As any avid social media user will tell you, it’s relatively easy to know whether your followers or friends appreciated your contribution to their news feeds; just look at the likes and shares on your page!
But when you see that a particular photo has had a few likes and shares, what does that mean for your campaign’s success? As a business focused on sales and verifiable returns, your posts must have a purpose, and a specific goal or objective.
But it isn’t always easy to quantify the success or failure of these efforts, especially when you want to cross-examine the results of a social media ad campaign and your sales reports.
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Public Perception
On any social media platform, liking and sharing posts is usually a good indicator of the content’s value or the way your audiences receive the information you chose to publish. After all, no one “likes” or endorses something that he or she finds offensive or unappealing in general. But just because your followers tend to respond favorably to your posts doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re investing in your products or services.
What this does indicate, though, is that your messaging got their attention and elicited a positive response; these are factors on which you can build a solid sales-related foundation.
Focusing on the Bigger Picture
So, social media likes, and shares may not directly lead to sales, but they can, in some way, contribute to a boost in your numbers in the long run. When you’ve established a rapport with your audiences for publishing quality content with which they can easily engage, individuals are more likely to take note of your posts as they appear in their newsfeeds. That means that each post can communicate a particular purpose or persuade a follower to become a customer or client sometime in the future.
Optimizing this content by adding strong links back to your website’s product or services pages, using keywords and phrases that convey your meaning, and encouraging decisive reactions among your fans can indirectly bolster your sales and create more opportunities for the posts to be circulated to new users.
Define your audience.
To ensure you are capturing the attention of the right demographic ensure you can identify your audience. In order to use social media effectively and truly speak to your customers, you need to truly understand who you are targeting. In marketing, customer personas are used to define and understand your typical customer or target customer.
Basically, it means building a sample customer and using that persona to identify exactly what your customers want. In the context of social media, you can use personas to build content that is relevant to them and will ultimately generate sales leads.
Content marketing and social media engagement is an integral part of any campaign strategy, and the pursuit of sales is no exception. While waiting on direct results can feel like a tedious process, it’s imperative to keep in mind that it’s all about fitting each of the pieces of your marketing strategy together and letting them do their part to contribute to your business or organization. When you do, you’ll notice the impact that social media engagement has and how it plays into the sales process.
For more tips on managing your social media accounts, using content marketing to your advantage, and understanding those likes and shares, stay tuned to our blog or contact the experts at Sage Island for a consultation!