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Leveraging Social Media Marketing to Increase Customer Engagement

Northsail Appreciates the Value of Multi-Platform Marketing Strategies

Through our work as a custom software developer, Northsail has helped countless clients overcome obstacles in their daily processes. We do this by providing software solutions that resolve issues as they arise and help expedite tedious tasks. Together, these benefits allow businesses to save and utilize more of their most precious resource - time.

Time is something we all wish we had more of, and even when everything goes according to plan, time is fleeting. We don't believe in wasting anyone's time, which is why Northsail won't take on projects if we don't believe that we can complete them to our top-quality standards.

In fact, we're committed to ensuring every project we manage is always delivered on-time, on-spec, and on-budget. It's this guarantee that allows us to build such strong, long-lasting relationships with our past clients. They know they can count on us to help overcome challenges as they arise.

So, if you're planning to work with Northsail, what are you going to do with the extra time that you'll have available? If you've been looking to expand your marketing strategy into new territory, one of the most effective methods for widening your brand's reach and building stronger customer engagement is social media marketing.

What is Social Media Marketing?

At its core, social media marketing is a method for using the wide range of social media platforms that are available, to connect more directly with your customer base through their social media accounts.

This will allow you to expand your brand visibility and make more personal, emotional relationships with customers. It transforms the often-passive customer shopping experience into an interactive journey, using engaging, relevant content.

In turn, if done properly, this can lead to increased sales and help drive foot traffic both online and at your brick-and-mortar locations. It's also a fantastic method for bolstering positive word-of-mouth relating to your brand, products, and services.

But where do you start? There are so many different types of social media channels and social media platforms out there today. Many of them require specialized engagement techniques, in order to achieve the most effective, long-lasting results.

With that in mind, Northsail has put together some helpful information on how you can frame your social media strategy most effectively; based on some of the most popular platforms that you could choose to centralize your digital marketing.

Expanding Your Reach Using Facebook/Meta

'Likes' help Facebook (now transitioning to the new brand name 'Meta') determine how popular your business, products, and services are.

In the past, this helped establish organic placements in Facebook's news feed algorithm, but recent changes have changed the way that this measurement affects your brand's social media presence. While 'page likes' are still beneficial, the most immediate and tangible measurable social media strategy on this platform is using Facebook Ads.

Thankfully, this doesn't mean you have to invest in Facebook Ads to run effective social media marketing strategies on this platform. You just have to think more strategically. Likes are great, but strong social media engagement is far more important.

We've previously discussed using effective Giveaway Ideas, and incentivizing your customer base is extremely effective for engaging them with your promotions through social media sites.

Running Facebook contests and giveaways is a fantastic way to incentivize customers into participating in a promotion. Facebook no longer allows for 'page likes' to be considered as an entry method into these promotions, but many customers will still choose to do this; especially if they're excited by your promotion, and you request it in the promotional advertising copy.

Many successful social media campaigns build a 'visit page' action into their contests and giveaways, which is required for entry. This is an extremely effective way of getting customers to click through to your website directly; or to a unique, Facebook-based advertising page that is designed to turn their piqued interest into a sales conversion.

Of course, running a contest means you'll likely have some sort of user-filled information form they need to complete before being fully eligible to participate in the giveaway. You can use this to build your email contact list for customers to prepare for your next Email Marketing Campaign

Don't forget to request them to like and share your Facebook page on that form as well. Even if it's optional, in many cases loyal customers will be happy to oblige. All you have to do is ask.

When they share your page to their respective feeds, it creates social proof of your brand for the people viewing those feeds. These personal positive endorsements are a way to utilize these social channels more effectively than your business possibly could on its own.

Getting More Attention on Instagram & Pinterest

Visual appeal is everything on Instagram and Pinterest. These social media networks thrive on helping create a visual footprint online for your brand and your products.

Because posts typically have fewer characters in the copy than certain other platforms, social media marketing here has two crucially important factors: Immediate, strong visual engagement and poignant, guiding written copy.

Visual social media engagement is something that should happen from the moment that a customer sees your post.

Pictures in social media posts should always be high-quality. This is an absolute must; otherwise, you could actually do your business a disservice by posting low-quality, pixelated, or blurry images. It detracts from the things you're offering, and makes your business appear unprofessional or amateurish, which can make social media followers less likely to want to purchase from you.

Another element that often gets overlooked in social media usage on Instagram and Pinterest is photo diversity.

Even if you only offer a limited number of products or services, no one wants to see essentially the same picture day after day. It disengages customers from your brand and leads to the 'same old, same old' mentality for your social strategy, which can stifle excitement in your customer experience.

