Discover How Social Media Marketing Can Boost Your Business

Social media has carved out an unexpected name for itself in marketing over the last few years as a hyper-efficient platform for your advertising campaigns. With traditional advertising, there is no guarantee that people will see or hear the your newspaper, TV or radio ad or that they will actually be interested in what you’re offering. This is because you can’t control the audience targeting, whereas with social media you can.

Here’s a basic guide on how you can create highly efficient social media marketing campaigns.

Social Media Checklist

• Use Social Media to:
• Promote your Business Brand
  
• Provide detailed information about your products/services
• Ask for customer reviews/feedback
• Attract new customers
• Strengthen relationships with current customers
• Find out what your competitors are doing

Advantages of Social Media:

Broad Reach

There are few limitations to social media reach. You could find an audience around the world that has a deep need for your product or service. Social media will open the doors to create new business connections and attract new customers with minimal effort.

You’ll find it easier to build relationships with new customers when you have created a dialogue with visitors on your social media. By messaging or live chatting with leads and customers on social media you will have direct results on how you convert leads into customers. This is something that traditional marketing is unable to accomplish.

Targeted Demographics & Niche Groups Because the big social media moguls have so many specialized groups, there are tangible ways to communicate and touch base with those communities in your business’s local area. The big social media moguls do much much of the grunt work when it comes to gathering relevant market research about your target audience. Platforms like Facebook have users provide information about themselves on their profile when they register an account. Depending on what platform works best for you, they can include the following:

• Gender — male or female
• Age — how old they are
• Location — what city or state they live in
• Career — their job, and maybe even their income
• Home-ownership status – whether or not they own a home, and the home value

 

Think about that for a moment. If you have market research that tells you who your optimal target demographic is, you can fully cater your advertising on social media to them. You can then build your ad campaign so only people that meet that demographic criteria see the ads. This lets your ads reach their maximum efficiency, while allowing you to maximize your reach.

Even the best market research that identifies what groups have the most interest in your product will only be making an educated guess based on percentages. Some social media platforms, such as Facebook, allow you to target ads to people who specifically like or show interest in products like yours. Here’s how:

• Listed interests — if they have specifically said in their profile or activity that they like your type of product
• Pages they like — on Facebook they might have ‘liked’ the profiles of other businesses and people associated with your type of product
• Who they follow — if they follow other companies, businesses, or high profile users and experts for your type of product

 

So not only can you target your ads according to the optimal demographic, but you can also further refine your targeting to people who have shown specific signs that they already like the type of product you sell.

Cost effective

Depending on what type of account your business has on social media, getting the word out on your amazing business can be free or very low cost. Platforms like Facebook will even suggest what posts might be best to boost or give extra promotion to based off the the insights provide from user activity.

The great thing about focusing your campaigns in this way is that it makes them much more efficient. You’ll eliminate spending thousands of dollars for a monthly ad campaign in a newspaper, magazine, TV or radio station and get the most out of your money with only a few hundred dollars for shorter campaigns. You can start and stop them daily, you can adjust them on the fly and test elements so they always perform optimally.

Get Personal!

I’m sure I’m not the only one who hates getting automated calls about health insurance or some random survey. Social media allows you to get connected on a more personal level. This way you avoid sounding ingenuine and robotic. Getting personal has the unique ability to promote trust in your audience which will allow you to win the hearts of more leads and eventually convert those leads into sales and satisfied repeat customers. You will reveal their buying intentions as well. You will discover how your customers or visitors on social media feel about your products and services through likes, comments, follows, and private messages so that you can focus your business objectives on the audience that expresses interest.

Buying Intentions

Using social media allows you to focus your ads on people who express general interest in your type of product. You can further refine it to people who have shown signals that they might be actively shopping for that type of product. Here’s how it works:

Searches — the person has recently been searching on social media for businesses and products like yours
Activity — they’ve specifically said in their tweets and posts that they’re shopping for a product like yours and asking for help or reviews
Likes & follows — similar to general interests, people who recently start liking or following businesses or products likely have buying interest

Duck Soup 

Whipping up a relevant and far reaching marketing campaign at the last minute is no easy feat, but social media could be your knight in shining armor. Using the appropriate platform is incredibly fast and straightforward. You’ll be able to distribute your information quickly, reach a diverse set of people, and it is intuitive, so you don’t need specialized training or “have a guy for that” to get your ad sets  rolling.

Knowing who and where your audience is on social media platforms along with how to best communicate with them will be a great advantage to how you market your goods and services. Get Professional Advice!