An Actionable Guide To Effective Social Media Marketing For Businesses

Social media is a powerful marketing tool, that works great for businesses too. It is an effective way to reach your target audience, build brand awareness, generate leads, foster customer relationships, and drive sales.

Despite how easily accessible social media is, a lot of businesses struggle with harnessing the power of this effective marketing tool to achieve their objectives.

In this article, you’d learn how 3 practical strategies you can apply to effectively use social media as a marketing tool that grows your business or any business you manage/work with. 

1. Understand your target audience:

This is the number one secret to a successful business because when you understand the people your business serves, it is easier to target them, get their attention, speak to them in the way they’d connect to you easily so, you can meet their needs and this would in turn foster a great relationship. 

Some questions to help you understand your target audience better;

• What is their demographics (age, gender, location, occupation)
• Why do they need your product/service?
• How will they feel when they interact with your products/ services?  
• Where do they go when they need such products?
• Why do they spend most of their time online?
• What is their purchasing power?

2. Optimize your profile

Optimizing your profile is simply making your the information about your business clear on your profile. This will help your target audience easily identify what you offer immediately they come across your page.

Tips for optimizing your profile:

• Have a your business name written boldly.
• Be specific with what you offer. For example, if you sell shoes, you can be more specific by writing “heels, sneakers & flats.
• Your business’ address/ location
• Contact information eg. WhatsApp/Phone number, link to website.
• Operating hours so customers know the best time to contact the business.
• Showcase your best sellers/offers (for platforms that allow you to highlight/pin posts).

3. Content Marketing

This simply means using content to help your ideal customer make an informed buying decision. 

When you leverage different forms of content to inform, educate, and inspire your prospective customers they begin to know, love and trust your business as one who cares about helping them. It also helps them see the value they get from the money they spend on your product/service.

Content Marketing Tips: 

• You can create content using these forms of content for your business;
• Educational: Teach about how your product can be used and the value they can get from the products/services. 
• Inspirational: Share things thatwill inspire them to acquire your product.
• Entertaining/fun: Share some fun relatable content while using your product.
• Promotional/Sales: Directly sell your product. Don’t forget to include your price in each post so, its easy for potential customers to make a decision. 

Building a business on social media is super effective but it can also be consuming. You can use a content calendar to stay organized and consistent with your content marketing effort. I have a free content calendar template on my portfolio, check out my portfolio here

Its also super important that every content you post should have a call-to-action that tells people the next step to take. 

I’m rooting for your business! Go establish your place on social media!