R2 - Using a Social Media Campaign to Grow Your Business? Here's How to do it.

Using a Social Media Campaign to Grow your Business? Here’s How to do it.

Businesses often try to utilize social media to widen their reach to consumers, and often these campaigns fail.  Take this statistic for example, 86% of marketers believe that social media is important for their business, but only 3.4% of business leaders say that social media contributes highly to their performance (O’Grady 2017).  It isn’t enough to have a large social media presence to capitalize on your target market.  Here are a few tips to start, or refine, your social media campaign in a way that will effectively reach consumers and generate revenue for your business. 

KNOW YOUR GOAL.  

What do you want to get out of this campaign?  Of course, the end goal is to capitalize on your market that is using this space, but get specific.  Fishing for followers and likes doesn’t always equate to dollars in your pocket, so have a plan for what you want to do online and create an identity. As Kaplan explains, the key reason why people create identities online is to present themselves online consistent with their personal identity.  Knowing specifically how you want the consumer to see you online is the first step; you don’t want to seem like you need their follow or likes, just be interesting to your target and they’ll associate your business with your online identity.  Knowing this will help you decide which platform is best for you to use, most commonly Facebook or Twitter, and from there you can decide what kind of content to use in your social media campaign.  Lastly, you’ll need a way to record and analyze the results that you get from the market.

KNOW YOUR TARGET.  

Once you know your goal, you need to know the best way to reach those goals.  After all, it’s a social media campaign you’re launching, so the next step is to figure out your target market.  Using social media sites like Facebook and Twitter allow you to access more than the location and gender of your target audience; they will let you see their likes and hobbies too (O’Grady, 2017).  Using this information, you can generate a customer profile that you’re looking for to best fit your business model.  

BE PREPARED.  

Once you understand how to best utilize this tool that is social media, plan your campaign.  As you prepare products for the market, know how to push them the right way.  Be relatable.  Using national themes or events is a great way to guide your campaign.  Use that in your social media posts and have your product launch coincide with, or right around, the event utilized in the campaign.  This helps the launch feel more natural and less like a product is being forced onto the consumer.  The best advice is to plan, well in advance, and release some teasers leading up to the leading up to the product reveal. 

CONNECT WITH YOUR MARKET.  

Widening the reach of a business by gaining followers does not imply an increase in sales.  Gaining the right followers is how to maximize sales in a social media campaign, and a high engagement rate is a good metric to illustrate whether a business is gaining the right followers.  The more engaging you are online will attract more consumers.  Users don’t like advertisements, so don’t advertise.  The best way to do this is by embracing social media for what it’s intended for, “It’s all about participation, sharing, and collaboration, rather than straightforward advertising and selling” (Kaplan, 2010).  So, the more you engage your target market, the more you may influence their decision to buy from your business.  Next, it is best to look in the mirror; that is, look at what you are doing to engage your customers.  Change the things that you aren't getting great feedback on, and keep doing the things that are engaging the consumers.

TRACK THE PERFORMANCE.  

There are many ways to track how your social media presence is playing with the consumer.  Look to see if you’ve generated significantly more traffic to the site because, if nothing else, with more traffic to the site, that means more exposure.  Use analytics to see what your target market is liking, reposting, and sharing, and if what you’ve released is fitting the interests of that audience. 

HOW DO YOU STACK UP?  

Using Facebook has a lot of advantages, one of which is that as a business, you can look at a snapshot of a week of your competitors’ activity.  The best model to look at is the leader in your field.  Look at what they do well and look at what they do poorly.  Model yourself after them to see if you can generate some useful traffic and followers doing what they do.  Don’t copy them, but look at their strategies and see how to best apply those strategies to your business and fine tune things until they work for your model.  

Sources:

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Kaplan, Andreas M., “Users of the World, Unite! The Challenges and Opportunities of Social Media,” Business Horizons (2010) 53, 59-68

O'Grady, Natalie. "3 Ways to Grow Your Business With Free Social Media Analytics." Entrepreneur. N.p., 27 Feb. 2017. Web. 28 Feb. 2017.

Solovic, Susan. "3 Strategies to Nail Before You Launch Your Social-Media Campaign." Entrepreneur. N.p., 18 Feb. 2017. Web. 28 Feb. 2017.