Content Marketing

Marketers and advertisers are leveraging the use of social media in increasing the sales, as social media plays a great role in persuading anyone to buy the product. It offers an interactive platform that allows you to talk to your customers, solve their queries and persuade them to purchase the product finally. It’s an efficient way to take your buyer from awareness stage towards decision stage. Social media marketing efforts can get you new customers and help in increasing the market reach. Social media also helps you get into the purchasers’ minds by actively engaging them into conversations, helping them discovering a new product and answering their concerns. All these things ultimately increase sales. It is also found that 67% of the buyers’ journey is completed after going through digital media.

Before hiring any social media marketing company, you should find the answers of these questions-
Do they give each client a unique and specialized marketing approach?
Do they have enough experience in this industry?
What is their communication process?
How do they measure or analyze social media marketing success?
Do they keep an eye on latest trends on social media?

Make sure that you ask these 5 questions to the social media agency before hiring them. Notice how they listen to your queries, and your marketing goals. If they are able to understand you and your company really well, then hire them!

Whenever somebody is reaching out to your brand on social media, you need to listen them first and then draft your response carefully. Any wrong response by your company can hurt them and they may discontinue following your brand’s page. Regardless of where your social media marketing stands, it’s always wiser to evaluate the response before clicking on send button.

<strong>Be friendly-</strong> People like to talk to those who are polite and genuine, the key here is to make digital interactions polite and personal. Frame your sentences in such a way that it doesn’t feel like a person with authority is talking, rather come down to their grounds and behave in the same manner they do.

<strong>Be consistent with your responses-</strong> If your customers are asking something different, and you are replying on a different level, then it can become harmful to your company’s reputation. To avoid this, track the customer responses and have some replies ready ahead of time. This will prevent any consistency defects in your responses.

Talk about the topic and not the brand Join Q&amp;amp;A sessions Share other brand’s content to build authority Engage with your customers Try to make posts viral Use relevant hashtags Run engaging contests and giveaways Post interesting content frequently Create surveys Comment on your loyal customer’s feed to make them feel special

Marketing using social media is the most versatile and affordable strategy that businesses can benefit of. It is one amongst the most effective ways to reach out to your target audience and boost sales over a period of time. 97% of marketers are using social media nowadays to market their products and services.

<strong>Your target audience is on social media-</strong>
Your customers are spending most of their times on social media channels. With the number of people increasing on social media daily, presents a great opportunity for any business who want to reach their target audience and interact with them.

<strong>Connect with your prospects and bring leads!</strong>
On social media, consumers will be more receptive to your messages-
People use social media platforms to socialize, in a fun way with their friends and family members. They are more receptive towards messages which they feel are interesting and is informative. They don’t hesitate in interacting with their favourite brands on social media, and following them whom they consider their idol.

<strong>It increases your inbound traffic-</strong>
Posting regular content on your social media profiles help you in getting new visitors to your website. People feel connected to a brand which posts consistently about their concerns and are likely to follow that brand’s website. Once you get a visitor, you can convert it into lead. Social media marketing is also a great way to add to your search engine optimization strategy.

Paid social media advertising is different from traditional advertising. It allows you to find, target and reach your audience very easily. Whether you are looking for brand awareness, sales, engagement of customers or website traffic, social media marketing has never been so stronger. The main benefits of using paid social media advertising for your businesses are-
<ul>
<li>Amplify your reach</li>
<li>Fit any budget</li>
<li>Brand awareness</li>
<li>Knowing market insights</li>
<li>Adds to content marketing</li>
<li>Increases website traffic</li>
</ul>

<strong>Dealing with negative feedbacks-</strong> Almost every brand make this mistake while dealing with negative feedbacks on social media. Whenever any negative comment pops up, brands make lame excuses while addressing that comment which should be avoided. Instead acknowledge the negative comment and reply politely. Brands should see that negative comment as an opportunity to engage in conversation with the angry customer.

<strong>Spamming-</strong> Another common mistake brands make is they promote their content on every social media platform and throw links to their content. Never post automatic and spammed link as they never work. Instead engage healthy conversations with your audience.

<strong>Promoting a lot-</strong> Social media is all about engaging customers and communicating with them. People avoid any type of promotional content and they hate advertisements. If you are spending too much time promoting yourself on social media, you will eventually lose your followers that may turn into potential customers in future.

