Once you’ve got all your social media accounts created and registered and your killer content polished you have to start promoting. It is the natural next step in your social media marketing campaign, but where do you start? Well, we’ve got some social media promotion ideas to get you going.
Digital promotion is also referred to as SM promotion and the main objective is to introduce yourself and your brand to the world. But what’s the point if no one sees that introduction? Learn from our ideas and get your ducks in a row, it’s time to promote yourself.
The suggestions shared here are meant to guide you in the right direction and can be changed or tweaked to meet your specific needs. The point of this article is to help you get started on promoting all the content you’ve worked so hard to create.
What Is A Social Media Marketing Strategy?
Basically, any marketing plan that lays out and explains what you want to achieve on social media is a social media strategy for marketing.
It describes all the goals you have and the content you will be using to achieve those goals with digital promotions. You can also describe this promotion as media social marketing – you’re using media and social media platforms to promote your brand.
With a proper plan, your social media advertising will be successful and you’ll be reaching your target audience with great content. The better planned your media strategy is, the more likely you are to get more brand awareness and sales.
The Benefits of Social Media Marketing
As any social media marketer will know, using these popular apps and social media platforms is a fantastic way to promote a brand or business.
Social media, for marketers, is like a door straight to their target audience. Because almost everyone seems to use social media these days, it is much easier to get more eyes on a social media advert.
Social media posts are a simple and fast way of marketing that can get a lot of attention for a business without spending a fortune.
Media posts can be creative and attractive and lure in more eyes than traditional media marketing. As all good social media marketers will tell you – ads in social media is a brilliant investment.
Ads on social media will get your content on more feeds and in front of more eyes. This will lead to a better reputation and more people getting to know your brand. Once people get to know you, they will slowly start to trust you and that will increase your awareness to the point of you being a relied-upon brand.
Social Media Promotion Ideas That Work
We’ll discuss the various ideas that will inspire you to cross that finish line of your marketing campaign in brief detail. We want to inform you but not keep you too busy reading to actually do anything productive.
Complete Your Social Media Profiles
This seems like it should go without saying – you’ve already created your profiles on all the social media platforms you’ll need. If you haven’t, you should do that now, and take our suggestions into account. Unless you are focused on going for a very minimalistic look, your profiles should be as filled out as they can be.
Make the most of all the information you are allowed to share. Your audience needs to know everything about you so they can trust you. They’re meeting you on social media so you should tell them as much as you can.
Use the great features you get on Facebook, such as the ability to add links in your Facebook Page. In the About tab, link to anything you’ve got that is relevant but don’t just link randomly.
Have a reason for everything you do.
The Story section is perfect for telling your brand’s story – do that. Pull people in by letting them know how your brand came to be and what it endeavours to do. Be interesting and entertaining.
Make sure that what you share will be something that real people want to read. Marketers sometimes forget that marketing personas are about actual living people, not just statistics.
Use Branded Hashtags
Hashtags are a big part of efficient and effective social media marketing. With strong hashtags, you will create more awareness and interest in your brand. Instagram allows users to link to other accounts and hashtags in their bios.
This is a nifty little trick that you should make use of.
You can have standard hashtags that are unique to your brand as well as special ones to promote special occasions such as competitions. On social media, especially Instagram, hashtags carry a lot of weight and branded hashtags even more so.
As part of a really good social media marketing campaign, it is suggested that you do thorough research about using hashtags. Your company and/or brand can only gain from what you’ll learn.
Use Email Signatures and Newsletters
You should be sending out newsletters on a regular basis. This will help your brand consistency improve with users. They also serve as a great way to show potential customers all your latest developments or products.
Promotion through emails is very important to all brands. You can get an email address from members of your audience on your site or social media accounts and reach out to them on a personal level.
On that note, you should add social icons to the base of these emails. This way, readers are reminded of where to find you should they need to contact you.
Often, reaching out on social media is much easier and quicker than an email. Also, consider adding a fan section to your newsletter. Here you can have a photo from the community. It will create a sense of trust with people and that is always a good thing.
Offer Social Only Specials
Although social media marketing is much more modern, you can still use traditional methods to get sales.
Just as you would have offered special discounts through the mail, you can do so on social media. In fact, you can do it better and reach more people.
You can offer specials that only serve certain users and end after a set time. Be as creative as you want to be with this kind of marketing. You can experiment with different specials and offers, learning which pull the most engagement.
Cross-Promotion
Occasionally, take a moment to remind your followers that you have more than one social media account. (If you don’t, you should)
There is no need to be shy about asking your supporters to follow you on all the networks. Make it a casual thing with links to the accounts you’re mentioning and create a nice and interesting call-to-action.
If you’re against that idea, use your bio to just show off all the social networks that you can be found on. You can also share promotions and posts on the different platforms, showing that you have other accounts without saying much.
Unique Social Icons On Websites
When a customer searches for you on the internet, it is likely that your website will be the first result they find.
Make it easier for them to find the social networks you’re on by using unique or branded icons. You can even take it a step further and add your brand’s logo or unique colours to it. How you do this depends on you and your marketing strategy.
Targeted Ads
Facebook gives marketing teams the ability to create targeted ads on its platform. To get started, add a tool like Facebook Pixel to your website. Then you can easily set up ads to target your site’s visitors automatically.
