Utilising social media to market your business can prove incredibly effective. Not only can it increase the number of visitors and in turn customers using your website but it is also a powerful way to market promotions and heighten awareness of the services and/or goods you offer.
Social media can be a powerful tool, but if used incorrectly, it could end up costing you money.
In today’s economy everything seems to be costing us more money and with redundancies and a shortage of jobs this has resulted in many people and businesses being placed into debt, meaning UK debt is continuing to grow at an alarming rate. One of the ways in which businesses lose money is through incorrect use of social media; therefore the aim of this post is to show you where you are losing money and what you can do to prevent this kind of loss in the future.
● Contact information: one of the biggest mistakes businesses make is promoting their social media sites, but not including full contact information. Customers should be able to click onto your website, see your email address and telephone number and find it easy to contact you. If you do not provide this information, and as there is lots of competition on social media sites, you might find your prospective customer ends up using another company they find that did make it easy for customers to contact them.
● How you use social media: social media used to be effective in raising awareness of businesses only. Now, however it can be used for selling and producing leads, among other things. Not to take advantage of this is to effectively lose money.
● Calls to Action: these are an extremely effective way to generate leads and increase sales. However, to work properly they need to have likeable and engaging content, encouraging people to like and share and follow the links you provide. Make sure your calls-to-action are unique and appealing.
● Testing paid social media advertising: many people are choosing to promote their company through advertising it on social media; however, they make the mistake of not testing this first. This often means that they invest in ineffective advertising and waste money. All advertising should be tested organically first to make sure it is worth investing in.
● Paying for likes and followers: nothing good comes of this, most of the time all you will acquire are fake followers, which is completely pointless.
● Ignoring feedback: It is essential that you use social media to listen to your customers, to respond to feedback especially negative feedback and try to appease your customers, otherwise this will reflect negatively on your business.
● Monitor your competitors: to see what is working effectively for them so that you can try to adopt some of the same ideas to your own business.
● Apply a strong social media strategy and utilise your time effectively on social media sites. A good strategy and effective use of time will engage more people to your company helping you to develop relationships.
● Keep your social media site updated: the goods/services you offer, the prices, your contact information, should all be completely up to date.
● Scheduled content: when you schedule content to appear on your social media page you need to go back and check to see how effective it was in engaging the audience, so that you can use this to create more effective posts.
● Get a professional to help: if you have no idea what you are doing or do not have the time to invest in social media, hire a professional to help, though this will cost you money, it could potentially make you much more.
Follow these guidelines to make sure your social media campaign costs you as little as possible, while increasing your customers and helping to maximise your profits.
