The 4 Building Blocks of a Profitable Social Media Marketing Strategy

Over the past decade, social media has become much more than a place to share personal feelings and pictures of cats. It has morphed into a powerful sales channel that businesses spend countless hours trying to master.

A Harvard Business Review article revealed that 84% of largely successful companies are on Facebook, 86% on Twitter, and 45% have an Instagram presence. However, for smaller businesses with miniscule social media marketing budgets, transforming their accounts into revenue generators is still a massive challenge – advertising on Facebook certainly isn’t getting any cheaper.

Thankfully, designing your business’s social media strategy to attract long-term profitability isn’t as intimidating as it sounds. It just requires a little knowledge, insight, and strategy...

1. Determine Where Your Customers Are Buying

Let’s be totally honest; your customers are not likely browsing social media exclusively to buy products and services. They are checking up on their friends, posting pictures, catching up on news, watching videos, etc.

Understanding your customers and their mindset toward social media is the most important part of social selling. The key here is to find which platforms your audience pays the most attention to and how they engage with the content. While Facebook continues to dominate the playing field with 85% of all social media purchases, Instagram, Twitter, and Pinterest are still strong contenders based on product types. In fact, some experts believe that Twitter will see renewed relevance in 2018 due to rising advertising costs on Facebook.

Various items and industries sell better on different sites based on the demographics of the users. For instance, books, antiques, and collectable items tend to sell better on Pinterest, while household goods and specialty gifts typically perform well on Twitter.

Pay close attention to your own business’s results from selling on various platforms so you know which accounts to market more heavily through. There’s no point in wasting time, money, and effort on social media platforms that are not bringing in the big bucks, so to say.

2. Create a Personal Brand

You’ve worked hard to establish a brand for your own business through marketing and social media efforts, but what about branding yourself or your business leadership? Customers tend to trust individuals over companies, especially online. In fact, leads that are initiated through an employee’s social media activity convert seven times more often than business generated leads.

Personal branding is about establishing credibility as an individual, particularly with your expertise or understanding of a business or industry. Hosting webinars, writing e-books, or blogging about your knowledge and marketing the content through social media could be a great way to start, not to mention a profitable side business idea as well.

Positive branding can benefit both a business and an individual, allowing both parties to grow along the way. Think of how intertwined Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook are, or Elon Musk and Tesla. Whatever the person does or says affects the brand, and vice versa.

Positioning yourself as an industry thought leader or expert can have a phenomenally positive effect on the business, especially in terms of customer trust and lead generation. Turning this expertise into something profitable, such as consulting programs or sellable material could also earn your brand some extra streams of revenue.

3. Dabble with Influencer Marketing

The influencer marketing trend has turned into a long-term strategy for many businesses, and for good reason. A successful influencer marketing campaign can potentially help you reach more targeted audiences than you ever have.

Many companies have seen impressive growth and revenue results from partnering with the right influencers. For example, Bigelow Tea partnered with several healthy living bloggers to promote their all-natural tea with fun recipes. They even created a number of new ideas. Once the campaign wrapped up, Bigelow measured a 300% increase in media value and nearly 19% growth in sales.

If your business has not considered this marketing avenue, it may be time to rethink the reasons that are holding you back. Remember, nearly 4 out of 5 marketers find that determining ROI is the most challenging part of influencer marketing.

While this tactic certainly is not the perfect fit for every single business, it has been proven to be a great way to create buzz and reach out to larger audiences.

4. Pay Attention to the Social Media Sales Funnel

Social media selling is a different ball game than the traditional methods. It requires more subtly and relationship nurturing over pushy tactics. As previously stated, most people don’t go on social media for the sole purpose of buying products and services.

Therefore, social selling requires much more attention at the top of the funnel, which is the awareness and introduction phase. Remember, social media is more about engagement than anything else, so aggressively pushing products and deals through your content is not the smart way to go. Nearly half of social media users will unfollow a brand that is overly promotional, so be very careful with what you post.

The posts you release must provide some sort of value. So listen to what your followers are saying and sharing online and use that to guide your content. People don’t follow brands because they want to be sold to; they follow, like, and share because they agree with the messages that business is sharing.

Focus on original content that will nurture interest more organically, such as blog posts discussing hot button issues or fun trends throughout your industry.

Remember that social media marketing is about the long game and establishing relationships, not necessarily gaining profits from the start. With the right content strategy in place, you can design campaigns that attract loyal followers, and eventually, turn them into customers.

Over to You

Building a profitable social media marketing strategy is all about the ROI your team is able to make through campaign spending. While social media profitability is certainly on the rise, there is still room for improvement.

Making a few simple changes and properly adjusting your focus can have a huge impact and set up your brand for success and continuous profitability.