Posted by Are you starting up your own business? Are you wondering about marketing? Whether you should take up the mammoth job of managing social media for your brand? You don’t know where to start?
I got you! 😃
If you’re new to social media and all its powers and responsibilities, it can definitely be overwhelming. But don’t let it scare you off from marketing your brand. You just need to follow a few steps and you’ll be good to go!
1. Plan
Setting up a plan or a goal is your first step to conquering this task. This shows that you have a clear-cut pathway mapped out for the next few weeks or months. There are so many different goals to choose from. Some combine a few goals and some change their goals based on current trends. For beginners, the most sensible goal would be to drive engagement. This plan ensures that whatever decisions you take to get to a point where engagement is at its peak, will ultimately benefit you. Then you can move on to goals like increasing your conversion numbers and the likes.
You can check out this article to know about planning a strategy — How to create a social media strategy for small businesses
2. Choose
This second step is super important and works as the foundation of your entire marketing strategy. You need to find out where most of your audience is or will potentially be. Well of course potentially you’ll be big and famous on all platforms but it is best to start small. A platform like Facebook can be the easiest way to garner more customers and followers. You can create pages and groups to give them the feeling of community. Once you’ve amassed a strong audience, you can slowly move on to different goals in your marketing strategy AND start building your presence on other social platforms.
3. Link
Linking is another important step. Have you noticed that if you like a certain website you find yourself checking out their socials to see if they might be true to their vibe? Or if you find a cool shop on socials and you want to see more of their stuff on their website so you look for a link?. Making it easy for users to navigate and reach both of these platforms is an extremely smart and easy thing to do.
Once people know that you’ve taken an effort to cover all bases, they’ll know you’re for real and trust you all the more. The best part about this step is that it does not even take time. Just 5 minutes and you’re good to go! 😀
4. Optimize
This step is basically a continuation of the previous one. Once you have all your platforms linked to each other, it’s important to make sure you have a smart, informative, and concise bio on your home pages. It should include your industry, a nice catchy tagline, the website link, and some contact information. Keeping your bio short and smart invites more people to explore the page more. If the 1st look at your bio and page isn’t captivating, you might lose a few potential customers.
5. Theme
The next step is understanding the kind of theme your audience will be drawn toward. You can keep it classic, vintage, modern, or abstract. Themes are really important if your main social platform is Instagram. Here you get to play with the Grid and showcase your creativity. If you have a very distinct theme, it is so much more likely that people will remember you compared to just a regular-themed layout. And if you’re just starting out, you’re gonna need to pull out all the stops. In another article, I’ve written about the most trending grid layouts. You can try them out and see which one suits your vibe the most. Here’s the article — 4 grid layouts to make your Instagram feed look fab!
6. Engage
This step is very crucial for your audience growth. You need to make sure that your content is engaging enough. Engagement is basically getting people to like, share and comment on your posts or stories. Stories especially have so many engagement stickers and tools. If your content is engaging, you’ll find that your marketing, even if it’s just a very small portion, will be done via this engagement and eventually, through word of mouth. You absolutely want people to be talking about you all over social media. Once you get a hang of this, once you get a sense of what kind of posts your audience most responds to, you can keep building from there and branching out creatively.
Here are some quick tips to increase engagement — 8 powerful tips to increase social media engagement in 2022
7. Quality over quantity
This tip usually works in most aspects of life in general. But with social media, it’s fairly important. While it’s important to post content often and consistently, you also need to make sure that your content isn’t irrelevant. Planning your content may take some time in the beginning but of course, once you get the hang of it, the process will flow smooth as butter. Making all your posts and stories about just the brand or business might get a bit monotonous and boring for your audience. Promoting your brand and products/services should maybe take up about 20–30% of all your content. The rest should consist of a mix of information about your industry, trending news, definitely memes, and maybe some customer testimonials.
8. Influencers
No, I don’t mean collaborating with influencers just yet. Of course, if you have the bandwidth and resources, by all means, go ahead. I mean that you should follow and like influencer accounts and pages. Specifically, influencers that work close to your niche. This way you’ll get any new information or updates relevant to your niche and you can reshare this among your own followers. Another important reason to follow influencers is that the platforms often use this information to provide suggestions. Based on algorithms, there are chances that your account or page will be suggested to new followers of that influencer.
Bonus Tip — Scheduler
GET A SCHEDULER! Seriously, I cannot stress this enough. Using a scheduler is just going to make all these points I’ve discussed above so much easier. Personally, I like Crowdfire because their UI is so easy and their features basically save so much time. With a scheduler like Crowdfire, you can schedule your posts to get published to your social media platforms, track and respond to mentions of your brand, get curated content to fill in your calendar, calendar view, analytics, and so much more!
I’ve already written a little article about how you can use Crowdfire to start up your Social Media journey! Here it is — A guide to using Crowdfire to level up your small business