The arena of the eCommerce world has become a cutthroat for businesses to survive and succeed.
A concrete digital marketing strategy is needed for a business to survive and shine through the crowd of 1,000s of other online stores.
Sure your business can take help from Google ads to reach your potential audience. But, did you know there is another way to reach a wider audience? And that too, absolutely free!
Yes, you read it right. This free marketing channel can elevate your customer base, capture the attention of a wider audience, and increase your brand awareness.
Are you curious to discover that marketing channel? Well, it’s the social media websites.
Social media has passed the phase when it was only used for communication and entertainment.
Nowadays, it has become a necessary part of digital marketing campaigning because of its numerous benefits.
Have a look at the following benefits of social media marketing.
Advantages Of Social Media Marketing For The Business
1. Increases Brand Awareness
After google.com, social media websites have the largest audience who spend almost 145 minutes daily on these websites.
By having a profile on a social media website, you can get an opportunity to market your brand to an audience of approximately 3.96 billion people.
Creating unique content, engaging with your audience, and staying active on your profile is going to help your business to target a large audience, and convert them into your customers.
2. Drives Organic Traffic
How will your sales increase if you do not have sufficient traffic in your store?
Driving organic traffic is the dream of every online seller. Increased traffic means increased conversions and ultimately increased sales.
Social media websites provide an excellent channel to send the potential audience from your business page to your website.
If your content interests them and solves their queries, then they will visit your website frequently to engage with the content published by you and explore the store.
3. Excellent Customer Care Service
It becomes difficult to talk with your customers or welcome their feedback on an online store. However, with social media websites, you can easily engage with your followers, welcome customer feedback, and answer their queries.
This improves the relation of the businesses with their customers and helps them to gain their loyalty and trust.
Customers can comment under your posts and share their views regarding your posts. Moreover, they can message you directly and get quick responses from your side.
4. Increases Sales
Social media websites can also become an eCommerce platform for your business. You can sell your products directly on a few social media websites like Facebook and Instagram. By integrating your products on your business profile. Customers will not be required to visit your website for purchasing their desired articles.
Facebook has introduced the feature of ‘Shop’, and Instagram has launched its new feature ‘Instagram-Checkout’. Both the features enable the entrepreneur to sell their goods directly on their profile, without making the customer visit the business website.
5. It’s Free To Join
You don’t have to pay anything to join social media websites. They are absolutely free to join. All that you have to do is to log on to any social website, create an account, and set up your profile. That’s it!
This means that even a business that has just started up and doesn’t have enough resources to spend on marketing, can easily create its business profile on the social website to promote itself to a vast audience.
6. Contextual And Programmatic Ads
Not only Google but also Facebook and Instagram provide the option to run contextual ads for targeting the potential audience.
All that you have to do is select the characteristics of your potential audience and the rest is up to the smart algorithms of these websites to reach your targeted segment. Moreover, these platforms also allow the businesses to retarget the audience, who was interested in your brand or products.
The aforesaid benefits are not the only ones that your business would reap, no. There are plenty of other benefits that your business can avail yourself of by simply joining this amazing platform of the social network.
In today’s article, we will throw light on seven smart tips that will help you to build a successful social media marketing strategy for 2021.
Let’s get started…
Seven Smart Tips To Build Successful Social Media Marketing Strategy For 2021
1. Set Your Goals
Each and every business activity should be thoroughly planned out, no matter how trivial it may seem.
Building a successful social media marketing strategy for 2021 is not going to happen without a solid plan. Therefore, before you create your business’s profile on social media, set your goals.
Your goals should be clear, precise, and realistic.
You might think that your goal for creating social media profiles is to market your brand. Hence, no need to enlist the goals and plan out strategies to achieve them. This could prove to be detrimental for your business and your marketing strategy would collapse.
No wonder that marketing your brand is your ultimate goal, but that’s too generic. List down some short-term objectives that will eventually help you to realize your main goal; marketing your business.
For instance, a startup business can have a goal to increase the traffic on a website, or collaborate with the key influencers of the industry, etc. Both of these goals are directed towards the marketing of your business.
2. Understand Your Audience
By creating your business profile on social networking platforms, your business would be exposed to millions of people. Not every person on social media would fall under the category of your targeted audience, right?
