Social media channels have become a force to be reckoned with when it comes to promoting a business. Brands that still don’t have a social media presence are undoubtedly losing many growth opportunities.
But it’s not nearly enough to have social profiles and share blog posts, product/service promotions, and brand announcements. You need to step up your game and drive real engagement. You need to harness the power of storytelling to evoke emotions, drive conversations, and generate more leads and conversions.
Whether you’re just now starting with social or you want to strengthen your social strategy, the following tips will help you supercharge your marketing.
Why Should You Focus on Social Media?
Social media marketing can help you boost brand awareness, expand your reach, increase website traffic, improve SEO ranking, generate qualified leads and conversions, and get more sales and ROI.
It can help you build meaningful relationships, inspire long-term customer loyalty, and get many brand advocates.
The best part? You can do it all for free!
Sure, you can leverage paid ads to get on your target audience’s radar, but you don’t have to. If you do, don’t make ads your core focus.
Social media marketing is all about interacting with followers, showing your brand’s human side, pushing emotional triggers and solid relationships.
It’s about providing real value and showing that you care instead of painting a picture of a brand that’s only looking to make a sale.
According to the latest social media marketing statistics, 71% of consumers are likely to refer friends and family to a brand that provided them with a positive experience on social media.
So, let’s see how you can upgrade your social strategy to build a loyal customer base and seize many growth opportunities.
How to Step Up Your Social Media Game
There are dozens of ways to improve your social media marketing strategy, but the following are some of the most effective ways to begin.
Create Lead Generation Quizzes
Quizzes can help you drive engagement and qualified leads through the roof, not to mention that they can go viral. When they’re engaging, relevant, and give share worthy results, people can’t help but take them.
Your quiz maker can be one of your most powerful tools, as long as you know how to make the most of it and create irresistible quizzes.
When choosing a quiz creator, look for a user-friendly interface and plenty of customization features. It’s a bonus if you can white-label your quizzes and brand them as your own. Ready-to-use templates and questions are a plus, but make sure it allows you to create a quiz from scratch, too, without requiring any technical knowledge.
Come up with eye-catching titles, an interesting quiz cover image, create short and interesting questions, enrich them with visuals, and create relevant shareworthy results.
Most importantly, create an opt-in contact form that you’ll display before the results. It’ll help you gather quiz takers’ information. Also, make sure to integrate your quiz with an automation tool to kickstart the marketing process. If you promise to provide helpful content or special deals in your email newsletter, your quiz takers will gladly subscribe. Just be sure to deliver on your promises.
Partner With Influencers for Ongoing Collaborations
By now, you must know that social media influencers can be excellent partners for expanding the reach and growing a business. They’re authentic and transparent, so people trust their product/service recommendations. They know how to engage people and influence their purchasing decisions.
Now, there are many types of social influencers, but you’ll want to focus on micro-influencers. They have between 1,000 and 100,000 followers, which means they have higher engagement rates.
The right micro-influencers for your brand should match your target audience. Look them up on influencer marketing platforms, and check social mentions and hashtags. You may not even have to pay them anything, as most of them opt for freebies.
Develop a Killer Social Video Strategy
Videos are all the rage these days. Implementing them into your marketing strategy will help you boost engagement, leads, and conversions.
But did you know that live videos get double the engagement of pre-recorded videos?
With live streaming, you can humanize your brand and strengthen customer relationships. You can even interact with followers directly in live Q&A sessions.
As for your other videos, make sure they’re short to hold your viewers’ attention. Also, include closed captions because many people watch videos without audio.
Don’t forget about Facebook and Instagram Stories. Since they disappear after 24 hours, they trigger the FOMO (Fear of Missing Out), which you can use to your advantage.
Provide AR and VR Experiences
AR (Augmented Reality) and VR (Virtual Reality) can provide your target audience with immersive experiences that bring them closer to your brand. That’s why they are amongst the important social media trends in 2021.
For instance, if you work in travel or real estate, you can share VR videos and offer VR tours of various destinations and properties. In addition, AR filters are great for trying on clothing, accessories, and makeup, picking out the right furniture, and much more.
You can even create AR ads and leverage shoppable features on social media to streamline the buying process and boost sales.
Turn Your Followers Into Brand Advocates
Social channels are excellent for turning followers into loyal customers and brand advocates. They can spread the word about your business like wildfire. All you need to do is give them a little nudge.
Organize contests and giveaways, encourage user-generated content, and offer incentives for email subscriptions, honest reviews, and referrals. Share authentic testimonials and any other social proof that will drive people to your brand and motivate them to recommend it to friends and family.
When people become your brand advocates, they do your marketing for you.
Final Thoughts
Making social media a core part of your marketing strategy will help you dominate the business landscape for many years to come.
But we’ve only scratched the surface with these several tips, as there’s a whole world of possibilities on social media. So, look into other trends, find more ways to boost engagement, and keep measuring all your efforts to drive fantastic results.
