5 Things You Can Do Right Now to Incorporate Social Media into Your Marketing Campaigns
/As a marketer, social media is a great tool to build your audience. There’s no shortage of social media channels available to help us tackle the task, and talking to our audiences is easier than ever. But talking at your audience shouldn’t be where you stop.
When you’re putting together your social media strategy, ask yourself: are you truly connecting with your audience? Are you engaging them by giving them what they expect from you and integrating them into your sales funnel? Because at the end of the day, you need to get beyond a “like” and get them to be a conversion and to be your business’ champion.
The good news is its very likely you already have a marketing plan to drive inbound leads. By incorporating social media and strategically creating targeted audiences and a content plan that addresses them, you can provide better support for your marketing plan, and your sales team, to drive more inbound leads to your funnel.
Here are five things you can do right now to incorporate social media into your existing marketing campaigns:
1. Use social to get them re-engaged. In order to keep your audience engaged, you can use social to your advantage by targeting those who have gone cold on email through social ads. Take your list of those who haven’t engaged with you and serve up an ad on social by downloading a list from your marketing automation tool and uploading it as a custom audience to your social platform of choice. Then, make sure your ad is worth the price of admission. Consider offering a free piece of downloadable content or an infographic that breaks down the value that you can give them. Get them re-engaged via social to remind them what they are missing with your emails.
2. Give them something they need. Ever have an awesome idea that you know will resonate with a group of potential prospects but you just don’t know where to start? When you don’t know who to target or where you need to target them at, you can use social media to find individuals in a specific demographic that you’re wanting to engage with. Create a downloadable piece of content that you know will be beneficial to this group and entice them to ‘come and get it’. Use a targeted social ad that speaks to the specific audience you’re wanting to get information from and send them to a landing page where they have to fill out a form to download the piece of content. Once they fill out the form you have endless opportunities to communicate with them via email and start to learn about who they are, what they want and what you have to offer.
3. Crowd source your information. When you need information on where next to take your marketing, you can use social to ask your existing audience for direction. Remember, the more you know about them the better you can serve them (and they better they can serve you). Use a survey tool to conduct informal audience research and get to know who they are, what they want and where they want that information.
4. Plan out social posts on your content calendar. No, really. Plan out what you can each month and take time to think through your social posts and schedule them in advance. Then you won’t waste time each day trying to decide what you want to post on social, or stepping on yourself if you have a blog post and an event to promote.
5. Use social as an opportunity to grow your email list. And this doesn’t mean you keep putting up an email sign up page on your social platforms; that’s boring. Get personal with your audience and educate them on what they get when they subscribe to you. Because let’s be honest, it better be good if they choose to let you in their inbox. Treat your email content as a commodity. Allow those people to get content first from you before you post on social, give them access to one-of-a-kind and personalized content based on their industry and their job role. You have the power to customize and communicate which leads to engaged champions of your business.
Join me on Friday, August 4th where we will dive into these tips in more detail and show you real-life examples of how we’ve put them to work and how you can incorporate the tips into your real-life marketing campaigns!