an imagined target audience. In the context, a marketing campaign should reflect the question, “What’s our intended audience No. 1 challenge?” Select or develop one product that gives a solution to the issue and provide it to your potential client that needed the product long ago to solve the problem. Starting from this point, you can focus on the ads, emails and follow-ups.
Start with the end product first
As always, everything comes to the product you sell or the content you have on your website. Using a strong traffic decoy, or any free alluring item that could be provided in exchange for a visitor’s email address, should be the root of your follow-up strategy. Free content, such as software or video tutorials, lures new people in and enables you create the connection before you start getting sales.
Remember that the initial marketing efforts on social networks become effective only after a certain period of time. Marketing and advertising have very long paying-off cycle and do not produce the wished results overnight. Most companies make sales within 30, 60 and even 90 days after the promotion. If you don’t sufficiently follow up, you can not expect to make a lot of money.
Keep following up; if they don’t produce any sales, develop an online poll inquiring why they did not want to buy anything. Deal with their worries and doubts with case studies or articles that clearly show why your product or service is of value, or inquire directly what you could help them with to simplify their life. Maybe you can customize the product according to their wishes to solve their problems. This is a great to find out the mistakes of promoting – and that’s important details to collect during your follow-up stage so you can eventually lead a person to the payment page and take advantage on future sales opportunities.
Rinse, repeat and optimize
Marketing campaigning is a continuous cycle of the mundane. Feed with content, change some ineffective techniques or items, put to test, entertain your audience, rinse repeat. When one funnel is nicely optimized and producing some sales, you can copy-paste (with some minor alternations) the same techniques on other segments or social networks. Make sure to gather and analyze the statistics and metrics properly to guarantee you now which promotion techniques, content and traffic decoys are the most successful.
Still not 100% sure about using social media for business?
If you’re still not sure after reading on using social media for business effectively, you can get a free consultation and get the expert opinion from the leading marketer of Sunshine Digital Marketing Agency who can help you with your marketing toils and troubles. If you had problems with development marketing strategy or running the marketing campaign, Sunshine Agency can take it upon themselves and produce real results in the due time.
