Social Media, Pay-to-play

Introduction

Social media is a dream ticket to market to your customers – create a page for your business, post regularly, get likes, get customers.  Unfortunately for business owners, it is not as simple as that.  In this blog, I discuss what you need to do to be successful in making social media work for your business.

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Social Media Marketing – What is It?

Social media marketing is the process of marketing to customers via social media channels.  The most common methods are Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Other channels include Snapchat, LinkedIn and Pinterest – there are others, but these are the leading social media channels.  You can use these channels to reach your customers through posting, sharing, updating, adding events, links to your website and much more.  Social media can be leveraged to build brand awareness and directly acquire new customers on the social channel.

Why marketing through social media is a must

Social media can be a hugely successful tool for all businesses whatever their market.  Customers or potential customers are more likely to listen to and engage with companies on social media than they are on any other marketing channel.  Your potential market on social media is unlimited, with the user base of social media sites growing all the time.

Don't be Vain – Likes don't count

Ok, so strictly speaking 'likes' do count on social.  It shows you have an engaged follower. It also helps the algorithm on the social channel show your content to more people if you get more 'Likes', or engagement.  However, ultimately, a small amount of engagement will only get you so far.  Taking Facebook as an example, getting engagement can be hard.  If you manage to create content that goes 'viral', that is something that is shared many times outside of your regular followers, that will help.  But creating viral content is somewhat of a holy grail for businesses to achieve (that is not to say you should not try to create interesting and unique content).

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How to Use Social Media Using Social Media to Grow Your Business

So if your social media content will only get you so far, how can you utilise social media to grow your business?

Social Media Adverts

The average reach of a Facebook business page (that is, the percentage of a page's followers who see a post) is just 6.4%, yet 74% of Facebook users visit Facebook daily, and over half of Facebook users visit several times per day. Yet with so much competition, if you want to succeed on social media and propel your business forward, at some point, you will need to utilise social media advertising.

Specifically, for most markets, Facebook advertising in its various forms is a crucial tool in the armoury of a modern business.  The level of customer targeting available is very granular, enabling you to focus in on people who may want to buy from your company.  However, this also poses another issue, in that it is easily possible to waste thousands on social media adverts if done incorrectly.  A common mistake is to 'boost your post' which many people take up as it allows an easy way to get your content in front of people.  However, this is one of the most common mistakes.  Never boost a post on Facebook!  There are several reasons; one of them the content you are boosting is likely not optimised for the end goal.  But more importantly when you boost a post, you do not have the same levels of customer targeting options available as are possible in Facebook Business Manager, a platform Paddle uses to harness the full power of social media advertising; thus you will likely end up targeting people you do not need to, and there is your wasted money.  Paddle can help you identify who your customer is, and then take advantage of the granular targeting available within Facebook Business Manager platform.

Retargeting

Using social media can also allow something called 'remarketing' (sometimes also called 'retargeting').  Retargeting can enable you to target visitors who have already been on your website, but not purchased or not contacted you, for example.  Retargeting is powerful as it gives you another opportunity to convert this visitor into a customer.  Again, you can use the tools of social media advertising for this purpose; something Paddle can help you take advantage of for the benefit of your company.

Local and Niche Groups

There are other free ways to harness the power of social media. An excellent method for some businesses, especially those with a local userbase is posting content into local buying and selling groups, and niche interest groups associated with your business.  It is important not to spam these groups, and make sure what you post is appropriate for the group.  However, used correctly, this can be a fantastic way to gain new customers.

Social media marketing is not for all businesses, and for those businesses, there are some great alternative methods, from Google Adwords to offline marketing.  However, social media marketing is suitable and powerful for almost all businesses.  Used in the right manner with targeted advertising, you can harness the power of social media to grow your businesses.  Paddle has worked with businesses where social media has been the only method they have used to gain new customers; these companies have grown beyond their expectations.

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Conclusion

Paddle is happy to discuss the needs of your business and assist you in growing your company, via whatever method is likely to work best for your business.

Contact Paddle Creative today to discuss your needs.