Currently, social media is growing by 12 new users every second, largely because of people’s need to connect and communicate. This is an opportunity for any business owner to connect with more customers and also build brand awareness.
In this short article, I provide you with 3 steps to social media marketing success. You’ll see that one step alone doesn’t do much for your business. You need all three working together.
1. Build Your Audience
This should be obvious, but social media relies on first building an audience. If you don’t have an audience then no one is going to read your posts.
This means you need to adjust your goals in the early stages of social media marketing. If you expect to drive sales right away, then you’re going to be disappointed. Instead, focus on tactics to build your target audience first.
Distributing content by sharing it on social media is an excellent tactic to build brand awareness, followers, and establish relationships early on in the sales cycle.
If you want to accelerate this invest in some paid ads which can be effective on Facebook.
2. Engage Your Audience
The main reason people use social media is to connect with other people. With this in mind, if you really want to turn strangers that visit your Facebook page into friends and these friends into customers, you need to engage with them. In other words, if someone comments about a post or shares a post, respond.
To be successful, you must engage your audience with the right content, at the right frequency, to maintain the attention of your target market.
3. Convert Your Audience
Finally, we get to the step we all tend to focus on: conversion. As I mentioned earlier in step 1, it’s not realistic to expect conversions when you’re just starting out with social media and you do not yet have an audience. It’s also not realistic to expect conversions if you are not yet engaging with your audience as explained in step 2 above. As you can see, the order of these steps matters greatly.
Build, engage, and convert are the three steps to success on social media. The speed at which this occurs will depend on your strategy.
Over the years, I have helped many contractors with these steps.
The best way to accomplish steps 1 to 3 is education.
In other words, invest in educating consumers about the services you offer.
For instance, if you offer a mold removal service, provide your audience with information about mold, what it is, how to prevent it, health and mold, etc. The best way to begin this process is to list out all the questions that consumers have about your services and focus on creating content that answers those questions. The best content that resonates strongly for fans of restoration companies includes written articles (blogs), before and after pictures, on the job pictures, videos, and for some contractors, inspirational posts!
Focus on finding the right types of content (informational, educational, inspirational, entertaining) for your social media, and then step 3 will occur because your followers will trust you and contact you when they need your services.