The phenomenal growth and popularity of social media in the last few years has made promotion on these platforms an essential form of marketing for businesses of all shapes and sizes.
Statistics also suggest that there are almost 4.8 billion active social media users today, making it an important medium for marketing. Furthermore, social media isn’t just for big businesses. Nearly 71% of small-to-mid-sized businesses today use social media to market themselves, and 52% post at least once a day.
However, unlike traditional marketing platf ki orms such as television, print, or radio, social media does not offer a one-size-fits-all solution but works depending on the specific marketing objective.
To navigate this and to successfully develop your self-marketing techniques, the main goal should be to employ a strategy that conveys a relevant and consistent message. It should also generate positive consumer awareness and encourage interaction with prospective clients.
If done the right way, social media marketing can help your business reach your target audience, resulting in more sales and increased revenue.
To make it easier for you, here we will discuss more about social media marketing and some of the best methods you can use to market yourself on social media.
What Is Social Media Marketing?
Social media marketing essentially means using various social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc., to promote your brand and sell your offerings (product or service).
So, if your business has launched a new item or product, here is what will be considered social media marketing-
- If you plan to promote your newly launched product/service on social media
- Create engaging content that showcases the values and story of your brand
- If you interact with your customers via comments
Why Do You Need To Promote Yourself On Social Media?
Here are some of the goals that marketing your business on social media can help you achieve-
Generate More Leads And Sales
Marketing on various social media profiles, including Facebook and Instagram, gives you a great avenue to generate more sales and revenue. For instance, by using social media platforms, you can:
- Integrate your product catalog into your social profiles
- Alert customers about new products/services and promos
- Run exclusive deals for followers
Data also suggests that 68% of marketers say social media marketing has helped them generate more leads.
Drive Traffic To Your Website
Another benefit of social media marketing is that it can help you drive targeted traffic on your website. Almost 75% of marketers also agree that social media marketing has helped them drive an increase in traffic.
There are ways, such as social ads or promotional posts, that can help you keep focus on conversions and URL clicks to be able to determine your ROI from social media.
Increase Brand Awareness
Increased brand awareness essentially means making your brand known to your target audience. Social media marketing can be a key driver in achieving this goal and can be 44% more effective in building brand awareness.
The key to creating an authentic and long-lasting brand is not just to publish promotional messages but to focus on specific content that emphasizes your unique brand personality and values.
Grow Your Audience
Social media marketing is also a great way to grow a niche audience around your business or industry that matters the most. Going through your social media platforms only makes sense when you are keeping track of specific keywords, hashtags, and phrases.
Keeping a close track of these conversations helps you expand your audience base much faster.
Ways To Market Yourself On Social Media
Social media today is an integral part of any marketing strategy. However, it can soon overwhelm business owners who don’t know how to leverage various social media platforms.
In this section, we will discuss some of the ways to help you market your business on social media
1. Create, Circulate, And Cross-Promote Your Social Media Profiles
One of the very first steps to market yourself on social media is to set up your profiles on the various popular platforms that best suit your business. However, the catch here is to successfully promote these social media profiles to let your audience know more about your business.
You need to circulate the profiles everywhere, including your business website, physical stores, and email communications. The more people see and know your social media profiles, the higher the chances of them visiting and interacting with your business.
Additionally, it is also a great idea to cross-promote your social media profiles across various channels. For instance, you may use your Facebook business page to promote your Twitter handle or Instagram profile.
2. Use A Content Calendar And Automation To Schedule Posts
Scrambling to create last-minute posts on social media accounts can lead to low-quality content. Creating social media content calendars here can be quite helpful in avoiding those mistakes and can lead to more effective posts as well.
Besides, content calendars also help you create specific goals and strategies and track your progress toward them. This is also the stage where you need to use automation. You also need to create your social posts in advance using various scheduling tools like Bulkly to post them automatically at the right time, complete with links, hashtags, images, and other content.
Scheduling your posts on various social media platforms in advance allows you to dedicate either one block of time per day or per week to create your social content. This is a better and more effective way to manage your posts and market your brand without necessarily affecting the other areas of the business.
3. Post Relevant Content Regularly
A large part of a successful social media campaign is about posting compelling and engaging content regularly. Apart from making your business look dependable, it also reflects your willingness to remain updated on the latest knowledge and share the same with your audience.
Although the algorithms of social media platforms keep on changing, regular posting on mainland social media platforms has its advantages, such as:
- It helps your content show up in newsfeeds
- Consistently posting relevant content helps you attract followers to your page
4. Use Multiple Social Media Platforms
Successful marketing on social media also requires you to consider multiple platforms that your customers use daily.
