There are plenty of ways in the market today for you to reach your target audience, and Northsail understands that a strong marketing strategy is just as important as a well-designed website.
Building brand loyalty is an ongoing battle that requires you to always meet and exceed your customers' expectations. Our clients know they can trust us to do that on every project, because we're always on-spec, on-budget, and delivered on-time.
We want to help you improve every area of your business, from the software solutions in your toolkit to the methods you use to create a personal connection with your customers.
Establishing a reliable, in-depth social media strategy is one way that you can use all the social media channels available today to engage with audiences in an affordable, widespread way.
Before we get to some tips for social media growth hacks, let's discuss the concept of 'followers'.
Standing out as a brand in the digital age absolutely requires a reasonable online presence. If customers can't find you online or don't see you in their favorite social media platforms, it's extremely easy to plateau on how much of your target audience you're actually reaching.
Even the best business needs to be able to keep their business profile present in the minds of their customer base as much as possible. Otherwise, a more visible brand with similar values and affinity could sweep potential followers away at any time.
That's where social media platforms come in. When social media marketers develop strategies, it typically involves the goal of increasing your overall follower count. But what is a 'follower'?
A follower is a person that enjoys your brand (or at least your brand advertising) enough to want regular updates when you post on their preferred platform.
One follower may only be interested in a certain type of content or a certain product that you offer, while another may be interested in your brand as a whole. You'll reach a different type of user making Instagram Stories than you will providing the same content in Facebook Stories.
There are no easy answers when it comes to determining what platform will give you the best results, other than to think about your core demographics, and which social channels will provide your brand with the most engaged audience within your target demographics.
Hashtags are an incredibly popular form of mutual promotion that both you and your customers can use on a regular basis.
Not only can it help push the reach of your promotions farther, but it's fantastic social proof if you can convince customers to start using your branded hashtag in their social media posts.
Increasing engagement should always be one of the top priorities when you make a post.
Adding appealing visuals to your posts, in addition to whatever written content you've prepared to go along with them, is a fantastic way to encourage customer engagement during those first few crucial seconds that you have to grab their attention.
It's easy to lose track of making frequent posts or maintaining a clear social strategy when you don't have any real deadlines or expectations for when posts should be made.
This doesn't mean that you have to post every day, but it's a good idea to schedule when you'll make posts in advance, so you don't forget to continue making regular updates.
Trust us - schedule posts ahead for your social media sites, and you'll see an improvement in your engagement metrics.
Don't pigeon-hole your social media marketing strategy by only sticking to a single social media platform.
Most businesses don't sell a single product, and you shouldn't confine yourself to a single type of follower. There are plenty of ways to run promotions on Instagram and Pinterest, as well as promotions on Meta (Facebook) in tandem.
There are a few different social media platforms that will allow you to how promotional video content, such as Facebook and Instagram Stories.
The key here is to create educational or informative video content about either the products you offer, or relating to the industry you service. Your engagement rate is sure to rise, when your video post adds the value of knowledge alongside your promotional marketing materials.
Everyone loves free stuff, it's just a fact of life. The audiences you'll find on social networks are no different, so it's not a bad idea to include giveaways in your social strategy.
Concerned that there isn't enough interest in a new product that you've got launching in your business soon? Consider running a giveaway to draw customer interest towards the new product. You could gain followers this way as well, simply because they'll want to watch for your future giveaways.
There are a million social media influencers out there, and many of them are constantly looking for the next business that they can partner with to expand the reach of their own brand.
Spend some time going through social channels within your own industry, and try to figure out who (if any) influencers are already representatives of the type of markets you're targeting. Reach out to them and offer to discuss partnerships.
Their endorsement could be fantastic social proof for your business.
Many social media channels actually have paid advertising that you can purchase through their platform to run promotional campaigns the same way you would on Google Ads.
