You've got a product or service to sell! Congratulations! Owning a business is hard work, but it's a beautiful experience. However, when you have a product or service to sell, you must find customers to buy the product or service. Plus, the more paying customers you have, the more it impacts your bottom line – sales and money!
One of the best ways to engage customer communities effectively and grow that bottom line is through social media marketing.
What is social media marketing? It's using social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube, to connect with your target market and reach potential customers, turn them into paying customers, increase sales, and build your brand.
Building your business through social media marketing is an excellent approach for a variety of reasons. For one, there are at least 3.81 billion users on the various social media sites. For another, social media sites are free to post. You only pay if you want to run paid ads using their advertising tools. There are also SEO benefits to using social media. It’s very common to find links to posts on Google for your particular niche. A link to your site on the top pages of Google can bring hundreds, thousands, and even millions of people to your social media page.
So let's look into how to grow your social media presence! We've got six tips that should benefit your company tremendously.
Building a Social Media Following Tip 1: Know Your Customers
Ask yourself – Can I describe my target audience in one sentence?
We'll use the example of an online yoga studio as we move through our six tips. The name we'll give our online yoga studio is “Move.” An example of one sentence to describe Move's target audience is: Move is intended for English-speaking adults of all ages, sexes, races, and locations interested in yoga and who like online classes.
Once you have pinpointed your target audience, you can formulate written content, images, and videos to reach them. Otherwise, if you don't know who you’re talking to, you're wasting your time and money.
Building a Social Media Following Tip 2: Know What Social Media Websites Your Audience Uses
You love LinkedIn. Great! LinkedIn is a popular social media site. But is it a site that most of your target market uses? If not, skip LinkedIn.
Your job is to discover what social media websites your market uses. Once you know what they are, focus on the top three.
How can you find out which social media sites your audience prefers? One effective way is to poll your website. You can also put the poll in any newsletters you send out.
Going back to our online yoga studio example, we found those interested in Move like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram the most. So we will put our focus on those three sites.
Now that you know who your target market is, and the top three social media sites they like, we can move on to tip three.
Building a Social Media Following Tip 3: Check Out the Social Media Profiles of Your Competitors
It's your opportunity to be a spy. As we said, Move is focused on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. So the goal is to look at these sites and check out the social media profiles of other online yoga studios.
You don't want to concern yourself with every online yoga studio, just the ones who seem to be crushing it in sales. Concentrate on the profiles that seem to be getting much engagement.
Once you've found some, ask yourself these questions: What do these profiles look like? What are their customers responding to? What moves are they making, such as online contests, to attract customers? Take your time with this step, and then ask yourself how you can copy their winning approaches while still being unique.
Building a Social Media Following Tip 4: Show Interest in Your Target Market
Should you get on social media and do nothing but push your product? No. You don't want to come off as annoying or too pushy.
Instead, you want to market your product while also showing an interest in others. Respond to questions, retweet customers' posts, feature some of your clients by telling their stories (with their permission, of course), and more. If your content is engaging and if you are taking the time to get to know your customers and potential customers, then you're much more likely to be successful at selling your product or service.
Building a Social Media Following Tip 5: Sell Your Products
Of course, even though you don't want to come off as annoying, if you don't sell your products, you get no sales, right? Using your social media and your website to sell your products is absolutely the way to go. Offer engaging content – written content, photos, videos – and include a call to action. Without the call to action, you are less likely to bring your viewers to the goal of turning them into paying customers.
One of the best ways to get sales as you market your product is with special promotions. Returning to our online yoga studio example – Move can create an image of a yoga student performing a yoga pose with the caption Join our online studio for free for one week to try us out.” Next to those words would be a call to action, which would be a link to sign up.
The image should be repeated throughout the day, but not obnoxiously so. Move should mix in other content and continue to pay attention to its market by responding, retweeting, etc.
Building a Social Media Following Tip 6: Camera Confidence Live Video Course
Another step in building a social media following is establishing yourself as an authority in your industry with live video. Live video is putting video out to your market in real-time.
Using our online yoga studio example, a live video could be a yoga instructor showing people how to do a sun salutation. Then, at the end of the video, there's a call to action where the instructor encourages people to click the link provided to sign up for monthly classes and to receive ten percent off while doing it.
In the 21st-century, live video has become a top way to reach your target market and increase brand awareness. However, when you're learning how to grow your social media presence, you want to put out live videos, but you don't want to come across like, you guessed it, an annoying car salesperson.
So how do you do it right? There’s no need to reinvent the wheel. Instead, learn from the professionals, such as Molly Mahoney, creator of the Camera Confidence Course. Molly will teach you how to confidently do live video right from your smartphone and skyrocket your sales.
You’ll receive coaching on how to sound natural on camera and confidently share your business and get more sales. If you have something valuable to offer, want to bring in targeted leads, and want to be known as an authority in your industry, coaching support is the best way to get there.
With billions of people using social media, it's no longer a question of “if” you should be on social media. You must be on social media, particularly if you are selling a product or service. Social media marketing is now an essential part of reaching your target audience.
Utilize these six tips and apply them to your social media marketing plan! These are proven tips that will help you get far better results from your efforts than if you didn't follow a plan.
Contact our expert social media team or check out all the possibilities for business growth through Camera Confidence or apply for a call to Go Live and Monetize.