Improve Sales with Social Media Marketing
If social media were a country, it would be the largest and the most populated place on earth. Virtually, it is! People across the globe use social networks to connect with their friends and social media and find information related to their interests, likes, and dislikes.
85% of US consumers use social media, while 80% of consumers prefer connecting to brands through social networks. They find and follow companies and brands they love (to buy from).
Facebook and Instagram
Both Facebook and Instagram are owned by Facebook. And both stand high in the list of most used and most popular social networking platforms. Facebook has been on top for quite a long time. But Instagram has been growing gradually over the years.
Did you know, Instagram grew more than 10 times since 2013? Back then, it had 130 million active users. But today, it has more than a billion active users. With a billion monthly active users, Instagram is the second most engaged social platform (first is, of course, Facebook).
Smart businesses make smart use of these social networks to market and sell their products. You, too, can.
Here in this post, described are some of the ways to boost your sales through Instagram and Facebook marketing –
1. Use Creative Hub by Facebook
The image, video or any other graphic used for marketing/advertising is called a “creative”. Facebook facilitates marketers with its indigenous Facebook Creative Hub tool that allows them to bring their ad ideas to life.
Each creative on your Facebook has a huge and direct impact on the performance of your update or ad. If the creativity level doesn’t match the ad format or doesn’t click in the mind of the audience – it is of no value.
Image Link: https://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/facebook-creative-hub-how-to-step-3-800.png
Facebook has developed this free tool to help you to achieve your sales targets with brilliantly designed ad graphics.
Apart from that, the Creative Hub tool allows you to test different versions of your creative in multiple formats before it goes live. In short, the tool enables high-performance ads that perform well on the web as well as mobile.
2. Split Test Tool for Better Ad Distribution
With the Split Test tool, you can test the performance of your ads by splitting a number of objectives such as audience, creative, delivery optimization, and product. It allows you to test different versions of your ad for multiple groups of an audience and helps you understand which selection has the potential to improve ROI and sales.
For example, iCustomLabel customizes labels and stickers for individuals and businesses. Since it is a B2B and B2C environment, they technically have two types of audiences – commoners and organizations.
For them, the Split Test can be a way to find out which audience group engages with their posts and advertisements and plan their future posts/ads accordingly.
As soon as Split Test is over, one can generate a report and discover insights about your best-performing ad set. Here, you can learn how to set up a split test tool from Facebook.
3. Build an Emotional Bonding
The man is a social animal. The man is an emotional animal as well. We are all driven by emotions. We make friends based on our emotional bonding.
So, if as a brand you want to connect well and build trust with your audience, shift your focus on finding emotional cues. Here the quality and type of content you create matters a lot.
Learn the art of storytelling – an art of telling stories that people can relate to and are close with. The story gets your content shared. Stories related to pets, babies, success, entertainment, cooking, heartbreak and some kind of solution often get high engagement on social media.
People engage more when they find an emotional connection with your story. Without emotional bonding, you would not be able to make much of your social media marketing.
4. One-Second Stories
More than 400 million people watch stories on Instagram every day. But it is a hard-to-win battle to keep people interested throughout your stories on Instagram. Keep in mind that the first 8.25 seconds are crucial for engagement because after that a user tends to lose interest.
Compile multiple 1-second video clips to create video stories of 10 seconds or longer. That’s how you maximize your story views and manage to gain the crucial 8.25 seconds attention span.
Here is a helpful guide to creating 1-second video clips for your Facebook and Instagram Stories.
For longer duration videos, you could use IGTV which for many marketers is a tool to boost visibility for their products; educate or entertain an audience, and generate views, leads and ultimately, sales.
When you post videos on IGTV, you can add links in the video description in addition to an actionable CTA to encourage watchers to visit your website, ultimately adding to increased sales. Focus on making every item seen in your video available to your users. There are many tools –such as Curalate’s Showroom – which you can use to create your virtual showroom on Instagram.
5. Tell Followers about New Launches and Offers
Social media can be used as a platform to announce what’s new in your bouquet of offerings. You will need attractive, customized graphics for each new launch and offer. Caption your graphics with creative and appealing text along with a strong call to action (CTA).
It should be a persuasive combination of text and graphics. Text and graphics should complement each other.
The effectiveness of caption relies on the skills of your copy-editing skills. But to come up with graphics that engage well and wide, you could use tools.
You can use the web and mobile applications that come with free and pro features and allows you to add cool edits to your images. These tools are a great help if you are not comfortable and want to save your time working with Adobe Photoshop and other legacy image editing software applications.
You will need high-quality images that you can purchase from Shutterstock and other resources. There are many free tools as well such as Pexels and Pixabay from where you can download high-quality, royalty-free images for your social media.
6. Incorporate Social Media Management Tool
Managing Facebook and Instagram; taking care of notifications and user comments, responding to inbox messages, posting or scheduling updates, creating and running ads, and above all, analyzing the performance of activities on a brand page – is not an easy feat for individuals or a team.
Even if the tasks can be taken care of, it will eat up a good amount of your (or your resources’) time.
What you need is an advanced social media scheduling and management tool that allows you to create, schedule, and post your updates along with providing insightful details regarding the performance of your posts.
With SocialPilot’s easy-to-integrate application, you can link all your social networks in one place. Not just that, you can post updates across networks and generate performance reports using a single dashboard. Such applications aim to ease your day and save plenty of your time.
Bottom Line
Boosting engagement and sales requires you to be active and regular on your social network. Just a day’s non-activity can cause a massive decline in your engagement and reach, and affect your page’s performance in the long run.
Social media success depends largely on the strategies you develop for your business page. However, there is no denying that some strategies work and others don’t. You should always try to test and find out the best working strategy for your page.
If Type-A strategy (say, content or ad strategy) works, Type-B might not. If Type-A did well, see what else can be added or removed to boost its performance. If Type-B did not work, figure out a strategy called Type-C or better, move back to the Type-A. That’s how you fast forward your sales through social media.
