8 Essential Social Media Tactics to Attract New Business
When bringing in new business there are many areas to consider when developing your social media strategies:
Social media is one of the most valuable tools available to businesses. A strong social presence can help you expand your brand reach, advertise your products or services, and pull in new business.
You might be wondering what you can do to help boost results from your business social media accounts, so here are 8 essential tips straight from our digital agency in Birmingham that can help!
1. Create social media goals & objectives
Use your business aims and objectives to establish a relevant social media strategy. Ensure that your aims are specific, and you have a clear plan on how you can achieve them.
These goals need to be measurable. Perhaps you want to increase the number of followers on your accounts by a certain amount or set a goal on the number of posts you put out in a month.
There is no point creating goals that are too challenging or too simple, so setting realistic objectives with manageable deadlines is important to maintaining a positive social media presence. Prioritise these objectives to ensure team efforts and resources are best placed and used most efficiently, and make sure your goals will increase audience interactions to increase brand reach and recognition!
2. Get Ahead Of and Analyse Your Competitors
It is important to identify and understand what social media strategies your competitors are using online and the engagement they are getting from various audiences. Take notice of the hashtags they use and the accounts they follow and think about how you could implement them into your own strategy.
Consider the content they share, including the copy of their posts and any images or videos that are used alongside it. Use competitors as an opportunity to research your audience and what they will interact with! If you market to your audience while highlighting your USPs, that will help you stand out from the crowd of competitors.
3. Know your Target Audience
Knowing your audience is vital for social media success. There are several questions about them that you will need to answer to get the right results, including:
- When are your target audience likely to be online?
- Which platforms do they use most?
- How are you going to hold their attention?
Younger demographics are likely to use Instagram and TikTok as their primary platforms, while the use of memes and short videos are likely to engage and appeal to them more. January 2023 statistics from Statista show that almost 31% of Instagram users and 38.5% of TikTok users are aged between 18 and 24.
Professional and older audiences are more likely to use LinkedIn and Facebook with text and news-led posts dominating their feeds. Almost 45% of Facebook users are aged 35 or over, while 60% of LinkedIn users are young professionals, aged between 25 and 34.
Consider using hashtag finder applications or services to find trending and relevant hashtags that will increase brand awareness within your target audience. Alternatively, this research can be conducted independently on the platform of your choice!
4. Choose the Right Social Platform
By understanding the social media usage of your target audience, you can then target those users on the platforms best suited to them and your business. This will help to drive engagement and brand reach within the social circles you are targeting most.
For example, if you are mainly targeting business owners with B2B services, then you will want to focus your efforts on LinkedIn. If your audience is mainly young adults or teenagers, Instagram or TikTok may be the way forward.
Utilising effective outreach and advertising campaigns, focused on your target audience, will guarantee that your business is seen by the relevant people.
5. Maintain Your Brand Identity
Using your brand colours and relevant imagery and graphics on your posts will help create an identity for your profile and make your content stand out. However, remember to stick to a visual style recognisable to your customers.
In your social posts, speak as you would on your website or in a blog or newsletter. This will help tie all your content together and give your customers a sense of comfort when interacting with you.
However, you may want to make small tweaks depending on the platform, for example, more professional on LinkedIn and slightly cheekier on Instagram, but you should never stray too far from your original brand voice. This is key when considering hashtags or keywords that you wish to use, too.
Consider creating business hashtags to allow your customers to post and create content about your products and services which you can then repost and respond to, further engaging your audience.
6. Social Media Analytics
Conduct a social media audit with a specialist to discover which channels and platforms will benefit you most for your target market, and to discover other opportunities for improving your social presence.
Ensure you are tracking analytics to see which platforms are performing best for you, and focus efforts and resources on the platforms you have the highest levels of engagement. Don’t be afraid to research and ask your target market what will engage them, as gathering and acting upon data is important to grow your brand awareness.
7. Create engaging content
This might seem obvious, but the content you produce needs to be interesting, helpful, and engaging for your audience. This could include varying the types of posts you make, switching between videos, images, text, and more, or ensuring that you are discussing trending topics.
Consider creating animations, subtitled blogs, Q&As, meet the team posts, day in the life of a team member, behind the scenes insights or sharing polls as ways of engaging your target audience.
Also, give your audience an incentive to interact with your business online as that would result in high engagements and even higher impressions. These could include tagging your business for a repost, giveaways, or competitions.
8. Keep posting consistently!
Consistency is key for consumer engagement and raising brand awareness, so make sure you are organised with posting. Keep a calendar to record what content you are going to post each week and plan and create content to post in advance. This also helps to ensure no opportunities for increased engagement are missed, such as from jumping on awareness days.
Sticking to a schedule allows followers to know when to expect new content to ensure you hold their attention, while consistency makes it easier to build a rapport with your followers. Part of this consistency is to routinely like other posts, respond to comments, and follow interesting accounts.
Build and Develop Your Brand With a free audit!
The experts at our social media agency in Birmingham are on hand to help you grow and develop your social media accounts and strategy. Our team take pride in their ability to utilise a range of key social media tactics to successfully improve the performance and effectiveness of your accounts.
You can currently claim a free brand audit worth over £750. Our experts will review your existing brand with the aim of identifying, how well your brand communicates compared to your competitors, including looking at social media. We will then give you some recommendations that can help you improve your position in your market.
