Finding it Impossible to Post Consistently?

How do you get results toward your business goals with social media? If you set aside some time each day for building your audience, sharing helpful content, and interacting to drive engagement, this will help. But you won’t truly see results unless you create a clear social media strategy and are consistent posting on social media.

Your social media strategy is your plan for using sites like Facebook and Twitter to achieve your business goals. It’s a plan that maps out how you’ll use these sites in the coming months in order to sell, grow brand awareness, and build strong relationships with your market. Here are the ways your strategy will help.

Focus on Your Social Media Activity

Without a social media strategy in place, the time you spend on these sites might be time wasted. You could end up just endlessly scrolling through your feed and commenting randomly, not really getting anything at all done.

Your strategy gives your activity here focus. You’ll have specific tasks to carry out each day, all of which will get you closer to the goals you’re trying to achieve. It’ll be time well spent that will achieve results.

High-Value Content Your Audience Will Love

Your social media strategy will greatly improve the content you post and share. This is because part of creating your plan is to research your audience and figure out what topics, formats, and types of content they prefer. You’ll know what problems they face so you can offer the right kind of help. You’ll create a detailed calendar that ensures you’re sharing the right material.

The result is that your content will resonate with your audience and engage them, and you’ll see more engagement.

Take the Work out of Social Media

Social media works best when you’re relaxed and having fun, interacting with your audience in a natural way. When you create a plan beforehand where you know what content to share when and you have protocols for social media engagement, you can simply plug and play. You won’t have to sit down each day and figure out what needs to be done next. You’ll have a clear and prioritized to-do list.

Get Closer to Your Business Goals

The first step in creating a social media strategy is to identify your business goals and how social media fits into them. These goals are the basis for everything you’ll do there, from posting schedule to choosing content types; from the tone you use to interact with followers to the metrics you’ll use to decide whether you’re making progress toward these goals. Your social media engagement will be more effective.

Get Started with Your Social Media Strategy

How do you get started creating an effective social media strategy? It starts with understanding the value of your offering and the needs of your target market. You’ll then create a plan and implement, monitoring metrics to see what is getting results and what isn’t so you can refine. Start today and devise your social media posting strategy.

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How a Social Media Strategy Drives Results for Your Business

How do you get results toward your business goals with social media? If you set aside some time each day for building your audience, sharing helpful content, and interacting to drive engagement, this will help. But you won’t truly see results unless you create a clear social media strategy.

Your social media strategy is your plan for using sites like Facebook and Twitter to achieve your business goals. It’s a plan that maps out how you’ll use these sites in the coming months in order to sell, grow brand awareness, and build strong relationships with your market. Here are the ways your strategy will help.

Focus on Your Social Media Activity

Without a social media strategy in place, the time you spend on these sites might be time wasted. You could end up just endlessly scrolling through your feed and commenting randomly, not really getting anything at all done.

Your strategy gives your activity here focus. You’ll have specific tasks to carry out each day, all of which will get you closer to the goals you’re trying to achieve. It’ll be time well spent that will achieve results.

High-Value Content Your Audience Will Love

Your social media strategy will greatly improve the content you post and share. This is because part of creating your plan is to research your audience and figure out what topics, formats, and types of content they prefer. You’ll know what problems they face so you can offer the right kind of help. You’ll create a detailed calendar that ensures you’re sharing the right material.

The result is that your content will resonate with your audience and engage them, and you’ll see more engagement.

Take the Work out of Social Media

Social media works best when you’re relaxed and having fun, interacting with your audience in a natural way. When you create a plan beforehand where you know what content to share when and you have protocols for social media engagement, you can simply plug and play. You won’t have to sit down each day and figure out what needs to be done next. You’ll have a clear and prioritized to-do list.

Get Closer to Your Business Goals

The first step in creating a social media strategy is to identify your business goals and how social media fits into them. These goals are the basis for everything you’ll do there, from posting schedule to choosing content types; from the tone, you use to interact with followers to the metrics you’ll use to decide whether you’re making progress toward these goals. Your social media engagement will be more effective.

Get Started with Your Social Media Strategy

How do you get started creating an effective social media strategy? It starts with understanding the value of your offering and the needs of your target market. You’ll then create a plan and implement, monitoring metrics to see what is getting results and what isn’t so you can refine.

This post was originally published on this site

4 Must-Do Tactics to Maximise Social Marketing

Marketing efforts are more powerful and effective when they work together.

For example, if you have a social networking account you probably have social networking buttons on your blog or website. You invite people to share on Facebook and friend you too. This way you can max social media.

