Using social media is one of the fastest ways to advertise your business. There are several techniques you can use to maximize your marketing on popular social media sites. If you follow these five basic guidelines, your social media advertising will be more efficient and effective in the world of cloud marketing.
1. Get to Know Your Customer Profiles: or, in other words, your primary target consumers who may potentially purchase your product or service. The more information you have on each of them, the more effective your marketing strategies will be. The social media sites on which you want to advertise include a wide and diverse user base.
- Demographics: Know age groups, genders and interests, and understand the relationship between these factors.
- Geography: Determine what parts of the country/world have the highest traffic on certain social media sites.
- Usage Habits: In conjunction with demographics and geography, determine when highest traffic occurs during the day. In general, most people with social media accounts in the United States will visit social media sites Tuesday through Thursday between the hours of 10am and 4pm. However, make sure your posting corresponds to your target consumers’ usage habits.
2. Monitor Branding on Social Media: If you advertise your brand effectively, people will not only remember the brand itself, they will also remember the products and services your brand represents.
- Observe Brand Conversation: Take note of what the competition says and use it as a learning opportunity.
- Determine Brand Relevance: In the conversations you observe, does your brand have a place in those forums? You may need to find other locations within the social media site where your brand has a greater chance of reaching out to more potential customers.
- Establish Trust: Once you’ve observed conversations, participate in them. Users will be more likely to invest in your business if they feel you have shown genuine interest in them.
3. Assess the Social Media Atmosphere: Your advertising is essentially an extension of your character.
- Consider whether you would want to advertise at a site where there are negative or obscene ads.
- If there are ads whose content you find unappealing, they may also offend the kind of customers you’re looking for. Go where you want and go where you’re wanted.
- Develop Relationships: Create your own account on the social media site and build a network of friends and colleagues. Don’t just use your account for the sole purpose of advertising.
4. Simplicity is Key: On social media sites, you are catering to people with short attention spans and an eye for quality.
- Say the most important part of your message within the first few words/seconds, as users will tune out or click on something else quickly if they’re not interested.
- Don’t weave two complicated ideas together. Clarity and conciseness are extremely important. You may need to conduct a field study to determine if your ads are too confusing.
- Keep the ad engaging and have a strong call to action. Potential customers get bombarded with hundreds or even thousands of ads every day. Ask creative friends and colleagues to help you produce powerful ads that give customers a reason to need your products.
5. Contextualize Your Ideas and Attract Customers with a Story: This applies especially to social media. Ads must inspire and not just educate, but keep in mind that you’re reaching out to many users with a wide range of mentalities and attitudes.
- Incorporate art and/or music and tie ideas together with an interesting and even personal story.
- Write Great Content: Excellent content increases the chances of people liking your ads. If people like your ads, they may also share them.
Following these basic steps will make your ads more appealing and reach a targeted audience on social media sites. Social media advertising is a great way to break into cloud marketing, build a large customer base and develop valuable business relationships with people from all over the world.
