Nowadays everyone is online. According to Google, people will spend over 5 years of their lives using social media. That is 40 minutes on Facebook, 35 minutes on YouTube and 15 minutes on Instagram every day on average. You, as a business owner, just can’t afford not being there! Well, I did some digging on my own and I came up with 5 marketing strategies that are really effective and can help you grow your business on social media.
- Optimize your content
The first strategy is to optimize the content that you’re delivering. You might have probably seen other videos or blogs on this that your content should be high quality, unique, relevant and appealing to your audience. But the question is how do you create and curate content like that?
If you want to position your brand as a thought leader in your industry, then maybe you should take a look into what the successful brands are already doing. I have a few tips to help you with that. The first is the 40-60 rule. This means that you should create 40% of all the content and curate 60% of all your postings. This will help you to focus on creating a high quality content and still maintain the consistency. The second is shareability. Better than focusing too much time on creating original, high quality and relevant content, you should instead focus on creating a shareable content. If you want to know what shareable content is, then just go to your competitor’s timeline and write down what kind of content receives the most number of likes, comments and shares. Go back to your workstation and start creating and curating content with those same elements.
In general, it is noticed that posting partial information, humblebrag comments, out of context posts and personal biased content usually are not very shareable. On the other hand, How-to post, positive or entertaining content, trending topics related to your industry and social causes supported by your business have a higher rate of shareability which can also help you to increase your credibility. Now that you got good content in your hands, wouldn’t be amazing if you could find if that content will hit or crash? Using tools like Feedly should help you to find and organize RSS feeds that are relevant to your business. Once you find the topics using websites like Buzzsumo, it will help you to see the total engagement achieved by any post. Moreover, using Buzzsumo, you can also check the total engagement of the content that you are creating. And then, to automate the delivery, you can use a tool like Statusbrew.
- Be present on the social media
This is the easiest way to talk directly to your customers and you can do that without spending any money. Apart from liking, commenting, sharing and answering content relevant to your brand, you should focus on listening, monitoring and engaging. The challenge here is to optimize the time you’ll spend on this activity. Good news is that you don’t need to monitor all the social media channels all the time. And that’s great because there are thousands of social media channels out there.
A good way to start deciding where to be present is to look where your competitors are. If they are posting like crazy on Instagram, then maybe it’s a good idea to start paying attention to that platform too. Another way to reach your relevant audience is to be present in the industry specific social media like GrowthHackers for marketers, Behance for designers or AngelList for startups. And after defining where to be present, it’s time to decide what kind of content you would like to engage with. Remember to engage where you can add value to and try to not hijack the conversations which takes us to the next point.
Define your style and principles, and stick to them. If you are funny while engaging, then don’t turn to a scientific speech overnight. And if you post pictures like 3 times a day, for instance, then don’t spend 3 weeks without posting anything! Consistency is key here. You can use tools like Hootsuite listening to track conversations. It will also enable you to engage without having to scroll down and visit different pages where your brand is present.
- Tackle the influential marketing
Now this is something that will dominate the markets in the coming years and is the cheapest way to gain scale. Moreover, it can even help your brand to go viral if you do it in a right way! Influential marketing basically refers to using influencers to market your brand. These influencers usually have huge audience or followers and they always add value while they engage. Now consider the benefit of getting these influencers to advocate for your brand. If they share your content, it will automatically leverage your visibility to all the audiences that are listening to them and because their engagement is high, your content will probably be shared by a loads of people. But the question is how can you make them listen to you?
The first thing which you need to do is to identify the real influencers. Keep in mind that if a particular individual has 100k followers in his or her Twitter profile, it does not necessarily means that he or she is an influencer. The engagement is a really better metric to define the influence of a particular person. Once you identify the right people, you can try to talk directly to them by presenting yourself and presenting your brand. Moreover, be honest about your intentions. It is also a good idea to do your homework by searching the backgrounds of the influencers which you are approaching and telling them why it makes sense for them to interact with you and with your brand. And also prepare for paying them for collaboration, which also takes us to our fourth strategy.
- Be prepared to spend money on social media marketing
“There is no such thing as free lunch” and this also applies here. The fact is that organic growth is dying. Platforms like Facebook, Google and Twitter have recently updated their apps to prize even more the paid content and even less the non-paid content. This means that it is harder to gain space in your customers’ timeline. Now, you and I might agree that it doesn’t make sense in spending a lot of efforts in producing content if nobody is going to see it! Try to understand that before paying or spending money, you should be well prepared otherwise you’ll be just wasting your money. And just to make sure you don’t miss the point, your competitors might already be spending a lot of money on their social media marketing. Now, how much should you spend?
20% of your marketing budget should be a good way to start. Also remember that it makes sense for you to use paid campaigns because platforms like Facebook knows much more about your customers than you can imagine. They do a great job while targeting. But once started, control your anxiety because it will take a while for the results to come.
- Deliver value offline
Understand this that your social media marketing strategy is not restricted to the online world only. Actually, interacting offline with your customers is the best way to keep them for life. It is even better if you can mix the offline strategy with the online experience. Let me give you an example about what PricewaterhouseCoopers did (the auditing company that is taking care of the Oscars briefcase for the past 82 years).
They have sent an actual briefcase to the celebrities before the 2016 Oscar ceremony! And the celebrities went crazy and posted tons of pictures in their social media profiles, boosting the brand awareness to the sky. You can do something similar by sending a special gift to your customers. However, the most important thing is to make sure that this is part of the customer’s overall experience, so that your customers can remember you forever.
I hope you find this article useful and if there is anything I missed, then please let me know in the comments.
The Known Unknowns by Hassaan Elahi 