The 3-step process that makes Social Media Marketing as easy as ABC
March 29, 2014 by Danielle Miller · Think back to the days when you were in kindergarten. The smell of crayons and the thrill of scribbling colors across a once blindingly white paper. Do you remember how foreign words and letters seemed? In those days, learning your ABCs was a pretty tough topic (never mind learning to write whole words!).
Flash forward to today. The internet has shifted the world of marketing. Many intelligent and capable entrepreneurs feel like they’re back in kindergarten again trying to the learn their ABCs.
For business owners, the option to ignore social media marketing has long since past. If you want to graduate to first grade, you’re going to have to learn the ABCs of social marketing.
ABC Social Marketing: Attract, Build, Collect
Social marketing is about attracting attention for your business, building relationships with your target audience, and collecting contact information for potential customers.
Let’s flash back to before kindergarten. Perhaps as early as age 2 or 3 for some of you. It all started with a melody and some sounds. We learn to sing our ABCs before we learn to write them.
Attracting an audience is like learning to sing. You learn all 26 letters, in the right order, and on the right note. You get comfortable with the rhythm.
In social marketing, this corresponds to learning the best attraction strategy for your unique customers. You learn what to post where, how best to say it, and develop a system (or rhythm) for your posting.
Step 1: Attract an Audience
When attracting an audience online consider which social media networks they use, how they search things, and whether or not you want to pay to speed up the rhythm.
Attract visitors to social media pages by providing relevant and interesting content. Get more people to check out your website by sharing links on social media. Use a balanced strategy. Combine broad audience reach and targeted qualifiers to segment your customers from the general public.
Networks
Consider which social media networks your customers are already using. Ask yourself these questions,
- How often are your customers visiting these networks?
- What type of content does your customer like to share?
- Which device is your customer using to access the site?
Identify the primary and up to two secondary networks. Design content to appeal to your specific audience. Make the content responsive to whichever device your customer uses most often. Learn more about choosing the best social network for your business here.
#Hashtags
Hashtags turn words and phrase into clickable links. Categorize your posts and make searching for similar content easy for the reader. Hashtags are like keywords and SEO for your status updates.
To use hashtags, put the pound sign (#) before the word or phrase. Do not use spaces or special characters. Some examples of hashtags for business owners are:
- #entrepreneur
- #startup
- #smallbusiness
- #marketing
Common hashtags for social media engagement are:
- #wellnesswednesday – Use this hashtag on Wednesdays to share health and wellness tips.
- #tbt (Throwback Thursday) – Use this hashtag on Thursdays when posting old pictures and fond memories.
- #followfriday – Use this hashtag on Fridays to give a shout out to people worth following.
Try it now: If it’s a Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday click on the corresponding hashtag above to Tweet a hashtag!
Keywords
Keywords are words your potential customer would use to search for information about your business, product, or service. They are like the melody of the ABCs. They should sing to your customers.
They should be used in photo captions, comments, posts, album titles, board titles, headings, about descriptions, and usernames. When choosing your keywords, ask yourself these questions:
- Is this a word or phrase my customer would naturally use?
- Does this keyword help attract my target audience directly or indirectly?
- How many other people are providing information about this keyword?
Paid Reach
Before jumping into paid advertising and boosted posts, you should be comfortable using the three growth strategies above. Collect as much information as you can about who you are targeting and which keywords work best.
At this stage in the process you can opt to pay to reach more people faster. Three key tips for paid advertising:
- Identify the age range, gender, geographic location, and marital status of your primary customer.
- Find 4-5 other pages that directly or indirectly reach your target audience.
- For Facebook advertising, use the power editor to make sure your ad reaches only your target audience.
Step 2: Build Relationships with Fans
Just like each individual customer, each letter is different. In order to write the entire alphabet, you have to get to know each letter. This is the process of building relationships.
The stronger the connection you make with each letter, the easier it is to recognize and remember its meaning. The more authority, confidence, and trust your build with your customers, the easier it is for them to make a purchase with you.
Build Authority
Being an authority in your industry is 50% learning and 50% leadership.You should be consistently expanding your knowledge in your area of expertise. Furthermore, you should be able to combine all your knowledge to become a thought leader on that topic.
