Social media is an indispensable digital marketing channel. On the various platforms, you can attract, convince, and convert prospects on autopilot while still focusing on other aspects of your business. Achieving these goals on autopilot sounds like a far-fetched idea. However, with the right strategies, it’s doable. This article guides you on how and where to find your target audience and how to convert them into paying customers using social media content.
Social media marketing for business
The majority of social media users dislike promotional content on their favorite platforms. Multiple reports have revealed that over 70% of these users are tired of promotional content, especially social media ads. Still, this does not disregard the fact that these ads are effective.
Using social media as a marketing tool for your business involves quite a lot. For one, you have to strike a balance between sharing too much promotional content and maintaining an engaging and less disruptive feed.
Social media is not designed as a marketing outlet. For the most part, it is optimized for sharing entertaining, inspiring, and educational content. The most popular uses include sharing videos on TikTok and YouTube or micro-blogging on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. The ability to share multiple content formats on a single platform is even more interesting.
Businesses have duplicated this framework to create actionable content that is relatable and engaging, thereby forming relationships with their prospective customers, which facilitates a smooth conversion. The following tips show you how to replicate this process.
Step 1: Define your ideal customer
Businesses fail to convert social media engagement into sales because they create content for the wrong audience. Worse still, the wrong audience rarely engages with content since they do not resonate with it.
As a business owner, you already know your ideal customer. If not, especially as a new business, there are simple methods for figuring out your ideal customer. These include:
- Conducting customer research. This is the simplest and most effective way of learning about your customers. It helps you create a buyer persona that represents a real person. This approach works best if you are establishing a new business without any buyers.
- Leveraging social media metrics. This is an advanced way of stalking your customers. The metrics provide insights about who is engaging with your content and where they are based, among other vital data points.
- Talking to existing customers. You can easily get several insights about your ideal target customer by talking to people who already use your product or service.
When creating a buyer persona, try to be as comprehensive as possible. Gather information such as their education level, salary range, age bracket, location, interests, and behavioral traits. With so much data, you can personalize social media content to a specific individual, increasing the likelihood of engagement and, ultimately, conversion.
Step 2: Apply best practices to social media content
Social media evolves fast. What was working a year ago might not work today. As such, there is rarely a one-size-fits-all approach to navigating social media content creation, distribution, and management. Observing the following tips will elevate your social media marketing efforts.
Create engaging content
On social media, engagement is measured by data sets such as likes, comments, public shares, and clicks. Of course, engagement varies based on the platform. But how do you create content that causes people to take these actions?
Before embarking on creating engaging content, start by understanding your current engagement rate. How many people are liking your posts in relation to your total audience? How many followers are taking the desired action? This information helps you gauge the engagement level or rate of your existing content.
Secondly, figure out what makes content engaging. Is it the format? The message? The time you post? This goes back to your buyer persona. If you uncover their interests, job positions, or age brackets, you find ways to create relatable content. Relatable content attracts lots of engagement.
Have a social media content strategy
You need strategic plans to find customers on social media using content. Examples of strategic plans are improving brand awareness and building communities. Each plan has specific approaches you need when creating content.
A social media content strategy can also stipulate which social media platforms you focus on when creating or sharing content. Also, your customers might be found on multiple platforms; therefore, you might want to reformat content for several platforms to increase reach.
Be consistent
Lack of consistency harms social media engagement. This consistency can be defined by brand image, posting schedules, and styles or tones.
You should be consistent on social media to promote a memorable and unambiguous social media presence. To your audience, this shows trust and reliability. Revisit your brand values and content to form holistic social media guidelines to get started.
Conclusion
The key to creating a performant social media marketing strategy that converts an audience into customers lies in knowing whom you are addressing and how you are addressing them. Following the above two-step process can create a solid foundation for attracting the right audience and turning them into customers.
SwingPointMedia is a marketing company focused on using content marketing, such as written articles, videos, and podcasts, to attract customers’ ideal audiences. This approach has proven to attract higher-quality customers while simultaneously reducing the sales cycle by as much as 70%.
SwingPointMedia serves local businesses in Southern California and can be reached by calling 760-422-5176.