As a marketing agency, Sherpa focuses
so intently on our clients marketing efforts that we often neglect our own
marketing. We are aware of the importance of a strong, strategic social media presence, so it was time we started investing time
and energy into our own social accounts.
Social media helps in two major ways:
1. Engaging with your audience in an authentic manner – helping to build up new and existing relationships.
2. Garnering awareness of your business – resulting in website traffic and conversions.
Once we
realized that we weren’t investing the time and energy that our own social
media deserved, we created a social media strategy, developed channel specific
goals, and finally, started creating unique and appropriate content for each
channel that would align with our strategies.
Okay,
let’s get to it. Ready to learn how we used social media to double our website
traffic in just ONE year?
Step 1: Create a Clearly Defined Social Media
Strategy
It’s
important to have over arching goals for your social media accounts before you
start posting content. Don’t have a strategy yet? Here’s how we created ours:
Developing Your Company’s Social Media Strategy
1. When developing your own company’s social media strategy, a mandatory place to start is by understanding your company’s why.
Why does
your company exist? Why would someone choose your company over a competitor? Be
careful not to get this confused with what your company does. If you are a
clothing designer, the reason why your company exists is to not design clothes for people. It might be “to
provide young consumers with clothes that are fashionable and affordable”.
The why is especially vital as it will
be the driving force behind every piece of content you create and post on your
social channels.
2. Once you understand your why, then move into the what. What goods or services do you provide to your customers? What do you provide that is better or different than your competitors?
3. Now you can start to think about the how. How are you going to use social media to showcase people your company’s why and what? Are you going to connect with local businesses? Perhaps you are going to make content that shows why you started you company?
Step 2: Develop Channel Specific Strategies
As you
likely know, each social media channel has content nuances that makes it unique.
LinkedIn and Instagram both have very different audiences, along with
Pinterest, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, etc.
It is
always better to start small, focus in and do well in one or two channels. Then
slowly grow your presence as desired.
Decide
which channels you want to start with based on your business’s target audience.
If you are targeting young professionals you may decide to focus on LinkedIn
and Twitter, or if you run a very creative business with very ‘photo-worthy’
products, you may choose Instagram and Pinterest. This is truly up to your
discretion and can always be changed based on how things are working out.
Step 3: Start Developing Your Channel Specific Content
Once you
know what platforms you want to use, start thinking about what types of content
you want on each.
For the
young professional example above, perhaps you will want to create professional
blog posts and share them on LinkedIn. You similarly want to connect with this
audience but in a less formal way, so you create tweets that focus around daily
happenings in your industry. This content should be created using your why and what mentioned above.
Remember
that not everyone likes digesting content the same way. A great way to get more
people engaged is to create different mediums for the same content. For
instance, if you write a blog post, think about turning it into a video.
Secret to Doubling Our Traffic
Are you
ready to know the secret behind doubling our traffic? The secret sauce to what
made us get a ton of website traffic using social media? Okay, get out your pen
and paper… the secret is…
It’s all
about posting high quality, relevant content, your audience cares about on a
consistent basis. Don’t expect results overnight, it is all about
investing in the long game. Notice this post isn’t about how we doubled our
website traffic in one day, one week or even one month. No, it took a full
year; however, the quality of traffic and leads we are getting as a result
could not be greater.
To further
achieve these results both organic and paid amplification were a huge factor.
Make shareable content that your
friends, family, and new readers will want to share with their friends. Putting
money behind your posts is also important if you are trying to expand your
reach and get new people to see and share your content.
Over the
past year, we dug deep into our strategy and goals we wanted to reach and
created content based on these goals that we knew our audience would get value
from. We posted consistently and focused on quality and quantity.
If you
follow these 3 steps, you are bound to get the results you are looking for!
______________________________________________________________
Thanks for reading!
Enjoyed this article? Sign up for The Summit - our monthly Newsletter.
Say Hello On: Instagram | Facebook | Twitter | LinkedIn | YouTube