Before you start a social media marketing campaign, you need to think about what your objectives are. Social networking sites aren’t the best tools for actually making sales. Instead, they’re very good relationship management tools that prepare the ground for future sales.
Raising awareness
The first step to using social media to drive traffic is to share links to interesting content on your website.
Although this sounds very simple, in practice it can be quite difficult to achieve. People will pass on useful, informative or entertaining information – anything that appears ‘salesy’ is likely to be ignored.
The more genuinely interesting content you have, however, the more likely people are to click on links, and buy from you when they’re ready to do so.
Building trust
The second step is to build trust and credibility – for example, by demonstrating your industry know-how or showing you can be responsive to customer comments, queries and complaints.
This can take time, but a good reputation is a vital tool in persuading a potential customer to buy, or an existing customer to recommend you to others.
Converting traffic to leads
The third and final step is to make sure people who arrive at your website through social networking find what they need. You should include calls to action that help you meet your marketing objectives – for instance:
- to get sign-ups to an email newsletter (which you use to turn warm leads into sales)
- to encourage people to share good content (which may have product links in it)
- to get people to make an enquiry about an exclusive offer
A website design company can help you drive traffic by ‘optimising’ your website for social media . This might include building a blog or adding ‘share’ buttons so your content can be passed on via social media sites.
How can I measure how I’m doing?
It’s important to measure how successful your efforts are in driving traffic to your website. There are a range of tools, such as Google Analytics, which allow you to see where visitors to your website are coming from.
With this information, you can refine your approach and work out the best ways to meet your online marketing objectives.
