With people spending so much time on social media, your social business pages could become your best marketing channels in 2021 and beyond. This is not as hard to achieve as you might think. By being intentional with your approach and committing a couple of hours a week to planning and implementation, you could soon be generating a lot more interest in your distributor business. And with it, more leads and sales.
If you have been inconsistent with posting, are not sure what to post, or have not seen much ROI from your efforts, chances are you post whatever comes to mind at the time you are posting, without much rhyme or rhythm. If that’s the case, read on.
With a little planning ahead, social media marketing doesn’t have to take a lot of your time to work wonders. If you plan ahead and use social media intentionally to reinforce your other marketing activities, you can achieve huge ROI through both organic and paid social campaigns.
To inspire you to improve your social presence in 2021, try implementing at least one of the following five highly effective social media marketing tactics.
1. Create a Social Media Marketing Planning Document
Writing down your marketing ideas matters. According to CoSchedule, one of our favorite publishing tools, professionals who document their planned marketing strategy are over five times more likely to achieve success. Also, 88% of people who set marketing goals actually achieve them.
Documenting your social strategy involves both high-level and low-level considerations.
On the high level, you want to include your overarching goals for social. You want to describe how social media fits within your overall digital marketing plan. You want a few guiding pointers for brand voice and the type of values you want to express.
For low-level strategy, consider how often you want to post per week or per month. Plan a budget for the next quarter. Describe publisher sources for shared content you want to write.
Getting all of this down in writing helps you stay focused and consistent. It also makes it easier to communicate your intended strategy to others, such as employees or contract marketers.
Most importantly, it keeps you from approaching your social media activities haphazardly. Having intention and purpose is the key to achieving better results.
2. Coordinate Social Posts With Specific Campaigns
If you want to push your social media marketing to the next level, try a couple of test campaigns tied into seasonal themes, special events or promotions, so that they can have an express purpose instead of randomly posting just to post something.
For instance, with trade shows coming back, you could focus on them in your social campaigns, aiming to drive traffic to your site to convert audiences into leads and clients.
Connecting social media activity to campaigns in this way ties them to concrete goals. Your performance can be benchmarked, helping you seek out ways to improve your next campaign based on past data.
The point is to make everything work together for a compounding effect.
For each campaign, list post ideas around them and then create several custom graphics for variety and optimal visuals on the various platforms. Make sure you also create a few call-to-action posts to generate interest and drive traffic to the appropriate page on your site.
Creating special, limited time campaigns like these helps you learn quick lessons and improve rapidly with your social media use. The data you generate and experience you gain will help you make better at using social media, helping you improve and accomplish your goals more consistently over time.
Be open-minded and test different things.
3. Create Content Marketing Assets and Landing Pages Just for Social
You can significantly upgrade your social media marketing returns by creating assets specifically designed to complement social posts.
For instance, you can create a lead capture landing page for specific target segments to use with targeted promoted social media posts. That way, your call to action can take an HR professional to a different page with different appeals than your page aiming to convert event planners.
You can also create assets that you know will perform well on social media, such as slide carousel posts and short videos.
Developing assets like these help connect your social media presence to customer actions that actually generate revenue. They also ensure you have a best-fit destination for each outgoing click to your website, as opposed to shoehorning a single “contact us” page link to every post.
Since each asset is custom-made for social, they’re better suited to their individual purpose.
4. Invest in Professional Video
If you haven’t already, now is the time to start using video in your social media marketing strategy. Businesses that use video marketing generate 66% more qualified customer leads and earn 54% more brand awareness compared to those that don’t use any video.
Live video and repurposing content as slideshows are great ways to dip your toes into video marketing. But to truly revamp your social presence, you should consider budgeting for a few short, professionally made video assets. They will make a huge difference in how your brand will be perceived.
These assets get attention and shape the way people see your business. They serve as a form of social proof for the quality of your services when they include live testimonials. They give you something to link to within other campaigns and to embed within your blogs. They also serve as brief sales pitches that can be far more convincing than any chunk of text.
For best results, plan ahead for when and how you will use your video assets. Keep in mind you can repurpose them in multiple ways for future campaigns.
5. Promote Posts to Targeted Audiences With Paid Social Advertising
We are big proponents of using paid social media advertising. It’s an easy marketing method that can have a huge ROI.
Social media engagement almost always comes at a lower cost per lead and cost per click compared to advertising on paid search or through display ads. Promoted social media posts can also be targeted to specific customer segments, helping you get your messages in front of the perfect audience you need to earn more customers.
Social advertising platforms also generate useful data to help structure, strategize and shape your future social media marketing plans. Track performance in any of the tactics above you decide to implement and you’ll achieve a more polished and welcoming social media presence.
The Point: Be Proactive
Take just one of the above suggestions and set time aside every week to work your plan. You will achieve a higher level of quality and you’ll start seeing results in no time!
For more on marketing your distributor business, visit Action Marketing’s Resource Library. You will find marketing articles, on demand webinars and guides, all free, to help you learn how to market your business in the digital age.
This article was first published in The Action Marketing Blog.
