How To Increase Sales With Social Media

Did you know that 1 out of 3 people worldwide are active on social media?

That is about 2.5 billion users across the globe who are scrolling through Facebook posts and Instagram pictures.

Wouldn’t it be a great idea to be active on social media with your company on a regular basis? Social media is where the attention is at right now. Grabbing a piece of that attention can play out great for your business.

Two out of three marketers saw an increase in leads, traffic and sales by spending a couple of hours a week on social media.

Let’s see how you can take advantage of social media and increase your sales.

Increasing your brand awareness

Putting your brand out there makes your company visible for people who might not know about your brand yet. Making use of different social media channels increases your potential audience.

Where do you start? Let’s say you want to be active on Twitter and Instagram. First, make sure you have your business pages set up on both platforms. Then, have every employee and people related to your business create a Twitter and Instagram account if they have not already done that.

Now you have created your first small audience. Every time you post something to Twitter or Instagram, have everyone like and share your new content. This way you will reach lots of people right from the start.

Now you can start building brand awareness through your first audience that will like and share your new content. This can result in new audiences being exposed to your brand, which in turn can result in potential customers.

Improving your brand loyalty

Social media is a great tool to increase brand loyalty and customer satisfaction. Brand loyalty make customers committed to your brand and make them come back repeatedly.

You are creating bonds by engaging with your potential customers and existing customers on social media platforms. You do not only have to use social media for posting about your company. Social media is also a great tool to interact with your customers and for giving your audience the opportunity to connect with you directly.

Increasing your conversion rates

The thing with social media is that with every piece of content you post, you are creating an opportunity for potential customers to visit your website.

What is playing a huge role here is the fact that you can show your audience that your company is ‘human’. You can make it much clearer that make your company is not a machine, but that your company is in fact run by real people. When you are engaging with your followers on social media, you are putting a person behind your brand. People prefer to do business with a person rather than a faceless company.

Interacting one-on-one with your followers and customers and building relationships with them can increase the chance of people coming to your business when they need a product or service instead of going somewhere else. Make sure you leave a positive impression that will stick in their minds.

Increasing your amount of inbound traffic

By being active on different kinds of social media channels, you increase the amount of possibilities for potential customers to come to your website. People can already use search engines and blogs, but by adding social media to the mix, you open up a whole lot of new doors.

The most effective way to do this is to think about which social media platforms will be most useful to your company first. In this case, more is not always better. You have to actually be active on the channels you choose, otherwise it will not work. You can be active on as many channels as you like, as long as you use them consistently.

The secret here is to build an audience on social media and have that audience share your content, such as blogs. This way you increase the chance of your content ending up in front of bigger influencers who might write about your company or about the content you put online. When they link back to your website, you are gaining valuable inbound links.

It is relatively cheap

Advertising on social media is not as expensive as you might think. Comparisons with other media show this and that you can reach over 1,000 people for as low as $3.

When targeting your advertisements effectively, you can increase your sales quite a bit. Think about what it would cost to send out 1,000 direct mails, buy an advertisement in the newspaper or a magazine. Those 3 dollars you spend on Facebook are going to win every time.

This only works when you target your advertisements to relevant audiences, of course. If you have never advertised on Facebook, you can start by creating an advertisement, finding a specific target market and putting a couple of dollars into it.

In the beginning you will most likely not be getting the full potential return on your spend, because you have to try out different audiences and fine-tune your advertisements. When you have found the right audience for your specific advertisements, you can start trying to put a couple of more dollars into it. If your sales go up, you can keep running that advertisement or increase your budget. If your sales stay the same, go back and fine-tune some more until you get it right. Facebook will also indicate if certain demographics are getting more bang for your buck than others, to help you in the fine-tuning process.

Facebook ads are arguably still one of the more affordable ways to advertise. Once you get the hang of them, you can generate more interest and direct sales.

Measuring more effectively

You can use Google Analytics for tracking visitors, but did you know that you could do the same exact thing with Facebook or Instagram?

Several social media channels offer the opportunity to measure how your audience is responding to your content. By finding out which segments respond best to your posts on social media, you can target your posts in a better way.

You can measure many different things on Facebook. One of the things you can measure easily is the time that most of your followers are interacting with your posts. Another thing is that you can see that, for instance, your posts are mostly shared by women between 40 and 45 from a specific country.

Knowing this, you can adapt your social media behavior in order be more effective on your different platforms.

Better customer support

It is extremely easy to manage your customer support on social media platforms. For example, on Facebook you can directly connect with your customers in an easy way.

When someone shares an experience with your product or service on Facebook, you can interact with them, which increases the human factor of your company a little once again.

Another opportunity to increase the human factor is to write personalized replies to your customers instead of having an auto-reply function on your website. While an initial auto-reply is not bad, a quick follow-up with a human response is much more beneficial.

Tip: Always do your best to acknowledge comments you get on social media, with a Like at least, or a comment back where warranted. Take the time to come up with a personalized and original response. Do not copy/paste the same message to all of your followers. Instead, seize this chance to show your brand’s personality.

Need help?

As you can see, social media can be a powerful tool for your business if you want to grow and increase traffic to your website. You can start implementing some tricks today and see what works for you.

If you need any help managing your social media channels, don’t hesitate to contact us for more information. We would be glad to help you generate more leads and increase your sales!

Go here to contact us for more information.