Social media is an exceptionally powerful tool for promotional marketing among other facets and types of business. It is a digital hub that can serve as a marketing storefront with consumers visiting multiple times per day to browse, shop and unwind. It’s the perfect place to connect with and sell to ideal customers in your niche.
In addition to print marketing, social media can help build your brand and serves well as part of a marketing and sales strategy that targets brand awareness, increased discoverability, and opportunities for community building and brand loyalty. However, just because your brand is on social media doesn’t mean you are using it effectively.
The three most common mistakes are inconsistent posting, constantly selling or over selling, and not focusing on the proper platforms. Now, let’s look into what you should do in each of these areas.
1. Inconsistent Posting
There is no tried and true posting frequency that works across the board for all businesses on social media. Posting 3 times per week might be optimal for one company, and another finds that posting 14 times per week is their sweet spot. For any business, it’s essential to gauge what posting frequency resonates best with your ideal audience. Try out a few posting schedules and see which garners you the best engagement. Once you have that schedule, then you must stick to it.
Social media users need to be coached to know when to expect content from you; this allows them to seek out your content regularly when posted according to these expectations. Businesses that inconsistently post miss out on the opportunity of training their followers to engage with their brand on social media. Social media is heavily founded upon the idea of community building and this requires being organized, trustworthy, and consistent.
2. Constantly selling or overselling
Just because social media offers the direct ability to sell branded merchandise to ideal customers doesn’t mean that you should be selling to those customers with every post. Your priority should be on socializing and offering an outlet for followers to engage with business as well as others.
Use Facebook or Instagram as a way to humanize the business, interacting with users, showing what your business stands for and how it serves its customer base, as well as outside interests. This makes followers feel more a part of a community where each voice matters, then being forced into a sales pitch.
We recommend direct selling every 10th or 15th post. This is a good starting point that can be tuned based on audience engagement. Again once you find the sweet spot, consistency will be important.
3. Not limiting your platforms
It can be tempting to join every social media platform thinking you will reach the most people, and have the best results, but not every platform is treated equally. Your customers will naturally gravitate toward one or more platforms that align with their background. Depending on how niche the business is, this could be only a single platform, or all of them. Even if all platforms are used though, it’s likely that one receives better engagement.
Your time on each platform should directly align with the percent of your audience and their engagement on that platform. If there isn’t time to spread, adding more accounts will lead to poor quality content, inconsistency and ultimately hinder your reach.
Ready For Social Media?
With these 3 mistakes in mind, it’s time to readjust your social media strategy appropriately and get your promotional marketing back on track.
At Velocity, we help companies manage their brands. With 48 hour fulfillment and distribution, print and mail solutions, and custom e-commerce storefronts to manage promotional products, we are the mega-phone to your rally and we are ready to help share your voice.
Ready to build your brand? Give us a call, 888-372-3487 or contact us, today!