When you set your goals correctly, the most common advertising tactic used by brands is paid targeted ads. You can also create challenges and invite customers to share images that help sell products.
To increase loyalty, you need to launch contests and giveaways!
Your page should be focused on selling your products or services. Use content marketing techniques such as blogging and videos that help you earn more than just money but also gain customers. Share information about how people who bought your products/services benefited from what you’re offering.
Set up objectives and be as specific as possible with them.
For example:
- The goal is to reach 95% coverage of the target audience in a specific city;
- The goal is to increase the number of followers by 40%;
- The goal is to increase the engagement by 5%;
- The goal to increase brand recognition;
- The goal to increase the conversion rate;
The name of this strategy is called S.M.A.R.T., which means Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and time-bound. This is an example of how we must write down our objectives accurately because sometimes they may get lost over time and be forgotten or misinterpreted.
In order to grow as an influencer, you need to focus on your goals. Asking questions about a topic that helps you understand what exactly people want isn’t enough. You also need to ask yourself why people should follow you and what kind of content they’d like to see from you.
These are some specific questions you should ask yourself before starting out: What results do I want to achieve? Why? Do I need anything else? Who am I going to involve?
Measurable — Everything is so easy, you just need to set some clear goals. Get 100 new customers, increase your sales by 10%
Adequate goals are achievable; they’re best accomplished by adjusting the promotion strategy rather than trying to achieve unrealistic goals. Smaller steps allow you to reassess tasks regularly.
Your goal shouldn’t be simply increasing the number of followers; rather, it should focus on attracting users who are already interested in the service. In short, the content you offer should be relevant for them too.
Last, we set a time range which makes it time-binding for us. We determine the timeframe for which we’ll evaluate the results. This makes it easier to assess whether the strategy was successful or not. It also allows us to review its impact and decide if any changes need to be made before continuing.
It all depends on the audience: whether people who read your blog posts are interested in buying what you’re selling when they receive your newsletter, and where it goes from there. You need to know your audience if you want to write for them instead of just writing for yourself.
Your first step should be to find people who are already interested in what you’re offering, whether they’re interested enough to use your service or not. Once you’ve found these potential clients, you must convince them that your service is worth their time and money.
For example, if you promote a dating site, follow mature people with specific pages related to that. If you are going to promote an online casino then follow topics dedicated to gambling. That simple logic is going to help you gain valuable leads.
Your target audience on Instagram, first of all, consists of people who are already likely to be interested in your product. We spend most of our time trying to get these people to sign up for our service. Only after we have successfully attracted these early adopters, do we look for others who, from an economic perspective, may also be interested.
Once you start attracting potential users, you can expand targeting options and send ads, launch giveaways, or hold challenges that target people who could possibly be interested in the product. For example, if this is an online banking app for gamers, once you’ve gone through gaming forums, you might want to try “gamer” communities filled with younger men.
Asking yourself who you think your audience might be, one of the three methods below will help you to compose the perfect portrait of your audience:
Empathy Maps are used by businesspeople to discover what clients want and how to sell them products or services. By putting yourself in your customers’ shoes, you can better understand why people buy certain products and avoid those who do not need your product.
Sometimes you have to put yourself in other people’s shoes to really understand the hardships of their souls — Kellie Elmore
The idea behind this task is to collect articles about different topics such as travel tips, fashion trends, health advice, or entertainment news. Each article must be tagged using the right keywords. This information should then lead to the creation of a database of relevant users who could potentially benefit from your service.
Each online audience has different needs.
You need to cater to each audience differently. Gift-giving is an important part of celebrating life, especially in business relationships. You may be trying to impress someone in your office. A corporate gift can help you do this without breaking the bank. Corporate gifts typically come in the form of cards, pens, calendars, mugs, t-shirts, key chains, etc.
These are different people using different keywords, they turn to different places when searching.
Empathy can be mapped by answering four questions:
What the potential client thinks, feels– how they think, what they want to get as a result;
What they hear — what other people in their social circle say, who does the client trust;
What they see– the client’s views, expectations;
What they do — how the clients see themselves in the community, what their status is and how the product corresponds to their standard of living.
The person method is used by businesses that want to sell products or services to a specific group of people. This method is different than other methods because there is a focus on the personality traits of each customer.
