Using social media to promote your business can sometimes be a challenge, questions like "What does my audiance want?, What kinds of things should I be posting?" can stop you, before you've even started to dive into actually creating content to promote your business effectively. In this article we will be sharing some tips and tricks to help you start critically thinking about how to promote your business online.
Mapping out your goals and ideas is a great place to start!
Thinking about things from a realistic standpoint might look like the following:
Goals:
I want to connect with my customers better.
I want to sell products online and attract new customers.
I want to share my brand values & tell my story.
Ideas:
Create a video about your story.
Share products.
Share a photo of you participating in community events.
Share business updates & behind the scenes look into your business.
Who is Your Target Audiance:
Once you have established what you want to share and the operational side of how social media will play a role in your business, its time to start thinking about your current customer and audiance base both in person and online.
Who follows you, or shops with you currently?
- What is their age? Beliefs? Gender? Location?
What kinds of posts have worked well in the past?
Who would you like to see as a customer?
- What does this person like? How old are they? What kinds of content do they already engage with?
What social media platform would this person be most likely to use?
By creating a mental image of your current and desired audiance you can better tailor the content your share!
Content Creation:
Providing quality content is important for you audiance and crucial to your success in promoting your business online. Your audience members are looking for answers to their questions and they want it all in one nice, neat place. Sometimes figuring out what your ideal customer thinks is valuable content can be a challenge. So you need to understand how you can offer them what they want!
Knowing what your audience wants generally stems from thinking about the following and addressing it in your content:
- Solving a problem your audience has
- Answering a common question or clarifying something about your product, service, or industry
- DIYing
- Entertaining the reader or watcher
- Showing a personal side to your business
- Inspiring the reader or watcher to something bigger and better
That’s generally what’s on your customer’s minds when they peruse your content. Every piece of content should educate, inspire, or entertain. Good quality content does several of those at one time.
A couple of other things that will help you round out your summer content calendar:
- July is National Ice Cream Month
- July 5 is Workaholic Day (maybe a post about work/life balance?)
- July 12 is pecan pie day
- August is back-to-school time and there is endless content to be made surrounding that!
- August is Family Fun Month
- August 9 is Book Lover’s Day
Content Creation Tool Kit:
Canva.com (Graphic design & pre-made social templates)
Pexels.com (Free stock photography)
Grammarly.com (Spelling errors plague us all - catch them before you post for free with grammarly)
We’re working on our own social pages too this summer and will be coming up with some fun content there are well – We hope you think it’s shareable too so help yourself! And happy posting! Looking for more help? Reach out to us at info@northgrenvillechamber.com & we can help give you some guidance or point you in the direction of some local marketing companies who would be happy to help.
Happy posting!