The biggest audience on the planet is available to you if you know how to do it right.
Learn The Basics of Social Media And Start Right Away!
Today, more than 2.5 billion users log on to social media platforms on a regular basis. And yes you can reach out to even a small percentage of these users and turn them into customers for your service or products.
For most businesses, Facebook is clearly the platform of choice. But before you start advertising you need a strategy, a defined demographic, a dedicated ad budget and the persistence to do it right.
- Define Your Strategy
Decide on what you want to accomplish. Do you want to:
- Increase Traffic
- Create engagement
- Get more sales
- Increase your brand awareness
Even if you don’t plan on doing the social media marketing yourself, you need to know what your goal is. A social media strategy defines how your organization will use social media to achieve your needs. Basically, this is a statement of intent. All you need to do is sit down and list out your goals and the outcome you want to achieve. Then you can sit down with our team at 5 Colors Media and we can work together to see how feasible your goals are.
Know Your Product and Your Market
Once you define what you are offering, targeting you best potential customers gets easier. Social media can help you target audiences that are geared or interested in your specific industry.
How Can You Define Your Service?
First you decide on the the sale approach that appeals most to your audience. Think of the age group you want to target, their interests, and even where they are located. You definitely want to make your product and offering unique.
Once you know who you want to target you can tailor your ads and copy to appeal to the population you want to target. Just be sure you plan on a long-term campaign and views (at least a few months.)
Now that you know what to do, here’s how to get started doing it. Let’s first start with Facebook which is the platform that has the largest number of views. These are the two simplest ways to put Facebook to work for you.
Promote Your Page
Yes. you can promote your page and some of this work does not involve your needing to buy Facebook ads. Before you invest in ads you want to get as many likes as you can. You can do this by inviting people to give you likes. Getting these Likes is not difficult. These are a few things you can do:
- You can place a facebook social icon on your blog or website asking people to like your page.
- Ask friends, family and customers to Like your page
- If you have a brick and mortar business, add a sign that people can see asking them to Like your page
- Place your Facebook address on your business cards so people can Like it.
- Cross reference your page with others with complimentary services or products.
Buy Facebook Ads
Once you have done everything possible to get a larger audience for your business Facebook page, you are ready. “Ready to do what?” You think. You are ready to participate in Facebook advertising. Don’t worry it is not an expensive process. All you need to do is consult with one of our Facebook marketers to:
- Set a budget and do Ad Words
- Use colors images and graphics
It is during these sessions that you will start to find your audience, the people you want to market to. You need to select the gender you want to target, the age group. You can even choose the profession and the education level of who you want to target.
As you funnel down to your niche audience Facebook will start giving you tips. For instance, it will tell you if your audience selection is too specific, too broad or just great.
Just don’t forget to save your audience so you can keep on targeting them.
Set The Repetition, Frequency and Reach to Create Brand Recognition
Okay. This is a touchy subject. On Facebook you don’t just set an ad and let it run interminably. We like to stick to about two weeks for a Facebook run. But there is no one-size-fits-all approach. You want to continually do A/B testing and let the data tell you what to do.
Basically you need to let you budget and audience size ratio make sense. The smaller the audience and budget you have, the more your ad will be shown to the specific users you have chosen, which is good. But as usual, too much of a good thing can bore after a while. And you do want to avoid ad fatigue and blindness. You can do this by watching your ads, your click-through-rate and be sure to rotate your ads using the Facebook Carousel Ads. Keep in mind, that being successful on Facebook or any other social media platform for that matter is testing. You have to test everything and check it all the time.
In the end it is all about testing. YOu got to test everything and check all the time.
Boost Your Favorite Posts
To reach a wider audience you’ll want to boost your best posts. Go to your newsfeed and select the post you would like to boost. Click on ‘’Boost Post’’.
Follow the same steps you used in page promotion with one important difference. You need to select your target audience a little differently. The benefits to boosting a post is that here you can create your own target audience or you can target people who like your page (and their friends). Best of all you can use images and videos. Just be sure to use images and videos of high quality. For maximum deliverability the text must be less than 20% of the total image. Now you are ready to get going.
In The End…
We’ve showed you the easiest ways to make a positive reputation for your business. And now that we have showed you the rules, as in any other creative world, you can find the interesting ways to “break” the rules. But always with one focus, that of making your business seem more social, more accessible and more fun.
