Use social media to boost your business
So you’ve put your brand out there on the big social media billboard but you haven’t generated one lead. And you’re beginning to doubt whether social media for business really works in South Africa.
Actually, social media for business is not about selling your brand or making a sale. It’s gathering information about your potential customers and providing them with engaging content that will get them to notice you. Your aim is to drive people into your sales funnel.
If you’re not having any success in generating leads for your business, you may be going about it the wrong way – you may be trying too hard sell to people rather than create engagement. Your need to develop a social media for business campaign that can help you to find out the following:
- What your target audience is interested in
- What products / services they may be interested in
- What their challenges or pain points are
- What you need to do to turn them into paying customers
Now let’s take a look at 5 reasons why you may be failing to get leads from social media:
- Your content has no value – Have you been pushing your product / service too hard? People are not interested in what you have to sell; they’re interested in how you can help them. The best way for you to provide them with this help is by offering them relevant and engaging content which addresses their concerns or interests and answers their questions.
- You don’t have calls-to-action or they aren’t clear enough – Entice people to go to your blog or website and make it easy for them to get there. For example, if you are an events company ask a question like: “Are you having an issue coming up with exciting ideas for your next event? We can assist you with our great concepts. Click here to find out more.”
- You aren’t using your social media platforms responsibly – Take some time to do the research about the social media platforms you are planning to run your campaigns on. Make sure you understand why people use them and what they are looking for when they are browsing the various platforms. Create a business profile that suits the platform and speaks to the people who are on it. Then always post content that attracts the attention of your audience in that specific space.
- It isn’t easy for people to share your content – One of the greatest aspects of social media is that it has the ability to make content go viral or at the very least get pretty wide coverage. However, you need to make it easy for people to spread the word for you. One, always make sure your content is interesting (yes, we keep saying this but it really is that important). Two, ensure your content is branded in some way or another so that people know that it’s yours. Three, make it easy for people to share your content – if they find it difficult in any way to share it, they will move on and share some else’s post.
- You’re not measuring how your social media for business campaign is performing – Analyse how your social media campaign is doing. The information will tell you when people are visiting your posts and which types of posts they’re visiting more frequently. By keeping a regular check on the analytics for your social media campaign, you will get a better understanding of where and how you could be generating more leads.
