According to a report, there are almost 4 billion internet users worldwide. Of this, 3 billion comprises of social media users globally. This is why social media marketing has become a huge industry for marketers. The competition on various social media platforms is intense. Today, nothing can beat the efficiency of social media in reaching a maximum number of people with limited resources. Every business wants to grab the attention of potential customers. In this competitive market, it is crucial to design a social media marketing strategy for your business. 

A successful Social Media Marketing Strategy means having a well thought out plan that guides you from attracting users to engaging fans and followers. It also helps to better organize and research your social media platforms and fulfill the ultimate goal of converting your followers into paying customers.

Though making that plan is not of any worth if does not complete the ultimate goal of converting followers into paying customers. 

In this article, I will present you with new ideas that will spice up your existing strategy and you will the secrets on how to leverage the social media platforms to get more conversions.

1. Expand the marketing channels

There are many social media platforms available in the market. And it is important for a business to have their presence on multiple social media platforms especially on the most popular ones such as Facebook, Youtube, Instagram, and Twitter.

If you are present on only one of these platforms, then you are missing out a huge opportunity to reach out to more people. 

People use different social media channels for a variety of reasons. Depending on these reasons, you have to figure out which platform will be more beneficial for your business than the others. 

Having your presence on multiple social media platforms is important. However, you need to focus on platforms that make sense for your business, be where your customers are. So, figure out where your customers are hanging out online and choose platforms that align with your business objectives. 

To find out where your customers are present online, you can use few tactics that may help you such as ask your customers directly, use the search functionality, look for online communities that talk about your topic of interest and use google alerts.

You should do research and analysis on how users are using the social media platforms. People may use Facebook just to interact with their family and friends, twitter to read or get updated with latest news and Linkedin to expand their business connections. So you have to figure out how you can reach to your audiences on a specific platform and which platform serves best for you.

2. Stay Active

You have to stay active on your social media channels if you want your audience to be as engaged as possible. So, once a user starts following you on social media, you have to provide your followers with the experience that will keep them engaged. Staying active just once a week on social media platforms won’t turn your followers into customers.

You have to stay active on a daily basis to create a more authentic interaction with your followers. Your followers can inquire anything about your brand product or services and you must be fast enough to give an instant reply to the user and solve any doubts or questions. 

By applying this simple strategy you will accomplish several things. Firstly, it will be great customer service and the user will be satisfied. secondly, it will show other followers that your brand care for the customers and if someone else asks something then they’ll be answered.

Fast and reliable customer service can really make your brand stand out on social media.

3. Use automation tools

Being a business owner, it is completely impossible to daily stay active on social media. You can’t spend your entire day on handling your social media.

So, if you’re running a small business and can’t afford to hire someone then it is really important for you to look alternative ways. 

Well, the solution for this is to use automation tools for your social media. It will save you time and streamline the process. 

You can use a tool like Buffer to handle all your social media channels from one platform. You don’t have to log in every day on every social channel like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to post your content. By using Buffer, you can manage and schedule all your posts on each social profile from one platform. Though by using some of these automation tools you might also face a small drawback of not reaching to more people.

But as I said before you have to be active to respond to customer queries. for that, you can use Sprout social tool that will direct all the messages from all social profiles to one inbox. These automation tools will definitely provide much relief to you in running your social media profiles.

4. Host Social Media Events and Contests

You can build a loyal community by hosting online events. The events are a fun and effective way that attracts your fans and followers to interact on your page. This is a great way to discover your followers’ opinions, get more fans, and also build an online community for your brand. It will have an even bigger impact if you host these events more often may be from every 5 to 6 weeks.

5. Offer exclusive promotions or discounts

Another way to increase brand exposure is to run profitable giveaways. When your followers enter the contest by posting content on their profiles, their friends and followers will see it too. This will lead to more followers and ultimately result in more customers.

• BOGO (buy one, get one): A popular discount for many retailers; it encourages customers to buy more than they originally intended to.
• Minimum order value: Good for boosting checkout totals, these deals will be offers like, “Get free shipping when you spend more than $50.”
• Specific category or product: Discounting specific items is a great solution to a product surplus or end-of-season sell-out.
• Customer loyalty: This could be specific to customers who’ve spent a certain amount of money or have signed up for a specific loyalty program.
• Subscriber or email sign-up offer: Plain and simple. For example, “Get 20% off when you sign up for X.”

If you are running these promotions more often, you will increase the chances of having more followers.

