By: Johana M. Caba, M.A.
Halloween or Ol'Hallow's Eve, is that time of year right before the big rush of the Holiday Season. It's busy but it is still the calm before the storm of Black Friday and so on. It is one of the busiest times of year for so many big businesses and small businesses. This year, these Holidays will be different due to the current Pandemic, but small businesses and online based businesses can still expect to make good profits. In this post, let us go over 6 social media marketing tips that you can use to boost your sales this Halloween and get you ready for the Holidays!
Optimizing your Website & Social Media Accounts
First thing is to ensure that your website and social media accounts are optimized. What do I mean by optimized? Well, when you optimize, you are ensuring that your website is accessible to search engines and that you are improving the overall chances that your website has to be indexed by these search engines. To do this, you need to make sure that you add the relevant keywords and phrases to your website's search engine optimization (SEO), edit your meta tags, edit your image tags, and make sure that you do not have any broken links. You will also need to optimize your social media accounts. Make sure that your accounts are easily found on your website, that you are posting consistently, that you respond to any customer concerns in a timely manner, and that you use hashtags to help you expand your reach. This is also a good time to audit your social media profiles to make sure that they are up-do-date, that your profile images are consistent and that your banners are consistent. Tip: Optimize your Instagram bio by separating important things into a bullet-style bio using emojis as your bullet points.
Prepare your Campaign
You might be thinking, I'm not a huge business, why do I need to prepare a campaign? Well, a campaign will help you organize your goals, set up your key performance indicators (KPI), and it will help you create a content strategy to use. Here is a good time to look at the Content Marketing Funnel to help you decide how to attract your target audience and at which stages of the funnel to implement which tactics. This is also the point where you begin to create your Content Calendar in order to plan out when you will post new content and at what times. At this stage, you are planning your content, designing some graphics and ads, and figuring out when you will be posting for optimal engagement. You can do this by taking a look at your analytics. If you do not have a service that gives you all of your analytics from different platforms in one place, then you can go to each platform individually. For Twitter, go to their Analytics tab, same goes for Pinterest if you have a business account. For Instagram and Facebook, if your accounts are linked you can look at certain analytics in the same place, but otherwise you can look at Insights on your business pages. Your analytics will tell you at what times of day your audience is engaging the most, where they are from so you can determine the optimal posting times, their interests, gender distribution, age, and other demographics. Use this information to guide your campaign!
Promotions & Giveaways
Halloween is a great time to run some flash promotions and plan some giveaways! If you are a convenience store, with a physical location, then this is a good time to decorate your store for Halloween and have some candy sales. Otherwise, keep reading! For online based businesses and other small businesses that are not convenience stores or large warehouses like Costco and BJ's, your strategy will be different. For example, a hair salon will use social media to run special promotions like doing Halloween makeup for a lower fee, doing new hair color changes for the fall for a special discount, etc. It really depends on your business. You will need to use social media to share your discounts with your audience and promote your giveaways. It's important to take quality photos of your products or examples of your work, or make engaging graphics using tools likeCanva to design. Talking about giveaways! I will be giving away a free physical version of my planner, The Blogger's Planner. If you would like to enter this giveaway, subscribe to my monthly newsletter, follow me on Twitter and share this blog post with your followers. I will be selecting the winner on October 31st! Good luck!
Affiliates, Public Relations & Influencers
You are a small business, but you can still have affiliates, send PR packages and contact influencers. This is all a part of your overall social media/content marketing strategy! You can use affiliate marketing to get your products and services out to larger audiences by partnering with bloggers and other influencers in your industry. For example, if you are a small beauty/skin care brand, you can always contact beauty influencers and bloggers. Another example, if you are a small lifestyle brand or a small candle maker, you can always contact and partner with lifestyle bloggers and influencers. Make them affiliates and gift them your products. This way, they can try out your products and share their reviews with you and their followers. Remember, if a person sees another person that they follow give a good review of a new product or brand, then that person is more likely to become aware of the new product/brand, visit their website and purchase. This is called word-of-mouth marketing even if you hear about it on social media. And, it doesn't have to be expensive to send out PR packages. For example, with my new planner, I've sent out email style PR packages with my planner and a nice thank you note. If you have a physical product, you will want to send out physical packages, just limit the number you send out if you do not have a large budget due to shipping fees being pricey.
Create Great Content
This might sound harder than it is. Creating great content does require some skill, creativity and inspiration. With the right tools, you can create your own graphics, write your own content and plan when to share it. For a small business, you might wear many hats and might want to hire a social media manager to create the content and share it for you. They will also be able to create your strategy and help you increase your website traffic and boost your sales. If you want some information and tips on graphic design and creating your own content, visit my previous graphic design blog posts including 5 Graphic Design Tips for your Logo! To create great content, you need to know some of the basics of design, how to pair fonts, select color palettes and so on. You should also be aware of what type of content your target audience prefers. You can figure this out by taking a look at your analytics on your social media pages. Another way to figure out what type of content your target audience prefers, is to do some market research including a competitor analysis to see what your competition is sharing/promoting to their audience.
