4 Simple Tactics for Successful Social Media Marketing

4 Simple Tactics for Successful Social Media Marketing

If you want to be great at basketball, you need to practice the game, stay in shape, and perfect your ability to work as a member of a team.

Similarly, if you want to be successful at social media marketing, you need to practice all the skills and habits of a successful Internet marketer.

Below you’ll learn about four simple tactics you can use to hone your own skills, give your campaigns an edge, and ultimately take your game to the next level.

1. Understand Customer Desires

To be a marketer is to be in the business of customer information.

That means whether you succeed or fail often depends on how close you’re able to pay attention to the constantly changing wants and needs of your target audience.

To stay in the loop with this kind of information, you should use tools like Facebook’s Audience Insights to collect vital consumer data.

Audience Insights can help you gain insight into the way that customers interact with your business.

After you’ve compiled the necessary data, analyze it to determine what’s working and what isn’t. Then incorporate the delivery of the successful bits back into your daily routine.

2. Building Relationships

The fuel of social media success is relationships. If you want to keep your pages working for you, then you need to work on building meaningful relationships with consumers and fellow business owners alike.

Getting involved in building these types of relationships is simple.

You can begin by compiling a list of some of the relationships you’ve developed, and how they matter to your business.

Set up a list of your top 100 contacts, including prospective members.

That list will give you a concrete idea of where to begin each week.

Schedule 30 minutes or to an hour each week to connect with the people on that list, whether through email or social networks.

Above all, make sure that your time, experience, and resources are available to help these people whenever possible.

By repeating these steps weekly, you can be sure to gradually build strong and lasting relationships.

3. Passion and Purpose

If you want your customers to become advocates for your brand, you need to appeal to both their heads and their hearts.

The former can be done by offering useful services, but the latter isn’t as simple.

One of the best ways to manufacture those emotional connections is to try giving back to your community, whether local or online.

For example, Toms Shoes has honored a commitment to donate one pair of shoes for every pair that a customer purchases.

To date, they’ve donated nearly forty million pairs.

The end result isn’t just a better world through philanthropy, but a stronger brand as Toms’ customers grow loyal.

Start by creating a calendar that incorporates ways you to give back to your fans.

Identify any means that you already provide for your customers and community, whether through donations, volunteering, or the like.

From there, you can begin to think about what other opportunities you might begin to pursue.

You could also set up a day to give back each week. It could be one post every Friday on Facebook, or one blog article each month highlighting your contributions.

4. Collaboration and Teamwork

Master marketers are only masters because they never stop being students. When it comes to your industry, you need to be a sponge for new information, trends, and studies.

One of the best ways to stay on the bleeding edge of your niche is to network with other professionals like yourself.

Establishing this habit is easy. You can begin by using social media tools like Sprout Social to help you engage with peers that have the same goals as yourself.

You can get started by researching the hashtags that you and your peers are using most. Then monitor them in order to join in on the ongoing conversations occurring online surrounding your industry.

With the advent of hashtags, this process is incredibly simple.

While you’re at it, it’s often worth keeping tabs on the conversation of the most influential people in your niche.

Preparing for Action

The difference between being fit or out of shape is often just the accumulation of daily habits.

Likewise, it’s your day-to-day activity as a marketer is what ultimately accounts for your successes and failures.

Spend a few minutes considering which of these skills and habits would be most beneficial to your effort. Then make a concrete plan to incorporate them into your schedule.

Although it may take time and diligence to implement these tactics into your own routine, after a few weeks time, you should be more than pleased with the results.

4 Benefits Of Small Business Blogging

4 Benefits Of Small Business Blogging

Many small business owners start a blog as a marketing tool, but still underestimate the benefits it offers their company. Indeed, some owners only focus on their blog as a publicity tool and wonder why their business is not growing as much as they expected.

Let’s look at four of the most important, often unexpected benefits that a company blog provides.

1. Search Engine Optimization

The search engines love sites that update frequently with new content. Consequently, running a business blog with regular posts helps improve your site’s search engine rankings.

Given that it is easier to update a blog than it is to adjust a static website, you’re also getting better rankings in return for less effort.

Even better, if you allow a group of staff members to publish articles, rather than relying on a single person, you can generate fresh content much quicker.

2. Build Relationships

Used properly, blogging allows you to build a relationship with your readers, rather than just working as a glorified press release system.

The interactive nature of blogging encourages comments and feedback from visitors, which you can use to your advantage.

Don’t just post sales pitches!

Building relationships is a multi-step process, which starts with posting content that your readers will respond to, so that they visit often to take part in the debate. This encourages them to subscribe to your blog.

Once they’re subscribed, people are often more willing to provide extra personal information, give feedback, and be included on mailing lists.

This generates valuable information for your business providing insight into what your customers think about your company.

It can also generate new ideas for products and services. Basically, your blog can act as a free market research tool.

3. Build a Reputation

By providing quality content relevant to your field, you can build a reputation as an expert.

Over time, your customers and blog visitors will begin to consider you the go-to person for their issues. This gives your business an important benefit over the competition.

Reputation is an incredible competitive advantage, especially for small businesses that must stand against established companies in their industry.

A reputation as an authority generates word of mouth references – and every good businessman knows that word of mouth is the holy grail of advertising.

The price of reputation is twofold. First, you must make sure that your blog posts contain only useful information to demonstrate your knowledge, with a creative bent to attract readers. Second, it takes time to build a good reputation, so plan for the long haul.

4. In-depth reviews

Blogging can also be useful when it comes to providing in-depth reviews of your products and services.

This is very useful for educating customers about what you offer, explaining how to use your products and services, and offering tips and tricks. But you can also use your blog to respond to customer comments and complaints. Show them that you listen to their issues and take action to improve.

This is really an extension of the most common purpose of a business blog, which is as a marketing outlet.

Given that blogs also allow you to upload photos and videos, you can provide useful, interesting, responsive content at the same time as pre-selling your products and services. This can help dramatically improve conversion rates.

Blogging is more than just a way to announce company news, new products and special deals. It can also help position your site better on the search engines, build a community of loyal customers and even reach out to educate your visitors.

The important thing is to plan your blogging strategy as you do every other marketing option, and make sure that you only publish high-quality content that is useful to your target audience.