There will be a certain group or class of people who would be interested in your product or services. Before you begin to create your content and implement your marketing strategies make sure that you know who your audience is and what kind of content they like to engage with.
The first step in understanding and recognizing your audience amongst the millions of users is to develop your buyer's profile or persona. It refers to the understanding of the characteristics that you wish to find in your buyers.
For instance, if a business deals with maternity clothes then its ideal buyers would be expectant mothers who want to stay relaxed and comfortable in their condition.
Understanding your audience will help you to select the right social media website to market your brand and create content that will be loved by your audience.
Once you have understood who your audience is going to be, then it will become easier for you to publish content that will target them effectively.
3. Select The Right Social Media Platform
It might sound very tempting to the business to create their profiles on every social media website. You might think that it’ll help you to catch the attention of a wider audience, but this will not happen, do you know why?
Because the targeted audience will not be present on every social networking site. For instance, if the potential buyers of a business are people who are senior citizens, then making a profile on TikTok, Snapchat, and Instagram will be useless as their targeted audience will not be available on these sites.
So, before you get too pumped and make your business’s profile on every social site you come across…wait.
Do your research on which platform you will find your targeted audience and then create your profile on that platform.
In the beginning, it is best to start with 1 or 2 platforms and then create your profiles on those networks. Remember, you are not only supposed to create the accounts but also manage them to keep your audience engaged and interested in your brand.
4. Create Unique And Engaging Content
Social media is a source of entertainment for people. They log on to these sites to view funny, creative, and engaging content.
If you want to catch the attention of the audience, then your content must be extremely catchy, creatively presented, and of course, centered on the interest of your audience.
You must’ve heard ‘Content is King’, if your king is strong and creative, then be prepared to welcome a whole batch of new followers who might even become your permanent customers.
Make sure that your content should be beyond the simple boring text. Your social media marketing will fail miserably if you only rely on text to catch the attention of your followers.
Use rich graphical content to keep your followers interested in your content. Use pictures, infographics, videos, and GIFs to keep your content interesting and increase the engagement of your followers.
5. Humanize Your Brand
The essence of a successful social media marketing strategy is to increase your brand awareness, without sounding too self-promotional.
While it may sound contradictory to promote your business without being self-promotional, this is how it works in the world of social media. To capture the attention of your audience, you have to focus on telling them ‘who you are’, rather than diverting all your energy towards divulging ‘what you do.’
Show your customers the people who are working for the business and how they execute the business activities.
Use the feature of live videos to interact with your customers and show them what goes behind the screen.
6. Monitor Your Efforts
Constantly monitor your strategies by observing the analytics and insights of your business profile or page.
Monitoring your efforts will allow you to understand the impact of your content on your followers. Moreover, it will also help you in planning your future strategy for creating content. If the content that you created was liked by your audience and increased their engagement, then in the future you would keep that in mind.
On the contrary, if certain posts failed to generate the desired feedback, then you can improvise it to your audience’s liking for boosting the engagement rate and traffic on the store.
7. Hold Contests And Giveaways
Giveaways and contests are the most effective to invite more audience, increase your following lists, and increase your brand awareness.
People love to participate in contests, lucky draws, and giveaways. They won’t mind following, or liking your posts for winning exciting gifts or discounts.
Hosting a giveaway or contest is really easy. If you have above 2000 followers then you can host it by yourself. On the other hand, if your business has just started and you have little to no following, then you can collaborate with the key influencers of your niche.
Facebook and Instagram influencers have a huge following of organic followers. By collaborating with them your brand will be marketed to a huge bunch of audiences.
Whichever way you wish to host the giveaway or contest, make sure to keep the rules simple, and minimum. People are easily turned off by a long list of complicated rules.
In A Nutshell
The stadium of digital marketing is incomplete without a creative, strong, and effective social media strategy.
Social media can connect you with your audience and enhance your relationship with them.
So, what are you waiting for?
Use the above-mentioned smart tips to step up your game of social media marketing. You might not see the fruits of your hard work overnight, but by staying active and consistent, you will soon reach the zenith of success.
Good Luck!
Author Bio:
Ricky Hayes is the Co-Founder and Head of Marketing at Debutify – free Shopify theme, helping dropshippers build high-converting stores in minutes. He is a passionate entrepreneur running multiple businesses, marketing agencies, and mentoring programs.
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