Social Media Ads
The sixth tip is to use social media ads. I say this all the time because they work, especially if you have a good budget and a good strategy. My strategy is to promote/boost my social media posts that already have good organic engagement. I do this because I know that they will receive more engagement and impressions than boosting a post that does not have good organic engagement. When boosting posts or creating social media ads, you will need to select geo-targeting if you are trying to reach a local audience, you will also need to select the demographics, your call-to-action and your budget. When promoting something to a broader audience, you do not have to select geo-targeting locations. If you are an online retailer or online small business, it's better to select a broader audience. If you have a brick-and-mortar location, then geo-targeting is better because it will show your ads to local members of your target audience which can guide them to visiting your physical location.
Conclusion
When you are creating your holiday campaign, you need to remember these tips. These social media marketing tips will help you boost your website traffic by increasing your reach on social media and guiding leads to your website. If you follow the Content Marketing Funnel, you can successfully guide them to your call-to-action which will be to subscribe, purchase or hire. If you want a more in-depth explanation on creating a social media marketing strategy to boost your website traffic, get Denelia Storm's new e-book Social Media Power (Affiliate) and her Free Social Media Roadmap guide today!
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By: Marlene I. Urena
So you have implemented a social media strategy for your business, but you don’t know how to monitor its success. This is where social media analytics comes in handy! Tracking social media analytics is a vital step for business success because it can expose any areas that need improvement in your company’s online strategy. Let’s go over how social media analytics work and what they can reveal
How do these tools work?
Social media platforms each have their analytics available for business pages and even personal accounts. This tool allows you to monitor multiple metrics that can be used to analyze how well your social media strategy is working. The information provided by these metrics is public, but no personal information is compromised in the numbers these platforms expose. There are even other analytics tools like HootSuite and Social Studio, which allow you to monitor the performance of multiple accounts on different platforms, giving you an overall view of how your company’s marketing strategy is performing online.
Before looking at any analytics on social media, however, businesses must review the goals of their strategy. Did you want to boost your engagement total by 1,000 per post? Did you want to shorten your response time to under 2 minutes? By defining the goals of your strategy, you will be able to effectively analyze whether or not it is performing as intended. You will be able to see if the outcome of the strategy falls in line with the numbers you wanted to achieve. If not, then there needs to be a re-evaluation of the strategy to find out what can be done in a better way. Overall, Social media analytics are great tools to use in measuring the success of a social media strategy and business can only benefit from employing their use.
By: Johana M. Caba, M.A.
Affiliate marketing is an arrangement between an online business and an external website or influencer in which the business pays commission to the website or influencer for website traffic or sales. We see many influencers, bloggers and other content creators that use affiliate marketing as a way to make money from their content. There are many arrangements that businesses can do. Some of the most popular affiliate programs that I've seen include ShareaSale and Amazon Affiliates. But can a small business have an affiliate program? The answer is yes, but it depends.
As a small business, you might have a brick-and-mortar store or be a completely online business. There are many things small businesses can do through social media marketing in order to increase traffic to their websites. Some small businesses only use social media to post while others incorporate social media ads into their online marketing strategy. Others might use influencers to promote their products by either offering their services for free or gifting their products to influencers for good reviews and shoutouts. With affiliate marketing, small businesses can do a partnership with influencers and other online content creators instead.
On one hand, it might be more beneficial to continue offering free services to influencers if you can afford it. For example, a hair salon or nail salon can continue offering free services to influencers that promote the businesses through their social media. On the other hand, other small businesses might not be able to continue thriving by offering free products. In this case, I think it would be better for them to implement an affiliate program where a portion of the sale goes to the person or website promoting the products or services. Essentially, affiliate marketing is a way of outsourcing for the small business because it allows the small business to use marketing expertise within their niche without needing to spend a lot of their resources on marketing. This is also a performance-based program which means that your small business is only paying for results, not spending extra money on direct advertising. Overall, utilizing this form of marketing allows you to reach a larger audience by using experienced sales people. It also promotes higher website traffic and conversion rates because of those sales people which can guide customers to your website in a more organic way than by using typical ads.
If you are a small business owner and you would like to begin an affiliate program for your online business, take a look at the following tips and resources.