You should also use Facebook’s audience data to help target any interested groups. It is a great way to show potential clients your services or merchandise. People who have never heard of you will be seeing your ads.
Loyalty Programs
Loyalty programs, as well as ambassador programs, are based on the idea of brand awareness. You work with customers who are happy with your brand and ask them to talk about it to their friends. This is also known as influencer marketing.
Keep in mind though that creating and supporting such a program takes patience and time. It takes many resources (especially money) and if you don’t have them, maybe opt for a loyalty or referral program instead.
With this, you give loyal customers discounts or rewards via referral purchases. You can share news about your program on social media and get other customers involved.
Use A Scheduling Tool
Planning out your social media advertisements ideas is a good strategy but without a proper tool, you may find yourself feeling lost. You might benefit from incorporating additional tools such as a social media company or tool to make your job as a social media manager easier.
That’s where tools like SocialPlanner comes in. It is a useful social media tool that helps users to find, plan and publish high-quality and engaging content. With the use of this scheduler, traffic can be driven to higher levels and sales improved.
Using tools like this allows you to easily find top-performing content to share on social media. You will also be able to plan your content’s publishing schedule with just a few clicks. Your content will be published on multiple social media platforms, as you desire.
Curate Your Approach Per Network
Creating the same kind of content for all of your networks won’t work. You need a different approach for every platform.
If you’re targeting audiences on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, for example, you can’t use the same tone or language when addressing them. Using the same images and videos might be okay, but you have to make tweaks to your copy so it is appropriate and hits the right way.
Take time to learn about the different ways to make use of social media marketing and incorporate the best methods for each of your platforms. You can also use blog posts to draw the attention of your audience. That way, you can get them on your official site for even more engagement.
If you want, you can experiment a bit with your content and analyse the results of your content on the platforms you use. Personal experience can often be the best way to learn.
Involve Your Employees
It is still in its growing stages, but employee advocacy is becoming an important part of promotion on social media. Employees are able to give users a real and honest look at the brand that they want to support.
It is likely that your employees have social media profiles, and these could be used to connect with your audience. Of course, you should take an ethical approach and not pay anyone who works for you to lie and create a false image of your brand. If your product/service is good you won’t need to scoop so low anyway.
There are tools that can be used to make the most of employee advocacy, so perhaps you should look at those options. That way, you can ensure quality results.
User-Generated Content
This may not be something you can do when your brand is still starting to promote itself on social media, but an idea to remember nonetheless. User-generated content is a fantastic way to show the world that real people are using your products or service and loving it.
Any content created by users of a product or service is UGC. This can be videos, photos, testimonials and even blog posts or tweets.
It is a way for users to interact with a brand and creates a lot of brand authority for a company. Make use of UGC and incorporate it into your promotion strategy for a higher level of trust from your target market.
Doing so will not cost you much – if anything – and the quality of the content is often really high. Many people like when brands use their content and will do what they can to stand out.
You can even plan ahead for this and have photo contests for the sole purpose of using it as part of your strategy. Just remember that with UGC, the ‘all rights reserved’ issue comes into play. Give credit to the users whose content or blog post you’re sharing.
Giveaways and Contests
When it comes to brand awareness, contest and giveaways are a great idea. You can set up a simple contest for your brand in just a few brainstorming sessions. The best giveaway is one that doesn’t call for much to be done by fans or customers.
This will rope in more people as well. You will get a lot of engagement if your promotion is easy to enter but offers a high pay-off.
If you want to take things a little further, make a user-generated contest that makes use of hashtags. You’ll be combining some really great strategies into one cool idea.
You call on supporters to take selfies with your merchandise or show themselves using your service and ask them to put a funny spin on it, for example. By using a tracking tool you can stay updated on how well the competition is doing.
Social Media Ad Advice
If you’re going to use social media platforms to advertise, make sure you do it right. With the use of creative social media posts, you may not even have to pay for advertising. Take into consideration everything discussed here – many of the ideas can be put into action without costing a cent.
However, it is possible to pay for social media ads. It is another awesome way to promote on social media, but make sure you plan it well. You don’t want to pay for something that doesn’t have the hoped-for results.
As you know by now, any social media strategy needs to be carefully thought out. Your content and every minute detail have to be drafted and approved before it makes it into your strategy.
Social Media Promotion In A Nutshell
To make the most of social media marketing, you need to take the time to learn about what works on all the different platforms. Then you can use your knowledge to plan a strategy that will see your company get the best results.
Take the ideas that we shared with you and fine-tune them. Adjust them to fit into your marketing campaign and reflect what your brand stands for.
Create a blog post that will focus on your social media content. This will create more awareness. Take your time and invest all your most creative brain cells into this. Good promotion on social media doesn’t happen overnight, but it is very effective.
Conclusion
A social media promo can be a bit tricky to get right at first. Don’t be disappointed if you don’t get it right the first time. Instead, learn from what you have done and take the best from it to start a new idea on what to do. For more inspiration, check out our blog.
If you need to schedule social media content ahead, be sure to give SocialPlanner.io a shot. It is a great scheduling tool that will save you a lot of time and worry.