Whether your business is already on social media or it has no presence there at all, you need to know the essentials of social media marketing to leverage this powerful tool. Here are some important concepts to understand when designing a social media strategy to increase your business.
Incentives
Much of human progress is owed to our tendency to seek rewards for the efforts that we expend. Since this is endemic to human nature, it naturally follows that you will influence people’s behavior better when an incentive is given for them to do what you want. It’s even more effective when you offer a reward and place a time limit to create more urgency. The shrinking attention spans of today’s social media audience also makes time limits a powerful tool in social media.
One way to implement these concepts is to identify an influencer and give that person an incentive with a time limit. When asking a prominent social media blogger to promote your content, offer a time-restricted incentive to entice their immediate response. Some examples of this could be a discount coupon or free gift that can only be redeemed within a time frame of a few days. Influencers promote numerous products on a daily basis, so your pitch needs to contain an enticing offer.
A similar approach can be used with advertising directly to your market on social media. When using paid advertising, you will have more control than with an influencer. You are also able to test offers and variations on the parameters of the incentive messages. Without an influencer, it is often more effective to infuse human elements that make the advertising messages more relatable to the audience. Having a person present the message in a video or facing the audience in a still image is a good way to accomplish this.
Rewards are also effective if you’re not aiming to make immediate sales, but you want to increase your subscriber lists for email marketing and other communication. It is a good idea to offer niche rewards for the exact group of people you’re targeting, otherwise, the money spent on these incentives will often go to waste.
Mobile is king
It is common knowledge by now that most social media traffic comes via mobile devices these days. With this in mind, it’s important to design ads and offers with the understanding that people are interacting with them via smartphones and other mobile devices. On a mobile device, the screen size is much smaller than on a laptop, so you have to have fewer fields to fill out on information requests and signup forms. The length of time needed to read or watch video content needs to be as short as possible because mobile consumers are on the go, and their attention span is very short.
Advertise for engagement
It’s important to establish a dialogue with the customer in the early stages of their contact with your promotional material. Customers often don’t make buying commitments until a follow-up communication has occurred. Design a marketing strategy that involves repeat exposures and interactions with the audience. When customers are directly contacted in follow-up communication, they feel a sense of a higher quality of user experience. Without active guidance, mobile users are less likely to take a series of actions. Chatbots and social media managers are two ways to establish early engagement with potential customers.
Understand user intent
Most mobile users are either seeking information or browsing for entertainment or leisure. Users who are seeking a specific product or service are much more valuable than ones that are just passing time and clicking out of pure curiosity. Choose the right social media platform that will reach people who are actively seeking rather than browsing. If much of your audience consists of people who are browsing, you must design ads that are not too obstructive toward their intentions of casually browsing. For example, if someone is reading an article about a viral news topic, don’t subvert their experience completely away from the story they were engaged in.
Keep these essential concepts in mind when designing a social media marketing campaign. Realize that your audience is mostly on smartphones, and their attention span is small. Also, consider their intentions as either browsing or seeking a product. Understanding the fundamentals is crucial for getting a return on investment of your marketing dollars.