From Zero to Hero: A Guide to Boosting Your Business with Social Media

Intro

Social media is a free-to-use channel to expand your business. With over four billion active users, social media are a powerful marketing channel to increase brand awareness and boost conversion rates.

But the big questions are, 'Is social media relevant to growing your newborn business?' 'How to use social media to escalate your business from zero to hero?' or 'What are the best practices to try?'

If those questions have been bothering you, this article can help you discover the answers. You need the right strategy to achieve your business goals. So, here's a guide to boosting your business with social media.

90% of marketers agree that social media is incredibly crucial for their clients and business. They value social platforms as powerful marketing channels that can generate positive results.

(Image via duct tape marketing)

Without further ado, you can consider the following seven best practices to grow your business from zero to hero. Let's dive in!

1. Define What Goals You Want to Achieve

First and foremost, define the business goals you want to achieve on social media. This is a crucial step to guide you to make targeted and personalized content to generate the desired results.

Often many businesses incorporate social media marketing to expand their reach and increase brand awareness. If those are your goals, focusing on creating high-quality and valuable content is your main task.

However, finding the right balance to create informative, entertaining, and promotional content is crucial. You can create videos, infographics, or user-generated content to start your journey.

Another option is to create a post consisting of a link to your site to drive people there. Moreover, if you want to generate leads and sales, leveraging targeted advertisements is an option to take.

2. Observe Your Target Audience

Observing your target audience is crucial to help you create a campaign and content that resonates best with them. You have a higher possibility of achieving your business goals with targeted and personalized content.

One way to understand your target audience is by demographic and psychographic segmentation. You can discover their needs, pain points, and content preferences to develop a more effective campaign.

For instance, you need different content to attract B2B companies and younger individuals. You need to consider the type of content, language, and tone.

Reaching B2B companies may be better to use semi-formal language to maintain professionalism, while non-formal language with a tone may be more appropriate for targeting younger audiences.

If you know how to approach your targeted audience, you can provide content that can engage them. Also, understanding audiences allows you to improve customer experience and stay ahead of the competition.

3. Develop a Targeted Content Strategy

A content marketing strategy helps you to manage and plan your content production, optimization, and distribution. With a comprehensive content strategy, you can work more efficiently and optimize your content to reach targeted goals.

When creating a content strategy, you need to consider several essential things. You must know your target audience, define content themes, create a content calendar, craft quality content, and analyze your performance. Here is how to execute them.

Understanding your target audience:

Identifying your target audience allows you to create content according to their preference. Besides audience segmentation, you can also use social media analytics and customer feedback to understand your audience better.

Defining your content themes:

Decide the best content for your target audience. They can use videos, images, and blog posts. Also, search for potential keywords to make targeted content. You can leverage using third-party tools like Ranktracker.

Developing a content calendar:

Growing your business on social media requires you to create and distribute content constantly. You may get overwhelmed by this process, so developing a content calendar is a must to manage your tasks. You can note what content to create and what time to post.

Investing in quality content:

High-quality and valuable content matters. For example, you can create product videos and infographics or show social proof to attract and engage with audiences. Besides, valuable content helps you build trust and credibility.

Analyzing performance:

Your job doesn't stop after distributing content. You still need to track your content performance and make adjustments wherever possible to optimize your results.

4. Enrich Your Feeds with Visuals

Social media relies heavily on visuals. Having your brand's identity is vital to creating a strong brand presence and standing out in a vast realm of the digital landscape. In this case, you need to create images or videos to boost your business.

You can get many content ideas from competitors. But make sure to incorporate your creativity to define your brand from theirs. Here are some things to note when creating visual content for your brand's social media.

Focus on creating high-quality images, photos, and videos (preferably HD)
Craft eye-catching graphics that scream your brand's identity
Create short and story-driven videos to engage audiences better
Share social proof such as customer ratings, feedback, and testimonials

Visual content is preferable on social media. Businesses and users are 40x more likely to share visual content (videos and images) on the platforms. Besides, you can use videos to enhance your email marketing.

5. Engage with Your Audiences

Social media is not a one-way street. Customers that interact with businesses on social media spend 20% to 40% more money on their products. Many social platforms provide interactive features to help you engage deeper with audiences.

For instance, Instagram allows you to create polls, Q&A, and other interactive posts to evoke audience feedback. Or, you can respond to their comments and messages if your platform doesn't have many features.

To make your social media more interactive, consider sharing user-generated content (reviews and testimonials) to build a sense of community. Besides, you can run contests or giveaways and create branded hashtags.

6. Leverage the Ad Features

If you have enough budget and want to boost your business quickly, using paid ad features is worth trying. 49% of customers aged 18 to 29 confess to purchasing anything in response to a social media ad.

Each social media platform has its paid ad features. So you must read each ad type and its regulations carefully to find the ideal one for your brand. But overall, are some ways you can use ad features to boost your business on social media:

Targeted ads: Reach audiences based on demographics, interests, behaviors, and more.
Video ads: Provide short videos to promote your brand or product, effectively engaging and increasing conversion.
Carousel ads: Advertise multiple products in a single ad to provide a more comprehensive view of your offering.
Story ads: Reach mobile-first audiences effectively to attract and engage them, also best for pulling in younger audiences.
Remarketing: Re-engaged those who have seen interest in your products, including audiences who have visited your website or added items to their cart.

7. Collaborate with Influencers

Another way to boost your business quickly is by collaborating with influencers. With a massive community, influencers can immediately promote your brand to their followers and increase brand awareness.

You can collaborate to create sponsored posts, video collaborations, or reviews. However, finding an influencer that focuses on the same niche as your brand is important. This way, their audience can resonate with your product, and you reach the right people.

If you work with influencers, ensure to find the suitable ones who can promote your brand effectively. Besides, establish a clear agreement that draws a win-win solution for both parties to maintain a good relationship.

Takeaway

Social media is an irresistible marketing channel for businesses of all sizes. Major platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok provide free and paid features to help new-born businesses to thrive and meet their target audience.

A thing to note is that you must consistently track your content performance on social media's analytic page. You can also use third-party analytics for more in-depth analysis and reporting. They also provide insights to help you optimize your content.

After all, the above seven best practices can guide you to rule social media. Keep yourself alert to the latest news, marketing strategy and trends, and algorithm changes to stay relevant and ahead of the curve.

From Zero to Hero: A Guide to Boosting Your Business with Social Media