Overview
You need proven strategies to transform your social media efforts into tangible results. Learn how to guide your followers through every stage of the customer journey with actionable tactics to maximize engagement, website traffic, and conversions.
Balance Branding and Performance Marketing
Too often social media is used primarily for branding and lacks meaningful offers to encourage performance. Your social media needs to have specific goals and metrics.
Most social media and website traffic is research related so you need to provide helpful information these visitors are typically seeking.
In addition, most social media followers already have an affinity or connections to the brand so you should be rewarding them with exclusive offers and incentives to build loyalty.
Use Different Social Platforms for Branding and Performance Purposes
Visual platforms such as YouTube and Instagram are great at building general awareness for your brand whereas Facebook and Google Search are better for generating inquiries/sales.
Top Reasons People Click on Posts and/or Follow Brands on Social Media
To help get attention include the following elements as part of your content calendar:
- Discounts
- Giveaways
- Coupons
- Novel Information
- Tips & Advice
- Source: Insightrix Research, Saskatoon.
Audit your social media content to make sure you’re providing enough of the above items. These can be packaged as offers that encourage followers to take an action. This can be signing up with an email address or some form of further engagement to deepen your relationship and increase contact frequency. The more they engage with your content the more they will see your posts, and the more likely they will consider making a purchase.
Create Offers for Each Stage of the Buying Cycle (Customer Conversion Paths)
Use offers for each stage of the buying cycle to develop conversion paths. Not all the examples above may be applicable to your business, but conversion paths have a few common attributes: An incentive (offer), a call-to-action, and a landing page.
Meta Advertising Best Practices to Convert Followers into Customers
Leverage your best performing social media posts by boosting them and/or turning them into paid advertising campaigns. The key thing is to identify posts with a 10% engagement.
Meta uses a 10% post engagement as a threshold in its algorithm for determining which posts get the most visibility in the news feed.
Go through your most popular Meta posts and click “See Insights and Ads” on each one to calculate which have a 10% engagement rate.
Boost these posts or use them for inspiration to create an ad campaign.
Use Meta Ads Manager to Target Existing Followers with an Offer
- Create an “Ads Manager” account (allows more functionality than boosted posts).
- Use the objective “Traffic” or “Leads” when creating a campaign.
- Create a “Custom Audience” that uses your Facebook/Instagram page followers as the audience source. Ads only target followers so you can use a small budget ($500/month).
- Create ads using either “Dynamic Creative” or “Lead Forms”.
- Specify your offer and have a clear call-to-action to encourage action.
- If sending users to a landing page, ensure the page has a form for email capture.
- Optional: Install the Facebook Pixel on your website to help with future retargeting.
Use Email to Nurture Contacts and Deepen Your Relationship
Turning your fans/followers into email contacts is a critical step in the conversion path. The easiest way to do this is by offering a discount/coupon that they’ll exchange an email address for (make it easy - don’t ask for more info than a name and email address).
Use paid ads or boosted posts with a coupon targeting existing followers that sends them to a simple sign-up page. Once you have the email address you can send them the coupon.
To make the most of email addresses, invest in using email marketing software for future communications. Email software allows you to schedule and automate emails while also ensuring you’re compliant with anti-spam legislation. Some email marketing software providers to consider are ConstantContact, MailChimp or CyberImpact (Canadian).
Email has a 80% chance of being seen compared to the 2% chance a social media post has. Building email lists of followers and customers is the best channel for conversions, period.