By: Marlene I. Urena
Social media has become a great tool for brands and small businesses to advertise their products and services. When creating ads online, it is preferable to make content that distinguishes your company from its competitors. If you are interested in how to make memorable social media ads and appeal to a larger audience, here are a few tips: 1. Keep up with Trends: Creating relevant content is essential for business success. Staying on top of current events is important because certain topics may become either sensitive or important to address. It would be possible to gear your company’s ads to your audience in a better and more appropriate way if your company is knowledgeable on what is going on in the world. That way, your ads will have a lasting impact on your audience, and anyone being affected by the events occurring in the external environment. 2. Utilize Tools Available on Platforms: Different social media platforms have different tools available to their users. Instagram, Facebook, and Snapchat have Stories, where people can share live updates of their daily activities. Some platforms even allow you to broadcast live videos, where you can interact with your users in real-time. It is important to use these features because they can expand your company’s reach. Different people prefer to interact in different ways, so using a variety of tools on each platform can increase engagement. These tools are also great for promotion because it makes the experience more personal. If people are seeing content and engagement, they will feel valued as a consumer and become more attracted to your company. 3. Have a Laugh: Using humor is a great way to differentiate your company’s strategy from others. Making your audience laugh creates a more personal experience and draws them to feeling comfortable. Cracking a joke or including a clever pun in your ads can make them memorable as well, but it is important to make sure the humor is in good taste. Ensuring that the humor used is appropriate and not offensive is vital to the effectiveness of the ads. 4. Balance Your Colors: People love ads that can catch their eye. Using color is a great way to add some vibrancy to your ads and appeal to your audience. You should use colors that complement each other and make sure your ads have a clean look. Too much color may also be a problem, so make sure there is a good balance or else the ad can become an eyesore. While every company needs a marketing strategy to be competitive, these tips provide some insight on how to make your ads top quality. By understanding the audience and their interests as changes continue to occur in the world, your content’s relevance and continuous impact are guaranteed.
By: Johana M. Caba, M.A.
When you officially open your small business, your focus is on growth and success. Like everything else in life, sometimes growth and success hit a plateau. There are many things that you can do to get out of a growth plateau. One of the things that you can work on is developing a social media marketing strategy for your small business. Below, I discuss 5 tips that to help small businesses grow their following, increase their reach and get more leads. 1. Engage on Your Social Media Platforms: One of the most important things to do on Social Media is engage. You can engage with your followers and your community by commenting, liking and sharing posts from others. It is important to engage because it creates a human presence for your business. By engaging with your followers and your community, you are building relationships with others that will help your business grow through word-of-mouth on social. These relationships that you build with others can also help you generate leads for your business and get your posts to reach more people. 2. Increase Organic Reach: Your organic reach means the amount of people that see your posts without boosting posts or using ads. You can do this in a number of ways. For example, you can add relevant hashtags to your posts like #BeautySalon or #HairDresserMagic or #SocialMediaMarketing. These are community specific hashtags that will ensure your posts get grouped with other posts pertaining to the same community. This makes it easier for others to find you posts. Another tip for increasing organic engagement is to tag others. If you partnered with someone for a post, or are sharing something that relates to a specific person or brand, then tag them. By tagging the person you are making sure that they see it, like it, comment and hopefully share it with their audience. It is also important for you to understand the platform. If you are on Twitter, then more posts per day will help you me seen by your followers and found by others in your community. If you are on Instagram, then higher quality photos and content on Stories will help you be seen. It all depends on the algorithm of the platform. For 2020, Pinterest released an advertising guide detailing the full-funnel platform in which you can guide your customers from the planning stages to the purchasing stages.
3. Increasing Reach with Paid Ads: A component of both organic and paid reach is an editorial calendar. Editorial calendars help us plan out our campaigns, promote our products and services, and curate content to diversify our feeds. We use these calendars to help us plan and execute our campaigns, and we also use them to help us track our analytics. By knowing what works best with our audiences, we have an advantage when it comes to increasing our reach. With paid ads, you can target your specific audience and increase the reach of your posts. This is an easy way to reach more people for a small amount of money because you don't need that much money to reach more people when boosting posts on social media. For more help with creating an integrated marketing communication strategy to help your small business grow, download my IMC Guide for Small Business.
4. Get Leads with Call-to-Action Buttons & Ads: Like I mentioned in tip #3, ads can help you increase your reach. But, they can also help you get more leads by creating lead generation specific ads on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. You can also create ads to lead people to your landing page which can be your website homepage or product page on your website. For more information on lead generation visit this Cloudways article on everything about lead generation through social media. 5. Create Valuable Content & Be Consistent: I think that the most important component of growing your small business with social media marketing is creating valuable content and being consistent. Sometimes life gets in the way and it's hard to be consistent, but the more consistent you are with a posting schedule, the more your business will grow. You can use editorial calendars to plan your content and use scheduling platforms like Hootsuite and Buffer to schedule your posts ahead of time. By scheduling your posts you make sure that you are being consistent, you stay in the loop, and you can use curated content to give yourself more time to create valuable content. For more tips on creating strategic content read our post, 3 Best Tips for Creating Strategic Content. |
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