In today’s always-connected world, there isn’t a single brand that shouldn’t be utilizing social media to market their business. The opportunity to interact on a daily and more personalized basis with your target audience should not, and cannot, be passed up. 

Sharing content online allows your brand to craft an online persona that reflects your brand’s image, values, and attributes. Even if you only use social media occasionally, what you create for your brand, or what you share and react to, helps strengthen an overall awareness of your brand. 

Unfortunately, many businesses throw together a profile without much thought and don’t put in the time and strategy necessary to make it a true success. Putting careful thought and consideration into your social presence and then taking it even further with stellar content and paid campaigns can help generate more leads for your business. 

Our social media experts here at Design Thinking have put together these simple steps that you can use to improve your profiles and effectively market your business on social media: 

1.) Begin with a Social Media Strategy

A good social media strategy will help your brand find the right customers, but will also assist in setting business goals, identifying your target audiences, and establishing your most important metrics and KPIs. Once you’ve got all the above down, then it’s time to create/curate engaging social content.  

Social media as a business owner, or a marketer, is a lot different than a casual user. Your goal now is to get a positive return on the time, money, and effort you spend. Thus, your social media strategy is your plan of attack. But keep in mind that the landscape for social media is ever-changing, and so will your strategy. You need to remain flexible, stay on top of regular updates, and constantly tweak your strategy to the ever-present changes. 

As a brand venturing out into social media (or revisiting it), be mindful to stay authentic, find ways to provide value to your customers/followers’ pain points, and when in doubt, guess, test, measure, and learn. 

2.) Create a great profile

Once you have your strategy, you need to create a social media profile that represents your brand in a professional and engaging way. This all starts with creating a username/handle. 

When choosing your handle, shorter is always better and consistency across your channels is key. Choose carefully, because it may be difficult, or even impossible, to change it later. 

Next, you need to ensure your profile provides the right description and contact information. Be sure to include a summary of your business, address, phone number, website URL, and anything else that could help your followers take the action you’re hoping for. 

3.) Establish a social media content calendar

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again, content is king! It’s important to keep a regular flow of content going out across your channels. 

Create a social media content calendar with a blend of content including promotions, company announcements, blog posts and even motivational posts that your followers may enjoy. 

It’s important that you determine the right frequency of posts for your brand and stick to it. Do some testing to figure out what works best for you and check your analytics to confirm you’re posting during periods when your audience is active. 

Remember, every social platform is different. Don’t just create one post and share the same thing at the same time across all of your accounts. You need to tailor your content, timing and frequency of posts to each channel and the audience for each. 

4.) Actually be social and engage with your audience

We know, it’s just crazy to think, but you need to actually be social on social media and start engaging with others to see results, especially when you first create a profile. At the end of the day, social media is meant to be just that – social. 

After you’ve posted, make sure to monitor and respond to any mentions and comments in a timely manner. It’s not only a good thing to do, but more and more customers simply expect it. In fact, 94% of consumers who use social media expect a response from a brand in 4 hours or less. 

This is your chance to have direct interactions with your audience, so don’t let them down. 

5.) Run some paid social campaigns

It’s becoming harder than ever for brands to grow a legitimate following by only posting organically. While posting regularly and engaging with your audience is an ideal start, you need to give yourself a further boost with a paid follower or “Likes” campaign. 

Some people hesitate to do this, but it really is a worthwhile investment to grow your audience given the time and effort you’ll be putting into your ongoing social strategy. Unlike other forms of advertising, just a small budget can go a long way. 

6.) Watch the leads start coming

So you’ve built a strong profile, with a comprehensive content calendar and you’ve built a large and engaged audience. Now it’s time to start using social media to boost your ROI by bringing in leads! 

Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn are all great channels to run lead generation campaigns. Each platform has its own ad manager tool to help you create campaigns to effectively reach the specific target audience you’re after. 

All you need is some eye-catching imagery, attention-grabbing and informative ad copy, and an appropriate budget and you’re all set! Oh, and did we mention that we can help you with creating all of those things? 

It’s time to stop dropping the ball when it comes to your brand’s social media game and start seeing results. Contact us today to take your social media marketing to the next level! Call 519-758-0901 to get started.