If you’re a company owner who’s also interested in marketing, that’s helpful. If you know at least a few marketing basics, those often come in handy when you’re trying to make headway in a crowded marketplace. Very few items or services you sell will have no competitors, so the way you market what you have available for consumption will make a huge difference.
You probably already know that social media is one way you can market your products and services. Your online content is another way. You might advertise on your website, or you can market your products and services locations places online as well.
In this article, we’ll go over a few valuable tips for marketing what your company has available. Some of our suggestions have to do with social media. Others focus more on other places online where you might choose to focus if it makes sense based on your business model.
Figure Out Which Of The Many Social Media Platforms You Should Use
As a business owner or operator, you probably have a lot on your mind at all times. Thoughts might fly in and out of your head all day long regarding your company and how to make it successful.
One moment, you might think about offboarding workers and the security risks it generates. The next, your mind might move to raising more funds from a venture capital firm or getting a bank or credit union to float you a business loan.
If you think about social media at all, it’s probably for advertising or marketing purposes. This makes sense because that is how your company can use it in almost all circumstances. There are very few business entities that exist anymore that can’t benefit from using social media, regardless of what products you make or services you offer.
The thing is, though, there are hundreds of social media platforms, and it can easily confuse you trying to determine which ones to use. Are you better off using Facebook, Tick Tock, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, or one of the many others that’s out there? Should you focus on better-known platforms, or should you research some of the more obscure ones?
It might seem more than a bit overwhelming, but here’s what you should keep in mind. Some individuals specialize in social media and marketing. It often benefits you to hire one of these social media managers if you feel like you have the funds in your budget to do so.
If you have a larger company, you might even hire an entire social media team. They will tell you which platforms to use based on what you sell and your sales strategy. They will definitely point you in the proper direction of the audience that you want to attract.
Focus On Your Branding Efforts
You should also make sure to focus on your branding efforts if you want your products to do well, either on social media or elsewhere online, such as your company website. Your branding matters, and it’s something to which your potential customers and the world at large will pay attention.
Branding is a combination of several factors working together. It’s the way the copy sounds on your website. It’s the way your social media messages sound whenever you send a new one out.
You want to try to cultivate a distinct voice for your brand. What that voice will be like depends mainly on what you sell and the audience to which you offer it. For instance, if you’re trying to market to younger people, but your voice sounds like it comes from an older generation, that will probably hurt your sales.
Some individuals can assist you with your branding, just like there are ones who can help you select the right social media platforms. There are brand managers who work on meticulously crafting a company’s voice, so it sounds just right based on your target audience.
Think about the celebrities some companies hire to appear in their magazine ads, commercials, or radio spots. Business entities that want to attract a younger audience pay younger stars to represent them. If you’re targeting an older crowd with more disposable income, though, you should take that into account with your celebrity partnerships.
All of this is a way to build your brand. You can’t leave your brand building up to chance, or it’s likely you’ll miss the mark when trying to attract the buyers you want.
One way to run effective outreach campaigns is through blogger outreach services, you might want to check them out.
Set Up A Predictable Social Media Schedule
Getting back to social media, you have not finished your job once you’ve figured out which platforms to use. In fact, you’re just starting. You will need your social media team, or a single person, if you own a smaller company, to set up and stick with a posting schedule that works for you.
There are things like the popular Hootsuite tool that your social media team can use to post on your chosen social media platforms. Your team can write their social media posts days in advance, or even weeks ahead in some cases. However, if they do that, the posts won’t be topical, and topical posts can sometimes help you.
The solution is to set up social media posts that will appear on your chosen platforms at set times, such as twice per day. You don’t often want to post much more than that, or whoever follows your company will tire of you. At the same time, your team has the option to send out an additional, topical post every once in a while if they determine it’s appropriate to do so.
How can they know what topical issue is worth mentioning on your social media? Again, that has to do with your branding efforts.
You will want to post on topics that come up in the world which you feel are worth discussing with your followers. Anything which happens that you can tie back into your company or brand would be a likely candidate for one of these extra posts.
A Blog Can Be Your Company’s Best Friend
Earlier, we mentioned that you need to carefully monitor not just every social media post you send out under your company’s banner but also any other content you post elsewhere online. Your company’s website would be a prime example of that.
Your site is a place where a visitor will come, probably if they wish to know more about the company or want to buy something from you. Maybe they come there through one of your social media posts if you mention a flash sale or some new item that you’ve just released.
Regardless of why they are there, though, once you have them on your site, you want them to like what they see. That’s why you’ll want to have attractive graphics, videos, and copy that can all help your brand. The longer you keep that potential client on the website, the more likely they are to buy something, sign up for your mailing list, or follow you on social media.
Your company blog can also be a way to win over some converts. Social media has some limits, and one of them is usually content length. Social media is about immediacy. It’s not where someone will likely want to read a lengthy article or story.
Your blog is helpful because you can make every post as long as you like and about whatever you want. That’s not to say that you should have 10,000-word blog posts every day. You still need to keep your customer’s likely attention span in mind.
Your blog can be a place where you can demonstrate your company’s expertise. If you feel like there are questions about your brand, niche, or products your customers will want to ask, you can write about that in your site’s FAQ section, but your blog is another logical place.
Your blog can help with your marketing because it’s another way to promote the branding ideal you strive to create surrounding your company, products, and general aesthetic. Your blog can be where you appeal to your would-be customers and devotees alike. If they like what they read there, one of your blogs might even go viral and win you many new customers or clients all at once.
If you feel like you’re a gifted writer, you can take the time to create some of these blogs yourself. As the company head, you are uniquely situated to know what is happening with the business.
You can convey that to your customers if you feel like you have the time and energy to do so. If you’re very busy and don’t think that you can write all the blogs yourself, you might write one a couple of times per year if you feel like there’s a topic that warrants your attention.
Now, you should have a few actionable ideas about what you can do with your company from an online marketing and social media perspective.