6. Leverage social influencers

Influencers are important in every industry. By getting the attention of influencers, you will have a chance of having more customers. 

But getting on their radar is not easy, so to get their attention you have to follow a social media 4-1-1 sharing system. It will help your business to get greater visibility with social influencers. 

Let’s see how it works; For every six posts shared via social media four should be from your targeted influencer. This sharing content will get the attention of the influencer. One post can be some informational content and the other one can be related to sales.

For this sharing of content, you can ask for favors like sharing of your products or services on their profile. It will be a very successful strategy as influencers have a high engagement rate and followers trust these influencers. You will have more chances of conversions.

7. Make an impact with your images

A picture says a thousand words. The impact of visual content on social media is very high and drive users to click on it. Images can help easily clarify a message and can also quickly grab someone’s attention. 

Before you settle on an image for your blog or social media post, you should first check that does this image communicate your message well? 

Most of the time people just scrolls through the images without reading descriptions or comments, unless the image grabs their attention first. 

Few words on the image can make a huge difference in attracting the targeted audience. You can add text overlays easily from online editing tools like Pixlr or Canva.

8. Place your links near the beginning of your social posts

Whenever you release a tweet or a Facebook post, you can control where you place your link. I always place my links towards the end of my updates as it is more convenient, but that doesn’t always cause the most click-throughs.

As you can see from the heat map above, links that are roughly a quarter into your status updates, especially on Twitter, tend to receive the most clicks.

So, the next time you write a Twitter update, don’t add a link at the end of your tweet — add it at the quarter mark.

9. Don’t forget to use hashtags

Using hashtags across all social networks can get you more traffic – in some cases twice the amount of traffic compared to not using any hashtags.

For each social network, your approach will need to be slightly different. Just make sure the hashtags you are using are relevant.

Once you realize the value of hashtags, you will use them in all your updates. It will not help much if you are just spamming, but once you start using relevant hashtags, you will see an increase in click-throughs.

10. Explore Social Media Ads from different platforms

Since organic reach is on the decline, more and more businesses are turning to paid ads on social media ads. Facebook ads are probably the biggest player.

In Facebook, you can optimize the promotion of your post for engagement. But if you want a specific action, then you can choose to optimize for other actions such as comment, a post like, link clicks, views, post story, video play, etc.

You may also want to consider to advertise on other social media platforms like LinkedIn and Instagram. The important thing to remember for your social media strategy is to analyze different platforms, pros and cons, price differences, potential reach, formats, and targeting options.

11. Use Live Broadcast to Connect With Your Audience

Your audience has a million options for content. Effective marketing means that you have to differentiate yourself from everything else so that your audience chooses you.

You can do this by utilizing a new feature on social networks that is live Internet broadcast. An article can be read later, a Facebook post can be commented on and tweets can be consumed when one checks in.

A live broadcast has to be consumed right here, right now. A live broadcast gets the highest engagement and clicks through rates. The important thing is that they connect with you right now. They can find out what platform you’re using the second they jump on over to your live broadcast.

Consider the multicasting model for your content. Take the content from your live broadcast and publish it to the streaming sites, podcast it into all the directories, embed it into your blogs and share it on your social networks.

You’ll be surprised how many touchpoints the content from your live broadcast can have and the ROI you get from such an approach.

12. Follow the 80/20 Rule of Marketing

The 80/20 rule suggests that 80% of your company sales come from 20% of your customers. Alternatively, you could say that 20% of what you do represents 80% of that particular activity’s outcome.

You can use the 80/20 rule as a guide to come up with highly effective business solutions for your company. Few strategies to help focus your attention on your top 20% customers.

• Discover your best customers: Keep close tabs on customers which made a recent purchase, or are frequent buyers. Once you identified them, mark them as a top priority for your sales and marketing efforts. Use their customer data to help you find and attract new audiences.
• Locate your customers geographically: Certain regions or cities are far more lucrative than the rest of the market. Use this information to boost your efforts in these locations.
• Delight your best customers: Don’t take your best customers for granted. Keep these type of customers delighted with your service by interacting with them on a more personal level.

Conclusion

Maintaining a strong and effective social media presence is a great way to increase customer engagement and improve your conversions in real-time. However, results take time and you need a patient and systematic approach to have the results as expected. Most importantly, you have to continuously analyze your data and scale up your techniques to stay in trend.

There are many many ways to help your business stand out in social media and make an impact on your followers. Hopefully, you found some new ideas in this post that will help you improve your social media efforts.