With more than 70% of all Americans on social media, your business, especially if you’re a small business, needs to be there too. Social media is critical to building brand awareness, generating leads, and ultimately converting them into sales. You know all this, but do you know which platforms best complement your products and services and which provide the best bang for your buck?
No matter what you sell, the number one place for your business to be, whether you’re big or small, is Facebook. Even with as much bad PR as it has gotten in recent months, about 2.6 billion people still use Facebook every month. In addition to reaching the most people, Facebook is relatively cheap to advertise on and allows your business to micro-target your audience. Like other platforms that have benefitted during the COVID pandemic, such as Amazon, Facebook is also functions as an online marketplace, making it ideal for advertisers. Finally, Facebook offers the best analytics among all social media platforms, meaning you can get a very good grasp on how your activity is affecting sales.
Instagram, a visual platform based entirely on photo and video posts and also owned by Facebook, is also becoming increasingly popular with advertisers. From Instagram Live to Instagram Stories, there are no shortage of tools your business can use to promote your services and products. Keep in mind that Instagram is built for mobile devices and since more artistic niches tend to excel on Instagram, and it may not be the best fit for all types of business. That stated, if you’re gonna be on Instagram make sure you have a good eye for detail and at least basic photography skills, so the photos and videos posted to your account are high-quality.
Twitter is great place to advertise, but it’s definitely not for all businesses. On Twitter, you can share short “tweets,” videos, images, links, polls and more. It’s also very easy to interact with users on the platform. However, if you’re a highly visual business or don’t have a blog, you may want to skip it. The companies that do well on Twitter already have a unique, on-brand voice on the platform, and many companies use this platform not for advertising, but primarily for corporate communications and customer service as consumers who are active on the platform often seek out companies to learn more about them or to express concerns or share praise about their products or services.
Once you have decided on a platform, or preferably platforms, there are a lot of different ways to convert your website traffic. Trust is a crucial. It’s important that potential customers feel like they can trust your business, because this can be the difference between a one time consumer and a regular customer. A few very popular methods that allow you to build trust with your customers, are by offering one of your valuable products or services for free, or running testimonial ads from previous customers. Once a customer engages with your promotion ad and agrees to try your free product, it allows time for them to trust your business while you can learn more about the customers your ads are attracting. If the customer likes your products and leaves a review, you can then market their review to others, which will help to validate your website.
In order to start your testimonial ads you must first build a website custom audience. You can then select which demographic you are wanting to appeal to, and even target people who have engaged with your website in the last 180 days. Next, you should create a copy of the customer’s testimonial and format it in a way where the information is simple yet effective in drawing in your audience. It’s important that your ad allows a way for customers to quickly find your website and the product that was featured in the testimonial. This process will help lower the rates of customers who may be interested in your products, but are unsure about the credibility of your website.
This process is just one method of converting your website’s traffic into new customers, and there are many other methods that may also be successful for your business. Overall, it is important that you understand your business, your customer base, and choose the most effective method of marketing that will work for you and your audience.
