One of the main questions I get asked about social media management is how to convert likes into sales and followers on your channels into paying customers.
People are now very aware of the power of social media and the potential to reach large audiences quickly. However, for a business owner they often need to know a shortcut or want to establish the correct way of social media marketing in order to reach their end goal.
Most businesses are primarily concerned with sales. They don’t particularly care how much people are talking about them because at the end of the day, they just need to achieve sales to pay their costs and move forward with their business plans. It’s important to stick to this target but also embrace the wider aspects of social media. In particular, it is great for maximising awareness of your products or services to generate word of mouth and sow the seeds with your target audience. Just because a person likes your page on Facebook doesn’t mean that they are ready to buy from you.
Email marketing is still as strong as ever and is proven to keep people informed of your services and news before following up with a direct invitation for them to take up an offer. Facebook is good for promoting your page to get likes but this still leaves you without their actual email address. To take this advertising a stage further, you could set up a landing page to collect emails of those interested. For example, if you have a restaurant and want to promote a 2 for 1 voucher competition, simply ask your audience to click-through to the page and enter their details to be entered.
Once you have their email address, you can follow up with future offers they may be interested in. Email lists can also be used for targeted ads on other platforms like Twitter or through Mailchimp campaigns. Through social media advertising, you can also create lookalike audiences, i.e. a group of people who have similar interests and attributes to your existing followers.
The key to social media advertising is to target a filtered down audience who will consider your post content and ads as relevant to them. For example, an Edinburgh restaurant will have most success targeted people within a 10 mile radius rather than the whole of Scotland. If it is a Chinese Restaurant then you can choose to only show the ads to those who are interested in Chinese food (i.e. they may have liked similar restaurants already). With the decrease in organic reach within Facebook, it has become essential to boost your posts in some way in order to get it seen and responded to. If you have 1000 likes, you may find that less than 10% of the audience are seeing the post so a budget is required to enhance your presence.
For more information about social media management and advertising, please contact me at jon@socialant.co.uk.
Jon