Establish yourself as a go-to expert in your industry by freely sharing your knowledge. The easiest way to share your knowledge is to give it away. Here are three ways to build authority online:
- Write guest posts for other relevant blogs
- Answer frequently asked questions
- Host a live Hangout on Air
If you want more ideas on how to build authority, check out this article by Hubspot.
Build Confidence
Building confidence is a great way to reduces feelings of risk consumers experience before making a purchase.
Show your customer that you are a credible resource. Make yourself accessible by participating in forums or groups. Share your knowledge openly and encourage people to ask you questions. Give people a feel for the quality of your work by providing samples or trial periods.
Want an example?
In June of 2013, Yodle conducted their First Annual Small Business Sentiment Survey. They polled 306 small business owners in the service industry.
The survey found that 42% of small business owners said they are worried about finding new customers. It also found that more than half of small business owners do not measure results from their marketing. If you’re not measuring, you’re not marketing.
I don’t want anyone in my community to be wasting time or playing guessing games when it comes to their marketing. That’s why I designed a simple printable marketing worksheet and put together a Facebook group for support.
The worksheet is a tool to make marketing planning super simple. The more simple the process, the easier it is to introduce to someone. You can get the marketing worksheet here.
The Facebook group is an easy and convenient way for people to post questions and get answers about social marketing. If you request the worksheet, you’ll get an email invite to join the group.
Build Trust
Every interaction is an opportunity to share your story and your mission. Be true to yourself, your morals, and your message. Here are a few Dos and Don’ts when it comes to building trust:
- DO be authentic
- DO share your story
- DO ask questions
- DON’T abuse your customers contact information (don’t be a spammer!)
- DON’T waste your customer’s time
- DON’T expect trust to build overnight
Step 3: Collect Conversions
Think of one business right now that if they came out with a new product, offered a special, or had a referral for you, you’d want to know about it. We all have connections with certain businesses that don’t required slimy sales pitches or gimmicks to close the deal. The challenge is to find your loyal customers.
Your fans and followers are potential loyal customers. Build relationships with them and they will want to share their contact information with you. Along the way it can be extremely beneficial to also collect other information about your audience. What information should you collect?
Emails
Collecting email addresses is at the top of the list because it’s one of the easiest forms of communication used today. To encourage your community to take this step trade your best content for your customer’s email address.
Use direct emails to customers respectfully. Follow the golden rule, Do onto others as your would have them do onto you. only send content you’d also send to your friends or neighbors. No sales pitches or filler. Instead, send quality emails that your customers would be happy to open, read, and forward to others.
Click-Throughs
If you’ve put a lot of love into designing your website, you want as many people to see it as possible. This goes the same for businesses who have invested a great deal of money into strategic website design.
Be sure to share links to your website, blog posts, and online store on social media. Driving traffic to a well-designed website can make selling your offering effortless.
Customer Data
Get to know your customer intimately. To show you what I mean, let’s play a little game. Think of your closest friend. Can you answer all these questions about your friend?
- Can you tell me their age?
- Where do they live?
- What funny habits do they have?
- What things are they most likely to complain about?
- Who is in their family?
- Is you friend a night owl or a morning person?
You could probably answer all these questions and more about your friend. Now, think of the last person who made a purchase with you. How many questions can you answer?
Collecting customer data comes down to one simple task. I’ve done it eight times in this post alone.
You guessed it… You need to ask questions. Lots of questions.
Feedback
Even the best relationships in life have been through storms.
When someone is complaining about your business, your process, or your product do your best to not take it personally. Try to see their feedback objectively.
Listen to comments, questions, and concerns. Identify opportunities, and act on them.
Final Thoughts on ABC Social Marketing
The internet has shifted the world of marketing. Many intelligent and capable entrepreneurs feel like they’re back in kindergarten again trying to the learn their ABCs. Learn social marketing one letter at a time and eventually you will have the power to tell your unique story.
Social marketing is a 3-step process with the goal of opening lines of communications.
- First, attract attention to your business. When attracting an audience online consider which social media networks they use, how they search things, and whether or not you want to pay to speed up the rhythm.
- Second, building relationships with your target audience. The more authority, confidence, and trust your build with your customers, the easier it is for them to make a purchase with you.
- Last,collecting contact information for potential customers. Find your loyal customers and get to know them intimately.
If you enjoyed this article, would you please do me a favor? Leave a comment below to let me know I’m providing helpful content. I look forward to your feedback!
Happy Marketing, Danielle