Social media is much more than simply a platform for brand building activities. If social media channels are used wisely, they can help businesses generate quality leads.
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Different social media platforms are dominating the internet-enabled world, and are turning into the best channels for effective marketing. But before assigning a hefty budget to social media marketing, you need to know how to go about it.
Locate Your Audience on Social Media
Once the idea has been rolled out about running an extensive social media campaign, start identifying your customers, understand their online behavior, and connect with them accordingly.
Find Your Business Avatar
Try building a fictional persona of your customers, who are likely to be interested in your product or service. For instance, if you are venturing into the online food delivery business, you first need to identify your business avatar. Whether your target customers are busy bosses who gulp down their meals in a hurry or someone who just wants to break the stay-at-home mom blues with appetizing food.
The clearer your identification of ideal customers is, the easier it will be for you to find your business avatar on social media. Further, social media tools like Facebook Ads Manager and ads.twitter.com can also help you in determining your audience size before running any promotional campaign.
Facebook Ads Manager creates a custom audience by asking you to put the email ids of your existing customers. Based on the custom audience, it searches and creates lookalike audience and brings your posts in front of a large number of potential customers.
Similarly, through Twitter, you can find your audience based on gender, geography, interests, followers, and keywords.
Track Your Customers’ Online Behavior
- What social media platforms they visit regularly?
- What type of content do they read online?
- Do they find blogs interesting?
Free tools like Google Forms and Survey Monkey can help you find the best answers for these queries and understand your customer’s online behavior. You can also send the survey form to your existing customers to have a clear picture of what they prefer reading on social media.
Know How Different Social Media Platforms Work
While you can send InMail messages through LinkedIn and enhance your professional contact, Facebook and Twitter help you in highlighting your business mantra through regular posts.
With more than 1.94 billion active users on Facebook by March 2017, this platform is no doubt the most popular place to run your marketing campaigns. It is quite popular among B2C companies for sharing links, images, posts, videos and for running contests. Your business can benefit from the dominance of this social media platform by running regular contests. Creatively-designed contests can start up the conversation with your prospective customers and boost your branding efforts.
The frequency of your brand’s mention on Twitter is something to look out for. Along with an increasing number of brand mentions, it is also important that people are talking about your brand positively. The word-of-mouth publicity works wonders for the audience on Twitter. You can run a campaign for your existing customers, and ask them to say one good thing about your product in order to win a gift voucher.
Another popular lead generation tool on Twitter is ‘Twitter Card’. Twitter cards sync with promoted tweets to help you create an extensive contact list of prospective customers. Also, you can host live events like ‘Ask Me Anything’ to interact with your followers and keep them engaged with your brand.
Not to forget, you have ‘Medium’ as a blog publishing platform by Twitter, which can help you expand your reach significantly.
LinkedIn serves as a great platform for professionals to improve their business network. B2B companies are largely using LinkedIn to register their presence on a platform which has more than 400 million users by now. So, why not try ‘LinkedIn Premium’ to expand your reach! You can send 15 InMail messages per day by subscribing to LinkedIn Premium. Keeping track of all those who view your profile is also easy with LinkedIn Premium. You can track who viewed your profile in last ninety days. The ‘advanced search’ option further helps users in finding connections faster.
‘Linkedin Publishing’ is quite popular as a publishing tool, where industry experts and marketers can share their thoughts and post informative blogs to connect with a larger audience.
Generate Engaging Content
Once you know your audience and their reading preferences, start developing the content for all your social media platforms. Make sure, what you say at social media channels is in sync with your brand image. Here’re a few engaging content ideas to get you started:
- Daily deals & promotions
- Little known facts
- Tips
- ‘How to’ blogs
- Top 10 lists
- Relevant statistics
- White papers
- Polls with results
- Consumer-generated content
- Case studies
- Informative blogs
- Interviews
- News
- Live events
With these content forms, you can engage with your followers on a daily basis and generate leads. Also, keep your resources ready to give a response to feedbacks and comments of followers on your posts. This way, you can keep the conversation going to grab the attention of more followers.
While you are busy generating engaging content, don’t forget to maintain the posting consistency. With regular posts, you can ensure that you are not forgotten by your followers.
Hootsuite is a popular social media management tool that can help you monitor your brand promotions at different platforms. You can view streams and post updates on all your social media platforms with this tool.
Reach Out to Social Media Influencers
“93 percent of professionals find influencer engagement as an effective strategy for building brand awareness” – As per LaunchMetrics
Marketers leverage social media influencers not just for content advertising, but for wide-ranging promotional activities. According to the Augure’s State of Influencer Engagement 2015 study, marketers prefer working with influencers for a product launch, event management, SEO, corporate communications and crisis management.
Social media influencers are those who are backed by a large number of followers. They can easily influence their followers about the trustworthiness of your brand by sharing your posts. Also, you can share content created by the influencers on your own social media platforms and drive visits to your website through the user-generated content. But, how to figure out potential influencers who are relevant to your customers?
- The more active they are on social media, the better they can be for your content promotions
- They need to have a tone that matches with your brand’s image
- They should cater to a large number of audience at different social media platforms.
Measure the Success of Every Campaign
Measuring the effectiveness of any social media campaign is important for a company’s growth strategy. The effectiveness can be measured on these success metrics:
- Number of people who are interacting with your content
- Engagement ratio at different social media platforms
- Number of page visits driven by social media, which can be tracked easily with Google Analytics
- The number of clicks your links get on a particular platform.
URL shorteners like goo.gl, bit.ly, and others don’t just give short and neat URLs but also provide stats on the number of clicks on shortened URLs. Also, try using UTM Parameters in Google Analytics 5 to track the click rate. UTM Parameters are the tags that you add to the URL. When a visitor clicks on a URL, which has UTM Parameters, the tags are sent directly to Google Analytics.
To track the reach of your social campaigns, you can also try HootSuite. It sends emails to its registered users with reports related to the number of clicks per day (region wise), top referrers and most popular links.
Success Tip: To get the most of your social media marketing, you need to share your opinions, spread awareness with informative content, and keep your followers engaged. You can also take help of a CRM software that equips you with social media software tools.