If you have decided to invest in social media sites, but confused about what social media platforms are best to be present on, then here is the list of top ones-
<ul>
<li>Facebook- Facebook is certainly the top choice for every business. With almost 2.5 billion daily active users, it is the widely used platform among people of every age. Its wide user base and demographic of users becomes the main reason why businesses invest in this particular site to reach their target audience.</li>
<li>Instagram- After noticing so much potential in Instagram, Mark Zuckerberg bought it in just 18 months after it was launched. Instagram has all the benefits of Facebook, and since it is owned by Mark, you can get the same user base and advertising potentials as you get on Facebook. Youth of the nation is available on instagram.</li>
<li>Pinterest- It is said to be the most creative platform out there, if your business falls within a creative category then Pinterest is the platform you should be present on. It has 292 million active users monthly and predominantly females.</li>
<li>Snapchat- If your business’s target market is largely comprised of young audience, then snapchat may be the best platform for you. Almost half of the snapchat users are aged between 18 &amp;amp; 25. There are over 350 million users active on snapchat monthly, and around 200 million active users daily. It has 12million+ daily video views which your company can utilise.</li>
<li>Youtube- It has around 2 billion active users monthly which your business can utilise to share the advertisements and content videos related to the business. You can use YouTube ads, which most of the brands are taking a good advantage of. It is second most popular platform for search after google in India.</li>
</ul>

If you are getting appreciation comments, then you should be ready to get negative comments as well. But be sure to handle them in a cool way, don’t delete them. Try to reply in a polite way, they are your followers and not your enemies. Engage them in conversations so that you can get to know them better, and also the shortcomings of your business. Negative comments are a great way to understand where your business is going, where it is lacking. Do not delay in responding to negative comments online. Any bad word travels swiftly across social media platforms, so respond fast in order to avoid spreading the fire. A slow response can cause damage to the company’s reputation.

Being consistent with quality content is important, you should not post too less that your followers forget you, and your business loose the impact. Posting too often also irritates your audience and there is a risk that they may unfollow your brand.

According to the studies, posting 2-3 times in a week on Facebook is good enough to engage your followers and keep them reminded of your brand. On Pinterest, you can post 5-10 pins per day, to maintain your brand’s presence. However this depends on the number of followers you have.

On Instagram, it’s recommended to post once in a day during peak hours. However, depending on the number of engagement and followers you have, you can post twice per day as well. Keep the quality of content high to interest your followers and keep them coming back on your page. On youtube, it is advised to post one video per week. It can be two videos per week if you have a lot of followers and you can create that much content with consistency.

Social media sites offer some tools to measure the ROI, understanding the need of marketers to measure the success of their marketing campaigns. Social media platforms provide built in analytics tools to track likes, engagement and shares. Facebook provides Facebook Insights, which lets marketers understand how they can convert social media actions into in-store purchases.

There is Google Analytics also, which is a powerful tool to measure the ROI of social media. It shows a report that consists of the impact of social media actions, most popular content, which social network is yielding best result and conversions. Similarly, LinkedIn provides page Insights and Pinterest provides Pinterest Web Analytics.

Here are some of the ways to promote your blog on social media- Add relevant hashtags- Include relevant hashtags in your blog so that it can reach wide audience and gets better visibility.
<ul>
<li><strong>Ask for shares-</strong> Ask your friends and colleagues to share the blog on their social media handles, it will increase the reach and bring new visitors for your blog.</li>
<li><strong>Promote other bloggers-</strong> Keep an eye on other blogger’s post and promote their blogs so that they can return the favour. Maintaining good relations is the key to get new visitors and link backs to your blog and Website.</li>
<li><strong>Be consistent-</strong> Consistency is the key, be consistent with the quality and frequency of posting the blogs. Maintain the frequency of posting to retain the followers and get new visitors to your page.</li>
<li><strong>Share it on every social media page you have-</strong> Share your blog on every social media page, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube to get more views and shares.</li>
</ul>

Social media is the best tool to reach masses, as people these days can be found active on various social media platforms. A wide demographics can be easily targeted through social media if the right strategy is followed. Don’t limit yourself to a single platform, post content on every social media site to get a better reach and target wide audience base.

For marketers, lead generation is the next step after generating brand awareness. Having leads on social media is a good indication of people interested in your brand, and these leads will eventually help you in keeping touch with potential customers. Paid promotions generally help in getting the leads. Lead ads on Facebook is basically the most common and widely used among businesses. The leads that are generated by these ads can be directly synced to customer management system for easy use. Instagram also offers lead ads to help marketers collect the necessary information.