Social media is one of the most effective lead generation tools for boosting businesses. But most businesses still don’t know how to run effective social media campaign strategies to generate leads for their businesses, and worst of all, don’t know how to start and close a successful social media campaign to boost business growth and lead conversion.
First of all, you need to know that the use of social media around the world is steadily rising.
According to Wearesocia, 49% of the world’s population is active on social media. This is 3.80 Billion people from the total population of 7.75 Billion people. This is a 9.2% increase, or an extra 321 million people, compared to January 2019.
Now, this is a mind-blowing fact. Out of the 3.80 billion active users, your business niche might be occupying about 10% of this number. Meaning that with social media, you can reach your potential customers.
But how do you reach your potential customers using the most result-driven social media campaign strategies and convert them into paying customers?
This is what we will be detailing in this blog post for you.
Right now, you might be starting out fresh on social media campaigns. Your monthly breakdown might have these embarrassing reports:
- an embarrassing figure of 0.1% monthly conversion from your campaigns
- low quality leads joining your email lists
- poor branding
- 2% reach every month
This could be depressing especially when you need to promote your business and get results.
But this doesn’t mean that you can’t convert more of your potential reach to paying customers. In some paragraphs away, you will learn how to set up a successful social media campaign and convert more than 30% of quality leads for your business.
Before we look at the effective strategies in using social media campaigns for your business, let’s look at what a social media campaign means.
What Is Social Media campaign Strategy?
Social Media Campaign is a combined marketing effort carried out on social media to assist with achieving a business goal which could be to either promote your products, or your services. These campaigns are not the usual everyday social media posts because they are designed and targeted to achieve a particular result.
There are no doubts that some organizations are making frank efforts to ensure that they effectively utilize the various opportunities embedded in social media.
As a business owner, you know the importance of social media as a way to make a connection between your business and customers. Social media has become an effective tool as far as digital marketing is concerned.
For instance, whenever potential clients are looking for a new product or service, they generally start their search on a search engine before going to social media, not only to learn more about your brand but also to see what others are saying about a brand or business.
For instance, Quora, Medium, LinkedIn, etc., are arms of social media that also form forums where people share their thoughts about a brand or a product.
While more companies are creating social media strategies in their marketing, not every strategy is effective. Your ability to encourage any of these actions comes from your brand’s authority and one of the best ways to build that is through the savvy use of social media.
A huge percentage of businesses and organizations are already planning to invest more heavily in social media so as to reach new followers and build brand reputation.
[bctt tweet=”A huge percentage of businesses and organizations are already planning to invest more heavily in social media so as to reach new followers and build brand reputation.” username=”DMSInstitute”]
Whether you want to sell products, gain subscribers, persuade followers to a point or sway the hearts and minds of readers to your brand, they’ve got to know who you are in the first place.
However, the truth of the whole thing is that tapping the audience of social media is a low-cost way to transform your brand into the global arena. Building your brand using social media allows you to develop new and strengthen existing relationships, which often leads to everything from brand awareness to loyalty.
The truth is having an expert on social media is going to save you a lot of headaches; this is because social media platforms are always changing and transforming specific things all the time.
Having a personal account is not the same thing as understanding the scope of what Facebook ads and Twitter-promoted posts can do. However, it helps to have someone whose job it is to stay up to date on what’s going on.
For you to choose the social media platforms that best suit your brand you need to understand the identity of your brand. Also, you have to consider a lot of factor such as the social media network your audience are most occupying.
This is very important because if 80% of your audience is spread across Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, it will do your business no good to invest your resources on Pinterest for instance.
Here are known strategies on how to find out the social media network your audience uses the most.
Let’s say, for instance, you’re in the business of ice cream sales, and your first 5 competitors are actively using Instagram in reaching their audience and have encouraging engagements on their posts, then this is a good place to start.
Apart from finding out the social media networks they use, you should also find out if their posts get engagements as this is very important to know if their audience actively engages with their posts.
Here is an image that shows how well people engaged in a post by Coldstone creamery.
–Facebook is apparently the best social media platform used by most companies in promoting brand awareness. It is a great platform for promoting virtually any brand, due to its very heterogeneous user base.
It’s rare to find a set of audiences who are not using Facebook as their go-to social media platform. Though you have to do your findings to make sure your audience is on Facebook.
–Instagram: This is one of the fast-growing social media platforms in the world. It is particularly effective for reaching young adults, Hispanics, and African Americans. And is a great option for brands that rely heavily on images, such as clothing companies and retailers.
–LinkedIn: This is another strong social media platform. For instance, if you operate a business-to-business company, LinkedIn is likely to be a stronger choice for promoting business-related content.
Let’s assume you have a base of existing customers, while planning to expand your marketing channel to social media, you can do a survey and request that your current customers give you a list of their topmost used social media platforms, this shows that other similar audience can as well be found there.
For instance, if you’re into consulting business, and your existing clients list LinkedIn as their most preferred audience, you might find out that using a survey, they will list out other networks like Quora, Twitter, Facebook, Medium.
These are other networks that can provide them with forums to discuss topics relating to consulting.
One of the social media campaign strategies you can use to grow your business is to use social campaigns to promote content. While social media is one of the most powerful ways to reach new leads, it’s easy to waste time or alienate people if you don’t use it appropriately.
That’s what makes having a sound social media strategy in place so important.
Campaigns that promote content are usually for some of the generic business goals like brand awareness, to promote a festival, to connect with your audience, etc.
If you want to build your brand on social media you really have to use social campaigns to promote your content.
For instance, Coldstone is using its audience and a strong and effective social media marketing strategy to promote its content which tells a story with Bstrong.
Coldstone’s social media campaign strategy with Bstrong
To take advantage of this effect, provide your audience with values that would encourage user participation, and make sure that your campaigns offer value to all participants.
Here, the value used is the emotional sense of assisting people in need. And this single value seen in this campaign will drive users to engage with this post and take action.
Step 3. Develop content and leverage influencers
Developing good content worth sharing is very important. It helps to speak about your brand but dependent on the circulation rate.
You will create a much stronger brand reputation if you focus on creating useful content that viewers will want to share, rather than cranking out content to meet arbitrary publishing calendars or that covers subjects only you would want to read.
By so doing, when you create good content, your content has a value that is worth sharing.
Also, a much faster approach is to leverage the audiences existing influencers in your industry have already built over the years. Mention their names or cite their websites in your content pieces. Influencers with Google Alerts or other notifications set up on their names will see your content after it’s published.
Email influencers after you’ve published your content to let them know they’ve been referenced in your work. Tag any influencers you’ve referenced when sharing content to your social media profiles.
Social media campaign strategies aren’t complete without the true meaning of “social” in it.
As social media are places where people connect with friends and loved ones, using trends and social-like elements such as hashtags, etc., will give your campaign more life.
Brands like Coca-Cola makes use of this strategy a lot, jumping on relevant trends that will connect their audience to their brands.
Also, hashtags are easy ways to join certain discussions. Invest in using hashtags to explode your reach and join connections in the areas that align with your brand’s goal and objective.
Story-telling strategies to build connections with your audience is a great way to secure your audience’s attention for a really long time, and these are some of the stories you can tell with your campaign strategies.
- Behind the scenes of your most memorable moments
- in-house moments of the team
- etc.
These stories can form a collection of campaigns that your audience would want to learn about.
Food vendors now use all the behind-the-scene moments to create sharable content on social media as part of their brand awareness campaign strategies. For your brand, you just have to find what your audience would love to be a part of.
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