Keep things interesting and mix it up. Don't be afraid to include images involving your team members engaging with customers, or using your products or services. This helps customers relate to your business through the social platform, which creates a deeper emotional connection between your customers, your staff, and your brand.

When it comes to writing effective marketing copy for Instagram and Pinterest, one useful technique is to utilize your limited character count to push hashtags that connect to your business.

Does your business have a slogan or motto that you're already using in your marketing materials? Create a hashtag around it, and then drive customer engagement by encouraging customers to use the hashtag themselves in their own posts.

This could involve encouraging a satisfied customer to show themselves enjoying your products at home. You can even hold photo contests on your social media profiles, where customers can enter by submitting their own photos using your designated hashtag. #tryityourself #supereffective

Building Followers on Twitter

Using social media engagement techniques on Twitter falls somewhere between both Facebook and Instagram/Pinterest style platforms.

While images are regularly used in Twitter campaigns (especially when promoting new products or promotions), they often need to be balanced alongside more copy content that you'll typically find in Instagram or Pinterest posts.

Establishing a balance between these two elements is crucial to success in Twitter marketing campaigns. This includes utilizing hashtags to help encourage user-generated content from followers and promote your brand.

You can help bolster your business' list of followers by making it a stipulation for entering any Twitter contests. This will assist future Twitter marketing campaigns, by creating a larger base of immediate engagement.

Another effective method for building customer engagement on Twitter is encouraging customers to produce their own tweets that include your branded hashtag, or to retweet the posts that you're creating.

This expands the reach of your marketing exponentially, as well as creating wide-reaching word-of-mouth. Each person you can encourage to retweet these promotional posts is essentially telling all of their followers that they would put their own name behind your brand.

This technique doesn't work as effectively as direct customer referrals, but leveraged properly, it can substantially expand awareness of your contests and promotions.

Tiktok, Twitch & Snapchat, Oh My!

Of course, the platforms we've already discussed are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to social media marketing. There are many other social media platforms you can utilize to increase your level of customer engagement, and there are more popping up every year.

Some social media platforms are fleeting fads, and others may be long-lasting. Staying on top of the trends can give you access to some otherwise untouched markets for your target demographics.

Certain other social media platforms, like Tiktok and Snapchat, use short, entertaining pieces of content to promote brands and products. These are fast-paced, to the point, and usually quite entertaining.

The goal is to create engagement with customers by eliciting an emotional response between the customer and whatever you're offering; whether it's a product, service, contest, or giveaway.

Humor is often utilized effectively in these campaigns, especially when the target demographic is younger, or the product is associated with a certain type of lifestyle.

Conversely, Twitch promotions use longer video formats, and frequently involve some sort of live broadcast with a sponsored influencer.

This means, if you’re looking to branch into this social media platform, it would be a good idea to research and contact some popular influencers within your target demographic. Doing this will allow you to ensure you're providing credible, valuable content to your followers.

Partnerships are a good way to build exposure, which you would have to pay for otherwise with more traditional advertising. These could be product demonstrations, new product reveals, unboxing videos, or even just videos of users making use of your products.

These sponsored videos are then saved to the social media platform, where they can be replayed later. Think about it: followers will voluntarily watch and enjoy what are essentially commercials for your business. This is a fantastic way to make a first impression on potential customers.

All three of these social media platforms encourage customers to feel like they're a part of the marketing campaign itself. It's engaging, because it's easy for customers to become involved in promotions, and for them to interact directly with the personalities you've chosen to lead the campaign.

In turn, this makes your social media marketing strategies more interactive, and thus, more approachable for some users than other platforms.

Expanding Your Reach Requires the Right Tools

Let Northsail Take the Stress Out of Daily Operations, So You Can Focus on Building Your Business

Now that you have some useful social media marketing ideas, you're ready to start evolving your marketing strategies to create stronger customer engagement by utilizing social media platforms.

Northsail understands just how important feedback, engagement, and customer service are to long-term success, which is why we're giving you the opportunity to test out a new service that we're going to be offering soon called 'Horizon'.

Sign-up below, and be one of the first people to test out this intuitive, helpful new service for FREE; before it even becomes available through our regular services.

We encourage open communications with all our clients, which is why all we ask is that you take a few minutes to let us know what you think about Horizon, once you've had a chance to test it out.

This is just one of the amazing services you can access through Northsail, so what are you waiting for? Reach out today and take the first steps towards a more efficient, profitable, and sustainable business.

Sign up for early access to Horizon!

We’ll send you important updates about the early access program and your free invite when we are ready.

Your contact information will only be used for the early access program, not for future sales and marketing.

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