There are many ways to market online. According to Entrepreneur.com, when you’re looking to get started with marketing on social media, deciding your goals, taking your resources into account, knowing your audience and creating stellar content are some of the essential steps to get started. These measures also work for other types of lead generation.
Keep these steps in mind when looking for more clients.
1. Figure out your marketing goal
If one of your goals is to convert your social media efforts into sales, Support Manager Amanda Parent of SocialMediaWorldWide.com emphasizes using social platforms to create awareness. Hopefully, this awareness will make your target consider working with you.
Parent also recommends using social media to make your target market travel through three stages. Parent explains, “The stages are awareness, consideration, and conversion.”
In a nutshell, Parent explains that awareness is the first stage. It’s when your target market knows that you exist. That market also knows that what you offer can possibly solve their problem.
The next stage is consideration. This is when people are deciding whether or not you are the person they should choose to work with to solve their problem. The last stage is conversion. The Conversion stage takes place when your lead becomes a customer.
She goes on to say that social media works well for the awareness and consideration stages but converting leads to customers tends to work best through sales calls, webinars, events and sales pages.
2. Consider your resources
If you aren’t in a place to hire someone or spend money on Facebook ads, you can still create awareness organically.
Penny Pinchin Mom Tracie Fobes also knows how to harness the power of social media marketing, especially on Facebook. She has been able to acquire over 600,000 followers to her page.
If you’re just starting out and don’t have a budget to tap into Facebook’s reach, she explains how your first step is to focus on choosing your photos carefully.
She explains that the cover photo should be inviting, easy to read and state a clear message about what you do. She goes on to say that making sure it looks good on both mobile and desktop is critical.
Another resource to explore is LinkedIn. People may often look to AdWords when attempting to promote their products or services. LinkedIn may very well be a better option.
“Google AdWords is driven by active searcher intent, so the leads generated are going to be really hot. The challenge is that there’s no way to qualify these folks for who they are or their ability to make the purchase decision,” says AJ Wilcox LinkedIn Ads Evangelist at B2Linked.com.
3. Knowing your audience can work to your advantage on LinkedIn
Wilcox adds that LinkedIn Advertising, on the contrary, gives you exceptional control over targeting an ideal customer. If focused correctly, “every single impression, click, and conversion are of the highest quality,” says Wilcox.
4. Creating fantastic content
You can also attract leads from content. There are many ways to do this. Writing blog posts on a website is one way. Creating videos on Facebook Live or Youtube is another option. If you like talking or conversing with others, you can even start a podcast or land a podcast interview as a guest on established shows that have an audience you’re trying to target. No matter what you decide, bring your A-game and be sure your content solves a problem your audience has.
The Bottom Line
There are multiple ways to market your products and services online. Start by using the steps mentioned and see what happens. You might even land more business than you planned.
