Social Media the medium you love to hate. A rapidly changing medium with great appeal, great potential, and unlimited reach. But, how do you decide which one to invest your time into and how do you make it work for your business?
The answer is complicated because for each business the answer is different. There is no one size fits all approach. Just like for a website build, the output needs to match the businesses core market demographic. A musician promoting their latest music needs a very different social media platform than an electrical contractor. However, both should use social media to leverage their business.
I like to breakdown today’s technology by comparing it with older methods for marketing. It helps all of us understand what we are trying to do. Especially the older generation that grew up without Facebook and Twitter.
The above cartoon helps us visualize what things that are important today used to be. Here’s my list:
Word of Mouth = Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Instagram
Yellow Pages = Google Search
Television commercials = Facebook & Instagram ads, Youtube Ads
Company brochure = Company website
Information distribution was, handouts, TV ads, Radio ads, Billboard ads, team sponsorships, newspaper ads… Now, it’s SEO, Google Ads, FB Ads, etc…
So let’s say you figure out which Social Media platform you need to promote your business in, the one that has the most reach and the greatest volume of quality prospects. The next thing you need to do is make a list of topics, items of interest and basically the phrase you’ve probably heard before, “Develop Orginal Content”. to do this you have to have a plan on what you will say, how you will visually show it and how it will mechanically work. For example, if you are promoting a new product. You need to think about what emotion this new product will bring to people. It is more powerful to show a person using this product and how happy they are than to just show the product itself. People want to connect with the emotion, see the results and then they will be more likely to act on it. So once they have acted on it, where does your message take them? In most cases, the ad, post in SM or picture needs to link directly to your website and not just the home page but the page that has information about the specific product. If a person is compelled by your message in Social Media, we want to make it easy for them to buy.
Here are the steps you need to take to make sure your Social Media is working for you.
- Decide on a specific promotion.
- Create information about that product (we will use a product for this example)
- Take pictures of the product for the E-Com part of your website
- Write up a product description, pricing, possible discount and terms of the discount.
- Publish new product on your website.
- Define your message about the product (It makes me happy)
- Create ad media (video, lifestyle pictures)
- Write up your ad copy using the ad media
- Set-up a Facebook ad with a link to your product webpage.
- Be sure to define as tightly as possible your preferred demographic area.
- Set your budget
- Launch ad in your geographic target area in FB & IG
- Also, post the link to the product on your business FB page
- Write a Blog post about your promotion. Show the developed lifestyle images again and elaborate on the product with links to the buy page.
- Be sure to customize your SEO if necessary for this blog post.
- If you have SHARE enabled in your website, share it in all your profiles on all Social Media Platforms.
To make Social Media work for your business, you have to have a strategy, a plan and it takes a lot of work. You can either do it yourself or hire a professional to help you. Just having a page in each social media network does very little to promote your business and products. ACTION is the key. and, action with a purpose will result in the most value.
Because of the monetization of Facebook a few years back, gone are the days when you could simply post on your business page and all your followers would see the post. Now it is only a small percentage. That’s because FB doesn’t want you to have too much success without paying for it. So if you’re going to pay for your promotion, you may as well do it right and not waste time and money.
If you need help, call on us. We provide everything a business needs to develop and promote your brand. Pinwilz Company has several divisions engineered to help.
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