Nobody can deny the importance of social media in today’s society. According to a recent report by Stastista on social media, Canadians spend at last three times more time on social media than reading their emails. At least 27% of online time is spent on social networks. The most interesting part of the report is that more than 75% of social networks users shop online. These statistics make a good case that if you and your brand are active and strategic on social media, then you can get rewarded if you do your social media marketing right.
This is an opportunity that you can’t risk ignoring. If you have been investing in other marketing channels such as content marketing, SEO, email marketing, and PPC, this is the right time you need to start considering social media marketing since it is among the top marketing channels that generate a substantial ROI. Here is how you can use social media for growing traffic and sales.
Set Your Goals
The first thing you need to do even before you start thinking about the other tactics is to establish benchmarks of what success will look like to you. Be as specific as possible while setting your goals and be sure to set measurable objectives such as:
- The number of followers
- The ratio of visitors to conversions
- The ratio of audience growth and engagement to sales
- Amount of traffic you wish to receive from social media
Facebook offers you a lot of options when it comes to advertising. Whenever you create an ad, you will have a wide range of options to choose from. For instance, if you want to track conversion rate using the Facebook ad interface, you will have the option of website conversions that allows you to add a unique tracking code to your site that shows Facebook whenever a site visitor who clicked on your advert meets a conversion goal such as subscribing to your email list.
Twitter offers you two options namely; promoted tweets and promoted accounts. The promoted tweets option is specifically designed to help you drive traffic to your website. Twitter also allows for conversion tracking.
LinkedIn for business targeting ads provides you with sponsored updates from company pages that will automatically show up in a user’s newsfeed and the traditional ads that you can set so that they appear throughout your LinkedIn network.
Always Be Where Your Audience Is
One of the most important rules of social media marketing is to use the networks and platforms that your target audience use. For instance, you can’t just sign up for Instagram and expect to make sales when your target audience spends most of their time on Facebook. Before you set up your social media marketing strategy, analyze your target demographic and learn where they are most active. Although you might choose to be everywhere, that might consume a lot of your time.
For instance, if you are targeting a B2B audience, then LinkedIn might be your best starting point. However, a recent study showed that most of the millennials that are between 19 and 29 years old dominate all the popular social media platforms including Instagram and LinkedIn.
Identify Social Media Influencers and Engage with Them
You must have heard about influencer marketing, but maybe you didn’t know what it meant. Well, influencer marketing is a fast-growing marketing tool since it works. When you engage with the various social media influencers, you are creating a perfect opportunity to attract more followers on social media, more engagement and most important, more traffic to your business website.
Keep in mind that if someone is an influencer in your area of specialization, he/she already has the audience that you want. Building long-lasting and sustainable relations with social media influencers can pay dividends since the amount of trust people place in social media influencers is comparable to the trust they place in their best friends.
Understand that Social Media Is for Sharing, Not Selling
Although a substantial number of consumers usually begin their purchasing journey on social media, most of them don’t visit social networks with the intent of shopping. The primary goal of social media marketing is to build long-lasting relationships first; selling is a distant second. This means that your marketing strategy should focus primarily on sharing helpful information and striving to establish trust before trying to make a sale. Therefore, learn how to optimize your social media posts using high-conversion keywords and share the right content with your target audience and everything else will fall into place.