Marketing on social media has a great impact on your business. It is believed close to 57% of individuals who follow you on social media are likely to buy your products. Creating a social media strategy is essential for any business because people trust brands, which are transparent, relatable and inclusive. Today, it’s not just about your offerings because there are a lot of other businesses who are probably selling similar products but what matters is how you are different. This image can be created and communicated through social media. But is social media enough for business marketing?
While social media promotion is crucial, it isn’t enough. Let’s take a look at other ways that help you to deliver a robust digital marketing service.
Inbound Marketing Strategy
What would you rather choose – customers looking for you or you looking for customers? The former is every businesses’ desire but the latter is what businesses end up doing. However, if you follow the right steps of inbound marketing, customers will be looking for you.
What is inbound marketing?
A methodology that attracts customers by delivering valuable content. For instance, you offer makeup products, then the best way to attract customers is to post content about how to apply makeup, skincare routine or several makeup looks. This shows you know about your industry, care about your customers and solve their problems too.
How to go about it?
- It starts with creating a buyer’s persona, which will help you to understand your target audience.
- Decide the channels through which you can attract customers, engage with them and provide valuable information.
- After creating content, keep a tab on analytics because that will show you the real picture.
Video Marketing Strategy is Best for Social Media
As per a Forbes report, close to 90% of buyers admitted that videos help them in making purchasing decisions, 64% says watching videos of a particular brand assist them in buying a product of that brand and videos leads to a 41% increase in search traffic.
The myth around video creation is it takes time, investment, tools and software. However, it isn’t completely true. Videos take time and money if you are creating a big production ad campaign but creating videos for social, blog and your website isn’t that difficult.
What types of videos are beneficial for your business to share on social media?
You can go overboard with videos or you can even create videos from your mobile phones. The question is what kinds of videos will help your business grow. Check the list here-
- About Us Videos – It’s a great way to let people know about your business. While it gets hectic for customers to read your company’s history but showing the visuals of where you have come from and where you have reached makes your business real, human and a success story. Even if you are a new business, then why you have created a business and how it helps consumers can also work for you.
- Product Story Videos – It’s not directly an ad video but a ‘behind the curtains’ story. The aim is to sell the product by showing why it has been created and what does it solve. It’s a great way to empathize with your customers and making them aware of your product.
- Product Ad Videos – It’s your direct selling plan. The video should display the product’s Unique Selling Points (USPs) and clear Call To Actions (CTAs) so that customer would know how to buy your product.
- How-To Videos– They help in showcasing your expertise in the industry you cater to. DIY videos are a fine source of organic traffic which implies that people who don’t know about your brand will engage with you and might convert into customers too.
Email Marketing Strategy
There are close to 4 billion email users and for every dollar you spend in email marketing, you earn close to $44. For a lot of marketers, email is the only channel for lead generation and the biggest source of ROI. Now, you don’t want to miss out on such a vast audience and a major source of lead generation.
How to Create an Email Marketing Strategy
The goal is to increase customer engagement and ROI. For this, you need to create content that secure and nurtures relationships. Follow these steps to accomplish your goals.
- Create a Plan– Before shooting emails, come up with a plan that answers questions like why are you sending emails, who are you sending emails to, what value you are adding and what are your goals. Without a plan, you will be shooting in the dark so why not aim at a target.
- Categorize Your Audience– Now that you have some data with you, wherein, name and email address are the primary fields and you can further categorize this data with gender, age, location or other demographic information. With this data, you can avoid sending mass emails but specific emails that are more relevant. Thus, increasing the chance of engagement.
- Send Personalized Messages– As mentioned above, with more segmented data you can send personalized messages. It makes customers feel special as a personalized email convey a more curated message. The open rate increases by 41% with just personalized subject lines.
- Measure Your Growth– After scheduling emails and sending them consistently, you need to analyze how you’re doing. Since there could be certain ways to go about it but what works for your business can only be figured out by you.
Social Media Strategy
While this post surrounds what more you can do other than posting on social media, there is a mistake that several businesses make while creating their social media marketing strategy. Many businesses assume that posting is the only way to increase engagement. This is partially true as posting is an essential way but certainly not the only way. Creating new content is crucial for your business and so are these steps-
- Engage with customers you need to share your content as much as you can. This helps in increasing website and referral traffic.
- Get in touch with influencers of your industry, communicate with customers and reply to mentions and tweets.
- Above all, analyze the data because that will tell you what’s working and what’s not.