With the average business set to spend around 7% of your annual gross revenue on marketing, it’s important to spend enough to stay competitive. However, this can be a major effort for a small business; social media can help you to cut some corners. If you’re willing to work on your social media brand, you could end up attracting come customers than you ever could with traditional marketing.
Here are four strategies for developing your brand and connecting with your audience.
1. Choose the Platform That Works for You
When you’re putting together your social media strategy, you may be tempted to get on every site and app imaginable. While this might make sense at first glance, you need to realize that you don’t have infinite energy to commit to every app. You need to choose an app that you can focus on and build a really following through.
Start with some field research on where your customers are located. The app that you find your customers on could depend on the age demographic that’s most attracted to your products and services. It could also depend on the industries that they most commonly work in or where they’re employed.
If you serve a general audience of people under 35, you’ll find them as the largest group of people you’ll serve on Instagram. You’ll have to try a variety of tactics when you’re looking to reach older users or people who don’t spend a lot of time with the app.
Every social media app has its own messaging style and the way that people use it. If you’re using social media as a way to attract people from the top of your sales funnel, you’ll use it differently than people who are aiming at repeat sales.
2. Maintain Consistency
When you’ve found your few social media apps that work for you, you need to make sure that every communication is of consistent quality. Crafting the right message requires some planning and creating a brand voice. Look at some of the companies whose work you want to emulate and have a planning meeting where your team talks about what those companies are doing right.
It takes practice to get your voice right, so don’t be afraid to make some mistakes at the start. However, as long as your text and visuals always match your brand’s overall purpose, you’ll succeed.
Building trust and rapport is the aim of social media. It takes time and a sincere interest in communicating with your audience.
People don’t want a traditional cold sales voice from your social media presence. They want to get to know your brand better.
You’ll have to test out a few different types of content to see what connects. Trial and error is one of the best ways to build a strong social media presence. In order to create strong and relevant content, you’ll have to try talking about everything from what makes your products great to stories from your staff.
Once you come up with a few types of posts that get a lot of engagement, give your customers more of what they love.
3. Post Early and Often
One of the things that many brands fail at is posting consistently. Every brand goes into its social media strategy with the best of intentions, but soon falls away as other business priorities take hold.
Create a schedule with accountability built in. If you have several staff members who are responsible for handling posts, give them each a set of posts to do on a weekly basis. The more you disperse the work, the easier it will be to get people to commit.
Your posts should be informative and give considerable value. Your best bet is to create a content calendar to post about subject X on day Y every week or every month. When you can manage to keep a schedule, your audience might not even notice, but as soon as you stop posting, you can be sure they will.
While you can use these opportunities to put up promotional posts, you need to balance between promotion and information. When you look like a social media spammer, you’ll end up getting ignored or, worse, unfollowed.
Part of what your social media feed does is to show your users what value you provide through your products and services. Prioritize posting about exciting new products before they’re even available so that you can build up hype and find out what people like the most about them.
4. Make the Most of Bios
While you might not think about your social media bio, you need to remember that it could be the first thing your audience sees. Since it’s one of the first things that most social media profiles have you fill in, most people fill it in hastily and forget about it. However, this is one of the best opportunities you have to inform customers who want to learn more about you.
Ignoring your bio could leave your customer clueless about who you are and what your company can do for them. Even when you’re offering some of the best services around, your potential customer’s only contact might be through social media.
Make sure that everything that you add to your profile offers relevant information that helps give clarity about who you are. Adding clever quotes or trying to be funny in a space meant to offer more information is a wasted opportunity. Talk about what makes your company great and add a contact button so that people get in touch with you.
While you need to pay the most attention to everything in your news feed, as that’s where your end user finds you, some want to dig a little deeper. Use your bio for those people who want to learn more about their favorite brands.
Developing a Social Media Brand Takes Time
Don’t be hasty when you’re trying to develop your social media brand. It takes considerable effort to build trust and even if you have a strong IRL business brand, you need to start from scratch in many cases on social media.
Have you tried similar steps and not getting the return on your social marketing that you’d like? Contact us today for a free consultation.