Twitter Ads, Facebook Ads, Instagram Ads - these are just a few of the options available to you. If you can combine social media advertising with your social media marketing campaigns, you'll get the best of both worlds. Just be sure that your content strategy is consistent across all of your platforms, or you could risk confusing your customer base.
If you've been working on email marketing campaigns, you've probably got a sizable email list at your disposal. Now's the time to put that to use.
Once you've spent some time establishing a presence on the social networks that you're choosing to use, create a welcoming email for everyone on your email list to follow your business on that platform. Not everyone will become a follower, of course, but every email address is another potential addition to your online army of supporters.
It never hurts to ask - as long as you don't ask excessively.
This is a debatable practice that does work much of the time, but doesn't necessarily offer a ton of long-term returns the way that natural followers can.
There are going to be a lot of people that will want a free discount code, and if it's a small percentage that you can afford to absorb on your margins, this is a fantastic way to achieve a short-term conversion increase.
However, many of these 'fake followers' will simply follow you to get their code, and then unfollow or mute your posts later.
Sometimes it can be nice to shake things up a bit and try something different with the types of content you're putting out for your business. If you've only ever done text posts, it could be time to move into visuals or video content.
Don't confine your brand to a single type of content, because even within your target market there will be some customers that are more interested or engaged by one type of content over another.
Offering a variety of content types gives you the opportunity to reach a wide range of potential followers across your social networks.
For business owners that are already feeling overwhelmed by the sheer volume of things that they need to accomplish in a day, building and maintaining a social media presence can feel like a mountain to climb.
Thankfully, you can always use a social media management tool to begin organizing all your social options into a single place, as well as giving you the option to post simultaneously across every platform at once, or schedule posts ahead of time to avoid forgetting.
If your social media strategies haven't been getting you the kind of attention that you were hoping for, it might be time to think about changing your plan.
There's nothing wrong with pivoting your strategy if you don't think it's working, so don't be afraid to make changes if things aren't working. Better to try a different approach than have your online presence begin to stagnate.
One of the biggest benefits of using social media is social listening - taking the time to collect data from social networks about what people are saying about your brand and your offerings.
Once you know a bit about how your brand is being viewed, use your social channels to reach out directly to vocal customers within your followers. Ask them about how you can improve what you're offering. Give them a chance to suggest ideas you may not have even considered. You'll be thankful you did.
If your social media campaigns just aren't going well, and you're feeling like the idea of maintaining a presence with minimal returns is just too much work for what it will net your business, consider hiring social media marketers.
These experts can give you the guidance you need to turn your campaigns around and start getting the kind of fanbase growth you were hoping for. It's an investment worth making, especially if your goals include a sustainable growth of social media followers.
Engagement is one of the most important features of a successful social media campaign, and there are plenty of great ways to use interactive marketing to encourage followers to share your content.
In turn, when you can get a follower to vouch for your brand by sharing your post on their personal profile, they're telling all of their followers to also support your brand.
This might seem like a given, but there are plenty of ways that business owners who start out with this mindset and quickly lose interest in quality, because they're just worried about making any type of post to keep their presence up.
Unfortunately, as soon as you start letting your quality slip, you're going to start losing the interest of your followers. That's counterproductive to your next campaign, so be sure that if you're going to post, it's always top-quality.
High-performance landing pages are a great way to help maintain excitement within your social media followers. If they click-through on your social media posts to check out your website, you'll want to keep them as engaged as possible - especially if you're hoping for conversions.
Thankfully, we've developed a new service called 'Horizon', which allows you to not only create high-performance landing pages for your website, but you can add in all the useful widgets you need to immediately start collecting valuable customer data.
Interested in trying Horizon for yourself? Well, now you can for free! To take part in the trial of Horizon, just sign-up below, and we'll get you started right away. All we ask is that you take a little time to let us know what you think about Horizon, once you've had a chance to check it out.
That's all there is to it. No obligation and no cost. Ready to get started on your next-level website?
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