They try to understand what they need and then make decisions based on that information. Also, they develop ideas about how those customers might change over time.
For example, for gambling it can be the following persons:
- A college student with no permanent income and no money from their parents, but gets scholarships to play games. He plays in an attempt to beat the casino game and make quick cash at race betting.
- A gambler plays games online or offline and hopes to get lucky by playing poker, roulette, blackjack, etc. They usually drink a beer during gambling.
- A 35-year old professional female gambler who wants to relieve stress enjoys gambling at casinos but prefers to avoid losing money. She perceives the casino as a place she goes to enjoy herself without having to lose any money.
The last one is the Sherrington method. It is sometimes referred to as the 5W formula. You can specify your target audience if you answer a few questions:
What– what do you offer;
Who — who is the potential client;
Why — why should the user choose this particular product (the customer’s motivation)
When– when, under what circumstances a product or service is needed, you subdivide clients into several segments;
Where — where are the points of contact, when people will make a purchase, in what conditions will they use the service (will they buy it on Instagram or in a regular store).
Let’s analyze the method using an example.
What we sell — marriage agency services.
Who is our target — single people aged 30–35+.
Why you — because the site has been working for a long time, it verifies all users that register.
When — the service is needed all the time, but activity increases most of all during the summer and Christmas holidays when people feel lonely.
Where people are looking for the service — on social media, on various forums.
Knowing the audience and the objective, it is much easier to draft a publication plan, choose a content format, package your product, draw up instructions or a strategic plan. I’m not going to describe all the possible options, otherwise the article would be too long.
For specific cases, you will have to put yourself in the client’s shoes, using the empathy map, the “person” method, searching on forums, and spying on other bloggers.
With competitor research, you get information about who is posting what content online. You can use this data to choose the right channels and hashtags to promote your product.
Competitors can be:
- Direct— they promote exactly the same service or product as you;
- Indirect — in theory, you can promote your services to their clients.
When choosing your competitors, you need to be realistic. If you’re selling hand-made cosmetics, it’s pointless to compete with premium brands like L’Oreal or Lancôme.
On the other hand, if you are promoting an affiliate program of a large bank or bookmaker, you can spy on the approaches used by large companies. But not everything is that simple, you are unlikely to be able to compete with organizations that allocate millions for advertising purposes.
Find Inspiration
Large companies and well-known brands can be a source of inspiration for you. While it’s not always wise to compete with them directly, picking up cool ideas and incorporating them into your promotion strategy in a different manner is very helpful.
The easiest and cheapest way to find competitors is through keyword searches. This can be the name of a service, product, or niche. You can also get results by searching through hashtags. But it is most effective to use 3rd party tools.
It is convenient to analyze and search for competitors through special marketing tools for analyzing social media accounts or through SPY-tools and if you want to know more about the best deals click here.
Hootsuite, Social Pilot — Marketing tools that allow you to schedule posts, create ads that show up on Google searches for particular keywords, track relevant keywords, track competitive social media accounts in real-time, and see who commented on your content.
popsters — A service for analyzing pages, blog posts and tweets from your competition on social media;
similarweb —A tool that lets you analyze the traffic of any site or page on social media.
seobuddy — A very useful plugin to help you organize and structure your website from an SEO perspective.
Bigspy — A tool that helps you find relevant content from competitor websites.
A strategy used by another social media account might work or fail, depending on the situation. Successful Instagram promotion strategies can help you gain a lot of followers. Dead ones can still teach you something.
To get an overall sense of what works for your niche, go through at least 10–15 accounts or pages in your niche. Then, study them by asking yourself the following questions:
- The design of the page ;
- The content;
- The methods of interacting with the audience;
- The communication tone;
- An analysis of the audience interacting with the profile;
- A product comparison, and brand analysis.
When you conduct competitor analysis, you understand how to launch ads, which traffic sources to use, what posts attract your target audience, and what their expectations are from you.
However, if after analyzing other people’s campaigns you realize that the audience there doesn’t match yours and the account was created before you did, then don’t feel too bad for switching.
Finding online competitors is one way to identify people who can help advertise your products or services. An example would be finding bloggers who write about things that interest you.
