Digital marketing is not only about being visible on search engines and advertising on popular websites; savvy marketers also know how to leverage social media to promote businesses at a fraction of the cost of other types of marketing and advertising. Promoting your business on social media is easy, but using social media to help your business grow can be difficult. Here are savvy and creative ways to promote your business on social media.
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Leverage Instagram Stories
Tap into your audience’s fear of missing out (FOMO) by using Instagram stories to deliver targeted content. Stories are temporary videos or photos that disappear after 24 hours. You can string many photos or videos together to form a slideshow gallery that tells a story. By tapping into your customers’ FOMO, you can begin telling your brand’s story and offering promotions and deals to boost sales.
Contests
Another savvy way to promote your business on social media is contests. Social media is the perfect place to hold contests, and you can choose from a variety of formats. The contest you hold will depend on your business and the types of social media platforms you use to reach customers. However, all types of contests can engage your audience and help you get new followers. Social media platforms have guidelines for how to host a contest, so do your research to ensure you’re following the rules and best practices. Types of contests you can hold include:
- Photo contests
- Fan photo contests
- Voting promos
- Video contests
- Trivia contests
- Caption creation contests
You need engaging content that can attract your followers’ attention. Infographics can help you relay information, data, and knowledge to your followers without the need to make them read too much. Infographics can easily teach something without making it seem like a lesson, and they’re great tools for increasing brand awareness and gaining website traffic.
Work With Influencers
Promoting your business on your business social media pages is a great start, but you should always find ways to promote your business outside of your owned pages. Instead, work with influencers who can help you promote your business and build brand awareness through their followers.
The creator economy is a relatively new term that defines the world of social media in terms of content creation and community engagement. Influencers are content creators who have their followings. Their audience trusts their opinion because they’re human beings, whereas they might not trust the posts of a business that only cares about making money. Working with influencers allows you to leverage the trust and authority they have with their followers, helping your business reach new people and gain trust.
Blog
While your blog will take place on your website, you can promote your blog posts using social media. Social media should be used to engage your followers to drive traffic back to your website.
Marketers who blog are more likely to have a positive ROI (return on investment) on both social media and their websites. However, if you don’t have a blog, you have nothing to promote on social media. So the first step here is to start blogging. Remember, you should also use SEO best practices to help people using search engines find your blog. However, you should always promote your blogs on social media to gain more traction.
If you don’t have a ton of followers and you’re not seeing engagement on your posts or referral traffic to your blog, you can boost your post. Boosting your content means you’ll pay for more people to see it, just like you would for an advertisement. Boosting your content is fairly cheap compared to other types of advertisements, and for even one dollar a day, you can get hundreds, if not thousands, of people onto your blog.
Upload Content Outside of Business Hours
There’s no reason to post content between 9 am and 5 pm when your audience is most likely at school or work. However, if you know enough about your audience to estimate when they’re most likely to be on social media, you can post at the times your followers are more likely to see your posts.
Facebook and Instagram give you detailed information about your posts and when your audience is on social media. Use that information to create a posting schedule and start posting outside business hours, when your audience is most likely to be scrolling through their feeds.
Of course, you want to keep your employees happy, so you can’t ask someone to stay late or come into work early just to post on social media. Instead of manually posting, you can schedule posts with a tool like HootSuite or Buffer, which allows you to plan your posts and schedule them at the right times.
Using a social media scheduling tool can help free up some time while organizing your office to ensure that all of your employees can be efficient, especially when it comes to posting on social media.
Learn About Your Audience
To promote your business on social media, you should never underestimate the importance of understanding your audience. Social media analytics give you tons of data about your followers so you can effectively advertise to them better. Just as you have employee data to track their progress, you’ll have a plethora of data about your audience to learn more about them.
Once you learn more about your audience, you can market to them and increase your ROI. For example, looking at your social media data, you may find that most of your audience lives in California. Likewise, if you compare your social media data with your sales data, you may find that most of your customers live in California. If that’s the case, you’ll be able to start posting specific content based on the location of your audience. You can also learn about the age range and gender using your social media analytics.
Closing words
Social media offers you the opportunity to engage with your audience, provide quality customer services, and collect valuable data about your customers. It’s up to each business to determine which social media platforms are best for their business and can result in a positive ROI.