You put in the work. You buy the equipment. You hire the right people. You make the right partnerships and invest in training.
You’re doing everything right, right?
Even those businesses that invest in all the right areas are going to be left behind if they don’t let people know they exist. And even more than that, they have to like you and trust you before they’ll ever contact you.
The same goes for social media. You could have the best social media content ever created, but if your strategy didn’t take into account the effort required in getting people to find your pages, all that content would be completely wasted.
So how do you get found?
Add social media links to your website – and do it right
It may seem obvious, but are your social media channels linked from your website? There’s a few things to take into consideration when adding two-way traffic to your website marketing:
Are the icons actually linked? You’d be surprised how many clients have come to us who find that their old website’s icons did nothing!
Do the links open in a new window? There’s nothing worse than sending a hard-earned website visitor away to your Instagram feed…where you’re trying to get them onto your website! #ReverseMarketingCycle
If you have the icons that cannot open in a new window, then please only place them in your footer and on the contact page.
Ads
As I often preach, while a substantial advertising budget can lead to substantial growth, a lot can be done with a smaller budget too.
On Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, you can be very specific with who gets targeted with your ads and it’s for that reason social media advertising can be a more attractive use of marketing budget than traditional advertising routes. If you were a boutique kids’ clothing store, you may only want to target parents with young children in a 10km radius of your store. This wouldn’t be possible with traditional media like newspaper ads.
Social media ads ensure you get seen. The art of social media advertising, is making sure the people seeing your ads are your potential followers and customers. And nothing is worse than your ad only targeting people who already know and love you – make sure your strategy branches out!
…and MY FAV TIP!
Run Facebook events to mask your marketing
If you use Facebook regularly, you may notice that you sometimes get shown events that are happening near you, or get notifications that your friend “Joe Bloggs is interested in an event near you”. Facebook events can get a fair amount of organic reach – and doesn’t have to be an event in the conventional form. It could be that each Thursday you have 20% discount for seniors – why not make that a recurring Facebook event?
And the number one tip (that’s not really a tip…)
Have great content
While this is less of a quick tip, and more of a whole, entire, massive strategy… it is important. If your promoted posts are boring, nobody is going to react to it. This doesn’t mean that you need mind-blowing videos, and professionally taken photos, it just means you need a well planned out calendar of what to share on your channels, and when.