Marketing your business can be the top expense for any business, it’s important to spend your money wisely to get the most of your money, especially when you are just starting. Marketing through social media is one of the most versatile and cost effective strategies that you can use to reach your revenue goals. The key to social media success is having a strategy and being consistent. Here are 4 steps to effective social media marketing.
1. Knowing Your Target Audience
In any business, you need to know your target audience. That means having an understanding of the personality and habits of your ideal customer or client. It means understanding their problems and how your solutions work for them. You have to not only be able to strategically get your content in front of them, but you also need to speak their language.
2. Speaking Their Language
There is no one way to connect with all audiences. Habits create cultures and each respective culture has a unique way of communicating. That means that your topic of conversation needs to be aligned with that of those who are most likely to patronize your business. Your “keywords” as they call them need to match with that of those commonly used by the type of people who are going to see and support your vision.
3. Decide Days and Times to Post
Speaking of habits, people generally have daily routines. This means that you have to be strategic about the days and times you decide to present your content on social media. Ideally you want to catch people when they’re minds are refreshed and mostly unoccupied. Mornings and evenings are definitely great times to consider because those are times when people are mostly likely preparing for something opposed to actively doing something. Your social media platform will give you the insights of when your audience is most engaged with you. Use that when creating your schedule.
4. Decide on Platform for Posting
It’s a great idea to get into the habit of scheduling your posts. Not to say that you absolutely have to schedule your posts on social media in order to see success, but it’s definitely not a bad idea to consider. Unlike other social media platforms, Facebook has a built-in post scheduler. There are many platforms out there that you can use for social media management such as Hootsuite or Later which are a couple of the most popular options around.
Applying these 4 things will surely bring continued success to your business. Knowing your target audience allows you to understand their behaviors, so that you know their language and when the best days and times to connect with them are. Although this article was written with a focus on social media marketing, these same concepts can be applied to email marketing as well.
-Marsha
Marsha Guerrier is a bestselling author, speaker, trainer, business analyst, business coach, and CEO of HerSuiteSpot®, a MWBE and SBE certified small business consulting and coaching agency that provides online and in-person support to early stage female founders looking to accelerate their business.