How to Use Social Media Marketing to Grow Your Sales

Facebook just recently hit the 2 billion user milestone. That’s nearly one-third of the entire planet’s population!

With numbers like this, there is no longer any question that social media is an absolute must in today’s marketing mix. However, gaining significant traction requires a well-informed approach. We live in a time when big data has a significant influence over business decisions. Social media is no exception.

Growing Your Audience

When it comes to social media, followers are everything. But there is more to audience size than the sheer number of followers; what is truly important is the size of an engaged audience that likes, comments, and shares your content. Audience engagement establishes the success of a social media page. In fact, Facebook and Instagram base the placement of most posts in a user’s newsfeed or timeline on post engagement and relevancy, so the quality of content is more important than the quantity.

The foundation to building an engaged audience is understanding what content that audience wants. For this reason, using social media monitoring sites is crucial. Tools like Klout enable you measure your social influence and see what is buzzing within your industry. Additionally, it shows trending topics and articles so you can see the most relevant content to include in your next post.

Taking a look into your audience’s demographics helps create a picture of what they engage with, what other related content they like, or what their interests are. Facebook Audience Insights reveals great information on your fans, like age, location, and even consumer buying behaviour.

Another way to create an engaged audience is by engaging with them first. Asking questions and posting content that invites conversation makes it more natural for followers to engage organically. Ask your audience to share their opinions, questions, suggestions, or stories in your posts.

The beauty of social media is that it allows instant interaction with your customers and followers, so be sure to respond to comments and questions. Interaction creates a sense of community, leading to a more engaged audience.

Follower engagement will lead to follower growth. Building an audience that is engaging with your content is much more important than just building volume, so be sure to evaluate your audience and track engagement results.

Capturing Intent with Keywords

Taking a lesson from SEO and incorporating keywords in your social media posts is a great way to both increase your audience reach and also ensure that your results are trackable. It is very important that your content is searchable so that it can reach users beyond your audience. Before posting any content, it’s best to do a little research and see what hashtags are trending and of real interest to people in your industry.

The easiest way to navigate through the analytical data is to compile the information into a single platform. Cyfe, for example, gives you an all-in-one dashboard where you can keep tabs on all of this information.

From here, you can track the social media metrics that are key performance indicators of your campaign. You can find which channels or platforms are getting you the most engaged audience, if your content is really engaging your audience, and what tactics are helping you make the most sales. Analyzing your audience’s social media usage patterns and preferences helps you gauge their intent and plan future content.

You can also dig out strategies that are getting results for other sites, especially your competitors, and determine whether you want to incorporate those strategies in your own campaigns.

Increasing Reach and Click Rates

Measuring and comparing the reach metric of social media posts shows not only how many followers saw a post, but also how many people outside of your current audience found the content through shares or searches.

Facebook includes tabs that display total reach or impressions for each post. Monitoring reach data also gives insight into which social media platform has the highest interaction or performs best with your audience. The same tabs on Facebook also collect information based on how many times the content was shared, which increases reach to outside audiences.

Click rates for links included in posts is another way to track engagement and reach. These clicks may be to draw more traffic to a website – especially if you back that up with sponsored posts and social media advertising. Keeping track of click rates indicates how many followers are genuinely interested in the content and wanted to learn more or purchase. Again, most social media sites offer this information, and using a centralized dashboard or spreadsheet to assemble all the metrics into one place helps you clearly understand what links, posts, and sites are drawing the most interaction.

Adopt a Done – For – You Process to Achieve Higher Sales

Focusing on key areas that relate directly to growth and engagement while also keeping track of posts, likes, and comments can seem like a daunting task, especially when multiple platforms are involved.

The ultimate goal of social media campaigns is to increase brand awareness leading to more customers and higher sales. The goal is to recoup, say, $2,000 of gross profit for every $1,000 of Ad Spend. That way, the more you spend on Ads, the more gross profit you make.

Patterson Digital Marketing offers proven Facebook and other social media marketing for clients. Our package includes:
•Facebook Business Page set up and design linked to your website
•posts to the page – 10, 30, 60 and 90 posts per month
•LIKE campaign set up, design and management
•Facebook Ads Campaign set up, design and management.

There is no long term contract involved – we operate on a monthly retainer and you can cancel at any time by giving 7 days written notice not to renew your retainer. Invest month by month until you wish to stop.

If you want to boost your customer numbers and sales with Social Media marketing, CALL US on (027) 489 5009 or email chris@pattersondigitalmarketing.com and we’ll get you on the road to success.

Chris Kirkham