Improve Your Social Media Marketing Amid COVID-19
With many businesses still operating mostly online, social media continues to be a powerful tool to build connections, attract new customers, and drive revenue. If you didn’t have a solid social media marketing plan pre-COVID, perhaps you began making shifts to explore how to use these platforms more effectively.
In fact, as a catalog brand, you have a unique advantage of leveraging social media that can increasingly drive more awareness to your brand. The key is using the techniques and tools that better positions you based on the type of business you have.
In this step-by-step tactical guide, we’ll highlight the latest trends towards improving your social media marketing even in the midst of COVID-19.
Video Content is Still All the Rage
Video continues to perform well for engagement, leads, and sales. Stats reveal that regardless of the industry or vertical, consumers and businesses alike enjoy watching video…with increasing demand. In fact, HubSpot shares that 54% of consumers desire to see more video from brands they support.
Video is so important to our own content strategy that we include a mini-video for each of our blog posts to give our audience another way to consume our content. It’s a great strategy to engage while keeping people on our site!
So, how can you use more video in your social media marketing for your catalog business? Here are three ways:
Go Live to Showcase Your Flagship Products
The social media algorithms love live video. So much so that they give preference to these videos in newsfeeds. Use this tool to feature your popular and trending items. Be sure to end the video with a CTA showing viewers how to access and order from your catalog.
Answer FAQs Using Video
Whether live or prerecorded, video is the perfect tool to answer your audience’s most pressing questions. The good news is, these videos can be short, between 30-60 seconds long, and could offer a ton of value.
Use the Comments as Ideas for Future Videos
Viewers’ feedback and questions serve as compelling content topic ideas for your next video. Use these nuggets to your advantage! Document these questions and keep the conversation going in your upcoming videos. Your audience will know that you’re listening and care about their thoughts.
Publish for the Platform
Did you know each social media platform has its own rules, style, communication preferences, and user experience?
You see, how you publish content on Instagram should be different than how it’s shared on Facebook. The mistake many businesses encounter is posting the same exact content across all social media channels and expecting to achieve favorable results. This is better known as cross-posting.
Users are accustomed to communicating differently based on the social media site. So, it’s important you tweak and adjust your content accordingly so it fits the style that people are used to seeing and experiencing on that respective platform.
The following are a few tips to consider:
Content Types
Keep in mind that certain types of content perform better on some social sites, and not as well on others. Visually appealing images do incredibly well on Instagram whereas it might not matter as much on Facebook. Infographics are killer for Pinterest but may not perform as well on Facebook.
Hashtags versus Keywords
Hashtags are king on Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest. It’s one of the primary ways new users will find you on these platforms. However, Facebook appeals more to keyword phrases. Therefore, focusing on keywords your audience typically searches for on Google is a strong approach for your Facebook content.
The Messaging
A cool tool you can use is the Social Message Optimizer from CoSchedule. This unique and simple tool will help improve your social media content to boost engagement, traffic, and credibility with your audience and the platform. Simply insert your intended message and see how it ranks. You’ll get insights on how it performs now and what you can do to make it better.
Surely, this tool can easily be your go-to for better social content!
Entertain, Encourage, Enchant
Even as a catalog brand, your customers want to experience the human side of your brand. When you’re relatable, people are more likely to connect and engage with you.
This is especially important for businesses who can easily attempt to hide behind brands and logos.
Yet, building the know, like, and trust factor will be a key ingredient towards driving conversions and followers on social media. It’s also a vital step to creating meaningful relationships that keep customers engaged and coming back to you.
The good news is, you can implement the following steps now to cultivate your audience, humanize your brand, and cement trust with your people.
Show Your Funny Side
Laughter does the body good! Give your audience a chuckle by sharing a funny meme or cat GIF on Facebook. Invite users into your fun culture by highlighting a funny happening while working remotely via Zoom. These sharings will make you memorable and give your content some zest!
Inspire and Motivate Your Followers
Motivational quotes and inspirational sayings still work on social media. For good measure, briefly share why the message resonates with your brand. How does it relate to your core values? What will you do as a result of this quote? This added step will further separate your brand while giving your followers insight into who you are what you stand for.
Delight So They Want More
Sharing value, answering questions, and offering solutions show that you are the expert in your space. It also shows you care for your customers and their goals/results. Enchanting your audience with value is a sure way to nurturing relationships while building trust.
Conclusion
Social media continues to be a game-changer for small businesses. By refining your social content through videos, humanizing, and the way you message for each platform, you’ll experience a dramatic shift in user engagement.
Therefore, use the tips outlined to better your social media marketing. Be sure to measure your engagement through native analytics and your marketing tools. Over time, you’ll see your metrics improve as well as your overall results.