If you already have a user account, analyze what you’ve done well and where you could improve. Ask yourself honest questions like these ones:
- What works and what doesn’t work;
- How the audience interacts with the account, is there anything happening;
- Do your followers represent who you want to be?;
- How strong is your position compared to your direct competitors.
An easy but efficient way to get more followers is to ask them what they want to see improved. They might come up with some really good ideas.
When checking the accounts of fake identities, it can be a discovery of how many different people want to use the name even of a small local company, for example, a bakery or a shop for selling handmade souvenirs.
Fake accounts are harmful to your business. They’re not just a nuisance for you; they can cause serious damage to your reputation. There are several ways you can eliminate fake accounts from your site. You can report these accounts through the customer support service and ask for confirmation of your rights to the brand name.
Spot The Fakes
If you’re looking for something quick and easy, then social media marketing can be an effective tool for you. Social media listening is a search for any mentions of a company on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Linkedin, etc.
Social media monitoring and social listening tools allow you to find out what people are saying about your company and products online. If you’re promoting an affiliate product, these tools can be used to discover where potential customers are looking for information. They can also be used to find which influencers you need to target when creating content.
How to Perform Account Auditing Step by Step:
- Search for the brand by typing its name into a search engine like Google, Bing, etc.;
- Check the personal profile for completeness and correctness: Is every field filled in properly? Are there any missing fields? Does the profile match the company’s current design? Have the pinned messages been reviewed? Does the profile look good on smartphones and computers? Does the profile look right when viewed from a mobile device?
- Select three or five of the best blog posts that received the most attention from readers.
- To determine whether any given post works well for your business, look at how effective it was for others. You can use Instagram Insights or third-party Instagram marketing tools to see if there were similar posts in terms of content and timing that resulted in good engagement.
- Track the results, periodically consider which channels are worth investing in. You will then be able to understand if they are profitable or not.
Product Packaging — Create a Post Style Guide
A key component of an effective Instagram marketing strategy is publishing regularly at roughly the same time every day. While variety is good (and is essential for increasing engagement), there must be a consistent design element across all your posts.
A good content strategy includes these key points:
- What kind of content do you create (lessons, instructions, announcements, etc.), which template you use, how you describe the style, the content formatting (e.g., lessons, instructions, announcements), who are your third parties (employees) if you’re using them — these things will help you quickly explain the way you work to newly-arrived team members.
- Describe the types of content you plan to use, including photos, advertisements, videos, stories, and user-generated content.
- After analyzing the competition, the audience, and the niche, as well as setting goals, create a list of additional marketing channels: promotional campaigns using influencers, promotions by collaborating with bloggers. At the same time, no one’s making you use ALL the marketing tools. It is much more important than the channel looks holistic, and the content format is suitable for the potential target audience.
If you’re trying to sell physical products, then focus on visual content: photos of clothing or even better models wearing them, unboxings, etc. Use banners with text for promotions.
How to Develop a Content Strategy:
- Define the style features of your brand or business.
- Set out the goals that the publication needs to achieve;
- Find the voice of the brand. Try to describe it in one sentence. Informative, friendly, comical (brutal), inclusive, sarcastic
- To target your audience, choose appropriate content and delivery methods.
- Write down how you want to interact with your audience.
- Plan a schedule for writing articles for your blog or website
Yes, publishing a photo is good, but half of its success depends on whether it’s relevant. If you publish a picture, but it isn’t seen within five hours, it may not appear anywhere at all.
To help you avoid publishing a piece of content during the wrong time, a publication schedule will help you. The best way to ensure you don’t forget something is to publish it on a regular basis.
How to Develop a Content Calendar:
- Keep an eye out for upcoming events, publish special content just before they occur, or use sports, holiday, or tournament news to promote products
- Take into account the season — In summers, people usually go away for vacations. When they come back from holidays, we tend to publish stories earlier than usual.
- Frequency isn’t as important as consistency. You’re better off publishing one post per month than making dozens of posts per week.
- When the audience most often looks at the feed. We conduct surveys and focus groups to determine which times are best suited to each group.
As long as you know your target audience well enough, if there is no way to purchase an expensive subscription, you could use the free Facebook planner tool, which can be found at the Facebook Creator Studio.
After preparing the posts and scheduling them, the system will automatically post new content at the specified times according to a pre-defined schedule. It’s super easy and totally free.