Online Marketing | Web Design | Social Media
This is one of the most frequent question I get asked by my clients or small business owners I meet.
What do you do when you are poor with time and you can’t afford to employ someone to look after your social media profiles? Check my new blog post on BIZ yourself and find out how you can manage all your Social Media platforms effectively.
Your Facebook page looks sleek and engaging, you have some likes, you are posting regularly…yet no one is commenting, liking or sharing your posts…what’s happening???
It’s normal to feel disappointed when you are investing your resources into something without real success. So how can you to fix this? Easily!
First – we’ve all been in a similar situation. Do you remember times when you started something and it took a while to master it? Persistence is a key to any success, and Facebook is not an exemption.
But you gotta do it right…here are ways to boost likes, shares and comments on your Faceboook page:
Grab their attention
The best way to do this is to catch readers’ eyes. We are drawn to images. So instead of text posts think how you can incorporate your message into a photo, diagram, video etc. Such posts stand out more in news feeds and get more engagement. According to Facebook, posts that include a photo album, picture or video generate about 180%, 120% and 100% more engagement, respectively.
Ask questions
We all like to be heard and we just love sharing our opinions. Give you Fans a chance to engage with you by asking simple yet relevant questions. It’s also ‘an innocent’ way to survey your audience.
While questions tent to get less likes and shares they are fantastic for comments.
Tips: Fans prefer yes or no questions or brief answers rather than open-ended questions. Keep it simple, interesting and start with “What do you think…?”, “How many…?” or “Should….?”
Tell Fans what to do
If you want to receive likes, than ask your fans to like it. If you want them to share, tell them to share it. You’ll see many will follow your ‘instructions’.
Example: Have social media strategy is important. Like if you agree!
Timing is everything
You need to post when Facebook is buzzing – that’s in the afternoon and evenings. While people use Facebook in the morning (usually on public transport) it is highly unlikely that they will continue using it once they are at work. Engagement window of opportunity is little. As the day progresses and the post-lunch fatigue sinks in, more are likely to engage on Facebook – but the pick hour really start from 5pm. Make sure you join the buzz.
Weekends are also ideal time as many are glued to the screens. People have more time to engage, share, like, comment etc. Especially if you are posting something longer, this is a time to do it.
Show you feelings
We like to know that behind a Facebook page is an actual person. Express your feelings by using emoticons – so smile, cry, get angry…
Tell a story
People are interested to know who you are and what you are up to. Same goes for your business. Share what’s happening behind the scenes in your company. Share success stories of your clients and employees, development of your products, events… Don’t forget to add images and use milestones 🙂
Promote good causes
“Charitable” posts receive almost the highest engagement. But don’t just share charitable endeavours of others. Get involved! Participate in fundraising events and share your results on your Facebook Page.
If you use these 8 simple techniques, you will soon see boost in your Facebook page engagement. And with more engagement your fan base will grow as well.
What are your best techniques to boost likes, shares and comments on your Facebook page? Share them in comments below or drop by my fan page? I’m dying to know!
Last time I wrote about how to identify your perfect customer and ‘build-up’ your Customer Avatar; now let’s look how this applies to social media marketing.
You’ll be relieved to know that the same rules apply in social media marketing and online marketing in general, as they do for marketing and advertising offline. The only difference, and advantage, is that online marketing is much more targeted because of the various software abilities which let you choose who you want to advertise to, e.g. gender, location, age, interests etc. You can also measure your results more tightly and tweak your campaigns accordingly.
For example; if you place an advertisement in a newspaper, you don’t know who will buy the paper and read your advertisement. You can only assume that your target audience have seen it. With online marketing tools, you can choose to whom your ad will be presented to. You can measure impressions, any click through and various other elements. You can also easily change any elements of your ads and split test various versions.
The more in-depth knowledge you have about your perfect customer, the more you can target your social media marketing campaigns. This means that it’s easier to determine what works and what doesn’t, which makes online marketing more cost effective and flexible.
So, you already know how to identify your perfect customer but what happens when your fans are not your targeted audience?
This is quite common problem when you’re starting with Facebook and other social media platforms. At the start you need to get the number of your Likes up and the easiest way to do that is to ask all your friends to like your page. While they will be engaging with you regularly and be great advocates for your brand, they might not buy anything from you. You will be spreading your reach through friends of their friends; however it might take time to finally get exposure to your targeted audience who will actually buy from you.
If you are in this position, you need to take steps to change demographics of your fan base.
How do you do that?
There are various ways but the most obvious and quick one is paid Facebook advertising. When creating ads on Facebook you can choose who to target with such precisions as to age, gender, location, interest etc. Facebook Ads (sponsored stories, promoted posts) are one of the most targeted advertising tools online and I guess they supersede any offline ads as well. Incorporate them with your email marketing campaign and you have just created possibly the most targeted audience for your business.
You know that I’m a great advocate of free traffic but you need to start making profit, so you need to change your audience as soon as possible. Setting aside a conservative budged to start with will make these changes faster. And once you are talking to your targeted audience you will see that engagement with your page will increase and so will your profits. The beauty of Facebook Ads is that you are in control of your campaign. If set up right, you will soon start making profit. Once you discover a lead generation formula that works for you, the sky will be your limit.
I know starting with paid advertising on Facebook can be a daunting experience. If you don’t know where to start or if you’ve tried it in the past but it didn’t quite work, we are here to help you.
We can either run you Facebook ad campaigns for you or coach you to create your own ads that perform.
Imagine what a good Facebook lead generation strategy will mean for your business….
Contact us to discuss your strategy
Have you ever heard this saying: “You can have the best offer but if you are pitching to the wrong audience you will not make any sales”?
Knowing who your customers are is essential for any marketing campaign.
