If you’re a business owner in the year 2019, someone has told you the importance of social media marketing.
You know it’s important, but you need to know if it’s important enough for your business to spend time, money, and effort on. After all, it doesn’t have clear ROI metrics like paid marketing.
The short answer? Yes, social media marketing is important and you should focus on it.
But telling you it’s important isn’t enough.
You need insights, advice, and strategy.
In today’s guide, we’ll cover 9 social media marketing tips to help you grow your business and we’ll talk about the time, money, and effort you should put into them.
Run a Contest or Giveaway
A contest or a giveaway is a great way to catch peoples attention on social media.
You can also use them to generate leads for your business.
In the short term, giving away your product or services for free will cost time and money, but you can reap rewards in the future if you do it right.
Here’s how the process works:
- Choose the product or service you want to give away
- Create a Facebook ad campaign targeting people in your audience
- Allow people to enter the contest by giving you their email address
- Run the campaign for a set period of time (1-2 weeks)
- Announce the winner through your email list first with the subject line “Contest winner announced”
- Announce the winner through social media
- Create a special offer/deal/discount and promote it to all the people who didn’t win
This simple social media marketing tip works well for businesses in all different niches.
Harness the Power of Video
Video is a great medium to use because people can watch them passively.
You don’t have to focus to watch a video like you do when you read.
You can use video to build your brand by sharing informative, entertaining, and useful information your target audience wants to watch.
Or you can use video as a creative twist for advertisements.
We’ve discussed how businesses have used video to spark viral campaigns that helped them grow their business.
While you may not go viral with your videos, they will be a sharable asset you can use to spread awareness about your brand and business.
Be creative.
If you’re a carpet cleaning company, show a before and after video of your cleaning.
Real estate agent? Provide cool virtual tours of your awesome homes and share them online.
Even if you’re in an industry that’s you considered unexciting, you can create videos that educate your target audience.
Not sure what videos to create? That’s where working with an expert comes in.
Give Your Brand a Personality
All too often, businesses try to use social media as a loudspeaker to blast ads out to the masses. Or, they use it to build awareness about their brand, but they do it in a stiff and corporate way.
It’s okay to use humor, inject personality, and have a little fun when it comes to marketing your business on social media.
Go back to our example above with Dollar Shave Club. They use humor to sell their product. They are even a little brash and inappropriate.
Contrast this with most other businesses who are afraid to go outside the box from time to time.
It’s refreshing to see a company who doesn’t take themselves seriously 100 percent of the time.
Participate on Your Platforms
If someone writes a review for your business on Yelp or Facebook, you should reply.
If someone leaves a comment on one of your posts, you should reply.
Any time someone engages with your brand on social media in any way, you should engage back.
Scour the landscape of business social media profiles and you will mostly see infrequent posting and little to no interaction with potential customers on their platforms.
These are people who took time out of their day to try and connect with you. Imagine you are a potential customer who leaves a comment on the businesses’s facebook page.
You get a reply back almost right away.
You feel like the business actually cares about your opinion, wants, and needs.
Aren’t you more likely to buy from that brand?
Of course.
Most of the social media game is a matter of activity, but there’s another even more important factor.
Be Consistent and Master Your Platforms
It’s better to do really well on one platform than it is to be inconsistent on multiple platforms.
Find one platform, use it frequently, master it, then move on to another one if that makes sense.
Different platforms work better for different industries. Choose the one that suits you best.
If you are a business with a visual product like custom homes or makeup, Instagram may be your best bet.
Youtube also would work well for the aforementioned businesses.
Keep it simple and start with social media’s gold standard platform – Facebook.
Whichever platform you choose, you can win the social media marketing game by simply being more consistent than the competition in your niche.
Schedule Your Posts Ahead of Time
This speaks to the point above about being consistent.
Instead of constantly spending time posting on social media each day, you can carve out time to work on a week to a month’s worth of posts and monitor the replies as they come.
If you don’t have time to do it yourself, you can work with a social media manager or digital marketing company to do it for you.
Having a well oiled social media marketing machine working for you helps you spend more time working on your business instead of working in it.
Take Advantage of Social Media Advertisement Platforms
Social media marketing expert Gary Vaynerchuk says now is the best time to invest in paid social media marketing on platforms like Facebook and Instagram.
Members of MLT Group attended an event he spoke at his he reiterated this statement.
In the talk, he likened the current advertising platforms to the early days of Google Adwords.
If you use the right strategy, the clicks on your ads can range from affordable to even cheap.
The caveat is that you need to use the right strategy.
Here are some great beginners guides on starting your on paid social media marketing campaign:
Running a great campaign takes patience and effort.
Which is another great reason why working with a smart company can help.
Use Remarketing to Connect With ‘Warm’ Prospects
It’s easier to sell and persuade someone who’s already familiar with your brand.
Remarketing is a great way to market to ‘warm’ prospects who are more likely to buy your product or service.
After you’ve spent time building awareness about your brand through social media marketing, content marketing, email marketing, etc, you can use remarketing ads to share an offer with people who’ve already visited your website or interacted with your brand in some way.
If you have a product for sale, you can create a special discount offer.
If you have a service, you can offer a free trial or consult as a way to build trust and show them how your services can benefit.
You can also send an offer without a discount or free trial of any kind.
Play the Long Game on Social Media
When it comes to social media marketing tips, the best tip is to use the platforms consistently for a long period of time
This isn’t the sexy answer, but most of the effective strategies in business and life are simple.
Digital marketing isn’t going anywhere.
Neither is social media.
If you can think in terms of years and decades instead of weeks and months, you will succeed.
If not, you won’t.