Your content marketing is probably the most important and effective marketing tactic in your strategy. Content after all is what drives visitors to your website. It makes sense to blend your content marketing efforts with your social media efforts for a really powerful strategy. Here are a few ideas or strategies to integrate your content marketing and social media efforts.

Linking from your blog to maximise social

Each time you publish an article or blog post, why not link to it from social networking sites? You can try different approaches to test which works best. Does a straight headline with a link work? Or does your audience prefer a teaser paragraph and a link? Some marketers have found that asking a question works best to motivate click-throughs from social networking sites.

Publish full articles

Some social media sites provide room for full articles. For example, LinkedIn and Facebook Fan pages both give you room to publish an abundance of content.

Include social media buttons on your site and in your content.

If you have a blog there are plug-ins that you can add to integrate social media buttons at the top of each blog post. You can also include a call to action in some or all of your posts. You can include a signature that says,

Like this post? Share it on Facebook.

If you’re using article marketing to drive traffic to your site you can link to those published articles from your social media accounts. You can also include a ‘Follow me on Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn’ or whatever sites you use. This helps broaden your audience and your awareness.

Use content to grow your social media connections.

Each article or blog post should ideally have a purpose. You may want to promote an affiliate link. You may want to drive traffic to your opt-in page. You can also use content to build your social network following. Include a call to action at the bottom of your article or blog post and link to your profile.

We’ve actually only touched the surface with how you can integrate your content marketing and social media efforts. There is tremendous potential here. You can use social media comments or questions to create content for your site. You can also integrate them both into your email marketing strategy too.

Remember that each marketing tactic is more powerful when it is integrated with your other existing marketing tactics. Plan your content. Plan your social networking strategy and then plan how they can work together.

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What a Social Media Strategy Can Teach You About Your Audience

One of the key foundations of your social media strategy is a detailed customer profile that describes your target audience as an individual. To create this, you’ll research your audience members and use objective data and feedback, not just assumptions. Here is what you’ll learn about your followers on social media and how this information will help you succeed.

Demographics – Who Your Audience Is

The first thing you learn is your audience’s demographics. This data answers the question, “Who are they.” It includes information like:

  • Age
  • Geographical location
  • Language
  • Gender
  • Marital status
  • Education level
  • Income level

Include whatever other information you feel might be relevant as well. Most of this data can be obtained by looking at social media profiles.

Psychographics – Your Audience’s Beliefs and Lifestyle

Psychographic data is not about who your audience is, but how they think and behave. This field seeks to discover the cognitive processes that influence behaviour. This is essential for any business as it determines the person’s buying behaviour.

Psychographics include:

  • Core values
  • Attitudes toward brands and products
  • Likes and preferences
  • Behaviour, especially in regard to businesses they interact with
  • Hobbies and leisure time activities

You need to dig a bit deeper to reveal this information. You might follow your audience on social media or carry out focus groups. It’s a little tougher to gain this kind of data so pay close attention to your customers’ conversations.

Pain Points – The Challenges Your Audience Faces

An important part of your psychographic data is your customer’s pain points. These are the challenges they face, the issues they need to overcome, or the questions burning inside them. If you can offer a solution to these problems through your content, you’ll build a strong relationship with them.

The best way to discover this information is to follow your audience members online. See what they post about or ask about on social media. Look at the conversations they have in online groups or comments.

Your Audience’s Social Media Preferences

By following your audience on social media, you can also learn about their preferences. You need to know what type of content they like so you can use that to engage with them. Preferences include not just topics they’re interested in, but formats they like (video or text), social media channels they use, and other social media behaviour.

Best Practices for Social Media Engagement

You’ll really learn a great deal once you implement your social media strategy and get results. As you implement, you’ll monitor analytics to discover what works and what doesn’t. Every industry, every niche, every audience, and every business has its own best practices. The only way to master yours is to launch your social media strategy and put your plan into action.

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8 Tips to Crafting Compelling Call To Actions That Convert

As a content creator, you know the importance of creating compelling calls to action that convert. After all, your goal is to get your readers to act, whether signing up for your newsletter, downloading your e-book, or making a purchase.

But what makes for a genuinely compelling call to action? What is it that creates that urgency to act immediately? What is a persuasive call to action?