Ultimately, your digital marketing strategy should allow you to reach as many people through social media as possible, and the same is not possible if you focus on only one platform.
Depending on your audience profile, preferences, interests, etc., many of them may use Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok throughout the day, allowing you to get your content in front of them.
While there are many popular social media apps, it is not necessary to invest in a marketing strategy for all of these platforms. Instead, you can simply consider the apps your target audience is most likely to use.
5. Improve Your Visibility With Promotional Keywords
Most people are attracted to promotional keywords such as offers, discounts, free, giveaways, etc. Incorporating these words in your posts at the right places allows you to tempt your audience and gives you more sales opportunities as well.
What is important to keep in mind, however, is that such promotional offers usually work best during holidays and other similar big events and when used optimally without overdoing them.
You can also use social media posting tools to simplify your task here, especially if you feel aligning your content strategies based on holidays and events gets too overwhelming to manage.
6. Optimize The Content Timing For Higher Engagement
Another important thing to keep in mind when promoting yourself on social media is not to do it when your audience is either inactive on social media or busy working.
The key here is to optimize the content timing to attract more attention from customers. You can do this by promoting the content by closely gauging the time to find out when customers are at home before or after work.
Put simply, reaching the right audience at the right time helps in word-of-mouth promotion and helps you increase the chances of your audience taking note of your product, browsing your website, and even sharing your offerings with others.
7. Build A Strong Community
When promoting your brand on social media, the goal should not be to get as many followers as possible. Instead, the focus should be on finding customers who are really interested, engaged, and loyal to your brand.
This is because building a strong community of followers gives you more opportunities to grow, as these are the people who are more likely to like your posts, repost your content, and become customers in the long run.
Furthermore, building a community around your business or brand is also helpful because the people within that community will start engaging with each other and help to promote your content. Collaborating with influential social media users and asking them to help you by mentioning you in story posts or reviewing a product can also be an excellent strategy here.
Kristian Longden from James & James Fulfilment emphasizes the importance of community in social media marketing: “In the ever-changing landscape of social media, fostering a close-knit community is a stable and reliable strategy. It not only amplifies your brand’s voice but creates a network of advocates who can spread the word organically, lending credibility and authenticity to your marketing efforts.”
8. Use A Lot Of Visuals To Tell A Story
While the importance of text posts is still there in sharing information on social media platforms, images and videos are an excellent way to increase engagement. About 30% of marketers create visual content for their blogs, followed by popular social channels such as Facebook and LinkedIn.
Various social media platforms such as Instagram and Facebook have several built-in features to help you create videos without having to spend a fortune on the use of expensive production equipment.
Likewise, there are several graphic design tools available today to help you produce the best quality pictures and other imagery for social media. While it always helps to have a creative mindset here, tools such as Visme and Canva make it much simpler to create the right size images for social media platforms.
9. Monitor Conversations Closely And Focus On Building Relationships
Followers on various social media platforms tend to engage with brands directly. This gives an excellent opportunity for businesses to create strong relationships with their audience.
Any brand that responds promptly and engages with its audience is generally more respected by its audience.
You can also use various social listening tools available to track, analyze, and respond to conversations with customers online. Track everything from what customers are messaging or writing about a brand to learning where people are and what they are talking about.
To build customer relationships, you can respond to comments and direct messages, use social media for customer service inquiries, respond to reviews, and retweet/repost relevant content.
10. Keep A Check On The Latest Trends
Last but not least, to be able to market yourself on social media successfully, it is important to keep track of and monitor the latest trends. Since each social media platform keeps on changing algorithms and optimizing its content, it is important to stay on top of these changes.
This enables social media marketers to showcase their content to the right users with the right tactics.
Also, keep in mind that apart from the technology aspect of ever-changing social media trends, there are several other trends to keep track of. Among these are augmented reality, live video content, short-form videos such as Instagram Reels and Facebook Stories, and various messaging apps to communicate with customers.
In A Nutshell
Businesses today use social media platforms for various marketing strategies to promote and grow their business. Social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, YouTube, etc., offer the most effective and fastest way to reach a larger audience, boost sales, enhance brand awareness, and much more.
In this post, we have discussed various creative ways you can use to achieve this and successfully market your business on social media.
If you’re looking to use social media to market and grow your business successfully, it is best to invest in a good automation tool like Bulkly that allows you to schedule social media updates across your preferred social media channels.
Contact us to learn more about Bulkly.