To know them means to know who they are as a person, what they like and respond to, what makes them angry, what excites them. Once you know them you will know exactly how to advertise to them, which will result in making more sales.
It sounds pretty easy, so why are many businesses still struggling?
Most business owners fail to plan their marketing and as a result they are too many things to too many people.
This means that lack of clarity and identifying who your targeted audience will result in shooting your message to potentially wrong audience or sending mixed messages. Imagine for a second, that you are selling designer women’s fashion with a high end price tag and you are advertising your products in a teen fashion magazine. You will not make many sales. Teens may grow to like your brand but are probably not in a position to buy from you yet. If you would advertise exactly the same products in a magazine that targets women with high end earnings, your sales would be skyrocketing.
How do you determine your target audience?
This is as easy as asking yourself few questions but it’s probably one of the most important tasks you need to complete as a business owner before you start any marketing campaign. In fact, it is so important that you should do that before you even start your business.
If you haven’t done so, you need to do it as soon as you stop riding this article. I cannot stress enough how important this is. Without in-depth knowledge about your target audience, you can forget about successful marketing campaign.
So, where do you start?
I’m confident that in general you know who your products or services are for. To be really effective in advertising you need to get few steps further and really get to know these people. You need to consider:
All these details are important and will make your marketing campaign successful. The better you know your targeted audience the better you can communicate with them. Once you have a good understanding of them then you will know exactly how to appeal to them. Makes sense?
Then once you know them you have to become them. This means that when you are creating your marketing campaigns, you need to put yourself in a position of your audience and consider your add from their perspective. You need to step in their shoes.
The easiest way to achieve this is to create you perfect customer Avatar. If this brings blue tall creatures to your mind, you are half way there. Because imagination is important part of creating your customer Avatars, you need to get ‘under their skin’
Your perfect customer Avatar is a list of traits that your ideal client portrays. It’s their inner desires, hidden fears and all the things that keeps them awake at night.
Your avatar represents a whole group of people that you identified as target audience. When you communicate with your target audience, you always talk to your Avatar. This means you always communicate in first person, like you are talking only to your Avatar. If you studied your targeted audience well, then each person will identify themselves in your Avatar.
Everything you communicate to your prospect market is designed around your Avatar and speaks directly to your Avatar, which makes it the most valuable marketing tool for your business.
Creating your Avatar might feel a bit strange at the start but it’s actually heaps of fun. They are like your marketing campaign buddies that you can turn to every time you are creating ads. Visualize yourself looking at your ads from your customer avatar perspective and take into account all relevant factors.
So now that you know the secret to successful marketing, all you need to do is get thinking and spend couple of hours considering your Avatar.
I’ve created a report for you that will take you through the process and the most common questions you need to ask yourself to create your ideal customer avatar. You can download it HERE.
Now that you know your ideally customer, keep the Avatar in mind anytime you are communicating with your target audience, whether it be via ads, blog post, videos, social media…and you will notice it’s sometimes easier to talk to one person then a big group.
I would like to know what you think about Avatars and how will you use this secret powerful marketing weapon.
As a business owner you are probably always on the lookout of how you can increase your visibility and attract more customers. It’s true that paid advertising is the fastest and easiest way to achieve this. But in the great world of the Internet, not all advertising needs to cost a lot of money to be efficient.
You probably heard about content marketing and if not, you need to read on, as content marketing is one of the best low-cost and high-return marketing forms that will get your business visible and increase your credibility.
The idea of content marketing is that you create a content that educates and/or entertains your target market. In return for sharing valuable information, your followers will reward you with their appreciation, trust and loyalty. Once such relationship is established, your educated followers will buy from you, even though you haven’t really pushed to sale to them. How wonderful is that.
This cute image explains how it works (courtesy of Aweber)
Content marketing is very popular with online marketers and if it works for them, then it works for anyone who has a website or uses social media marketing.
How to make it work for you?
The reason why many don’t tackle content marketing is the good old excuse of not having enough time. It’s a bit of a BS, as content marketing can all be done in advance, all you need to do is plan ahead. So the first step to make it work for you is, you’ve guessed it:
Planning
It’s simple. Answer these questions and you have your plan:
Once you answer these questions, you have a plan. Now all you need to do is write your content.
Writing
The most efficient and productive way of performing tasks is to bulk them up. So, if you need to write content, the most time-efficient way is to sit down and write as much as you can in a given time. Once you have the content ready, then schedule it for posting. This way you will save heaps of time and you know how it is, once the pen (fingers J) runs smoothly, you don’t want to stop the creative flow.
Consider setting up one day in a week; let’s say Monday morning for 2 hours, to write one blog post, email newsletter and 10 Facebook posts. Then schedule them in WordPress and Facebook and you are done for the next week with your content. Now you can concentrate on other aspects of your business.
Think about which day best suits you to write. Unless you really have to, refrain from opening your email of Facebook until allocated time is over and you have some content.
Content marketing does not stop with writing and publishing. The next important step is:
Monitoring and responding
You need to regularly check all platforms where you publish your content for any comments, questions, so that you can respond in a timely manner. Especially when it comes to social media you need to respond quickly to elevate engagement, which prolongs longevity of your posts and give you more reach and exposure.
Set up reminders to check your posting platforms daily and for social media make sure you are available for at least 30min after your posts are publish, so that you can promptly engage with fans. Then set your smart phone with push notifications to follow any comments throughout the day. (Warning – create a discipline to only check business account notification, to avoid getting pulled into private conversations and checking upon your friends – this can wait until later. You have business to run J
Remember, a good marketing strategy combines paid and free advertising. Content marketing is not only cheap; it allows your potential customers to get to know you and build relationship with you. It also helps you build credibility by educating your market and presenting your product and services.
If you are already using content marketing, share what works for you in comments below.