Every Season is Engagement Season in Marketing

So, you definitely know that your business needs to be on social media, but you may not necessarily know how to utilize it effectively. Sure, you set up an account, picked a profile picture or avatar, and put in all of your information… but then you only made a few haphazard and overly hashtagged posts, gaining a couple of likes. Eventually, everything went stagnant. Think about that for a second: if you were visiting a company’s account on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or Pinterest only to find that they made 3 posts and the most recent one was in 2011, would you even bother liking or following them?

Successful social media accounts and campaigns do take time and effort, but the time and effort that you put in can result in quality engagement with consumers which can then turn into sales and lifetime customers.

Social Media Done Right

Never before in history have marketers had the ability to engage directly with or hear directly from their audience the way we can now. Learn how to use these developments to your advantage:

Engage

It’s not enough to simply set up accounts on every platform out there; you have to actually maintain the accounts and post relevant content for your desired customers or clients. The keyword in there, aside from the obvious “maintain,” is relevant. If your content is relevant to the consumers following you they are more likely to pay attention to it, respond, and even pass the message along to other consumers by sharing your posts. Another pro tip is that it’s a mistake to focus everything on what you as a business want to say – think more about what your consumers want and need to hear. Regardless of the content you end up posting, if you frame it in terms of how it is relevant in the consumer’s life, you’ll see at least some degree of engagement and success. (Not sure exactly who your audience is? Maybe you should start here first!) Also, remember to include a call to action (or in terms of engagement, a proposal) like, “Call us at (555) 555-5555 today!” Or, “Be sure to check out our other deals on our website!”

Take in Feedback

When people do respond to your posts, pay attention to what they say. Do most of them agree with you or say positive things? That’s great; that means that what you’re doing is working! Engage back with them by thanking them which shows that you are genuinely concerned with their experience. Are there some people who complain? Pay attention to those complaints and see if there is anything you can do to remove customer pain-points, ESPECIALLY if you see that people are generally complaining about the same things. Respond back saying you’re sorry something didn’t work out for them but that you’re working to make sure it never happens again. Your business will cease to exist without your customers so you should almost always value their feedback. (The exception being those who have expectations that are literally impossible to meet. You know the ones.)

Measure

One great part about social media, other than it being free, is that it’s so easy to measure nearly everything! You can collect data on how many posts you make in a given time period as well as how many likes, comments, and shares each post gets. After collecting data for a while you can cross-reference your numbers against your feedback and set goals for yourself and put a strategy in place to guarantee that you to keep growing.

Adjust

Once you have measurements and feedback to work with and evaluate, it’s time to make adjustments to improve your social media game. Maybe you get the highest number of responses to posts that ask a question, so you start posting more questions. Maybe people are more likely to share your post if it has a good graphic, so you start putting more effort into your visuals. Maybe you find that people engage more overall in the afternoon than in the morning. Once you take your data and make sense of it, use it to your advantage to craft your content so that it starts working for you.

As you start to really breathe fresh life into your social media accounts and engage directly with your consumers remember this: success doesn’t always happen overnight. It may take several months of posting and getting about 3 likes before you build up a solid platform upon which you can grow. Don’t give up when things don’t go viral; keep posting, evaluating, and adjusting your social media technique. You will eventually get out of it what you put into it and it will eventually become easier to post nothing but great content.

While marketing engagement may sound overwhelming to you, it sounds like a good time to us here at Waypost (what can we say, we love our jobs)! Give us a call today at (864) 288-6162 or contact us online anytime to see if we can help you with your marketing woes.