Here are eight tips to help you craft compelling call to action that convert:

  1. Keep it Simple
    Your call-to-action should be clear and concise. Don’t try to pack too much into it. Instead, focus on one key message you want your reader to take away. This way, they are more likely to remember what you want them to do. If they have to go back or recall the point, they will likely become disinterested.
    But, avoid being Generic. Don’t use a call-to-action that just says “Click Here” or “Read More” unless you have an incredibly compelling reason for doing so. If you want to tease your readers with extra information, consider including a few lines of text before your call to action, or give them some commentary afterward.
  2. Make it Relevant
    Your calls to action need to be relevant to the content of your article or blog post. If it’s not, your readers are likely to be confused and may not take the action you want them to.
    A good example of a relevant call-to-action is the one used by Lifehacker. In a post, they were offering a free guide to making your own GIFs. They know that readers of this article will likely want to create their own GIFs and they urge them to do so immediately with a clear call-to-action at the end of the post—but not before teasing them with some valuable information first.
  3. Use Strong Language
    Your call to action should use strong, persuasive language that urges your reader to act. Words like “free,” “now,” and “instant” can be particularly effective in driving conversions.
    Use a Strong Call-to-Action Header. Your call-to-action header should be large and bold, easily visible to your readers so they can’t miss it. It should also be relevant to the rest of your post so as not to alienate any potential customers.
  4. Offer an Incentive
    Giving your readers an incentive to act can be a powerful motivator. Whether it’s a discount code or a freebie, offering something of value will increase the likelihood that they’ll follow through on your call to action.
  5. Use Imagery
    Including an image along with your call to action can help it stand out and be more effective. Use an eye-catching image that supports your message and entices your reader to take action.
    The image should also be relevant to your post, and you should make sure it’s not too large or small. It’s best if the image is positioned above or below the call to action so that it’s easy for your reader to find. Make Your CTA Easy to Find. Try to place your call-to-action button within a few paragraphs of where you introduce it.
  6. Make it Easy to Take Action
    Your call to action should be easy to follow and lead your reader to the desired destination without any confusion. Ensure your links are working and that roadblocks do not prevent your reader from following through.
  7. Test, Test, Test
    Don’t forget to test your call to action to see what works best. Create different ones to see which one converts the best. Then, you can fine-tune your call to action for even better results. A/B testing is a great way to determine what works best for your audience.
  8. Use Persuasive Language
    Finally, your call to action should use strong, persuasive language that urges your reader to act. Words like “free,” “now,” and “instant” can be particularly effective in driving conversions.

Remember, crafting a compelling call to action is essential to driving conversions. Crafting ones that convert is also easy with the correct information and tools. Keep CTAs in mind the next time you’re creating content and see the difference it makes in your results.

Perhaps take a peak at some compelling call to action examples in another post?

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Don’t Have Enough Time for Social Media? A Strategic Plan Can Help.

If you want to make an impact with your audience on social media, it takes time. You need to be there every day posting content, interacting, and building your audience. This time drain is one of the major challenges, but there’s an easy way to overcome it – Create a detailed social media strategic plan.

What Is a Social Media Strategy?

A social media strategy is a blueprint or roadmap that tells you the what, when, who, and where of everything you do on social media. It is a summary that links your social media activity to your overall business goals. It explains what you will do when there and how you’ll measure your performance and make improvements as necessary.

Simply creating a profile and posting randomly whenever you feel like it isn’t enough to get results, even if you do it daily. You need a solid plan if you want to use social media to achieve your business goals.

How Your Social Media Strategy Saves You Time

How do you create your social media strategic plan? It starts with some research to gain an understanding of your target market. You then need to create your plan and set goals. While it takes some time to do this crucial planning, it will save you time in the long run.

Your strategy saves you time because it stops you from spinning your wheels. It’s remarkably easy to waste time on sites like Facebook, scrolling endlessly through your feed, liking this, sharing that. But one part of your plan is an organized to-do list so that each day when you get started, you know exactly what you need to do.

More Results for Your Efforts

You’ll also save time because everything you do on social media will have an impact on your bottom line. This is because when you made your plan, you identified goals and how you’ll reach them. All your activity on these sites is connected to reaching those goals.

Tips on Saving Time on Social Media

In addition to implementing a strategic plan, here are some other ways you can make the most of your time on social media.

Create a Schedule. Find out when your audience is most responsive and use this time for posting and interacting. Decide how often you’ll post and create an editorial calendar. You’ll do this as part of creating your plan.

Start Collecting Ideas. You’ll need a great deal of content, so create an ideas list and add to it whenever you’re struck by inspiration. You can refer to this list when it’s time to write and you won’t get stuck with writer’s block.

Automate Where You Can. Take advantage of automation tools for tasks that don’t need the personal touch. You can do this with software or a social media dashboard.

Repurpose Content. Look for evergreen content you can repurpose. Another great content shortcut is to curate content so you don’t need to create it all yourself.

Start Creating Your Social Media Strategy Now

Even if you’re there every day interacting with your audience, put the brakes on now and take some time to create your strategic plan. Your content will resonate even better with your audience and you’ll start building real relationships.

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