Encouraging click-throughs from social media to your business website is one of the biggest challenges of modern online marketing. Every business knows the importance of maintaining a social media presence, but numbers are useless if they aren’t converted into customers. Bridging that divide can be difficult, but here are some tips to help.
1. Offer Incentives
Incentivizing social media followers to make the jump into your e-commerce infrastructure is overwhelmingly the best way to generate custom. You’ll see this across multiple online businesses ranging from stores and streaming sites to real money casinos. The latter often hand out bonuses to their social media followers, which can be used when they sign up to the site proper. Any business can and should copy this model.
Giving social media followers a discount code, a two for one, or free delivery offer, makes them feel valued. It gives them a sense of community and adds weight to your social media presence. It’s usually enough to turn followers into customers, too. One successful purchase via an offer usually leads to repeat custom in the future, paid for at the full price. Don’t be afraid to get generous with your social media following. They’ll appreciate it, and they might even recommend you to their friends.
2. Build An Email List
Email marketing sometimes has the reputation of being old-fashioned compared to social media, but it remains one of the best ways to encourage traffic and customers to your site. The reasons for this are obvious. Social media is a necessarily limited platform. Tweets are short, Instagram posts can only be images, and YouTube is video-based. If you want to talk about your products and services at any length, email is the way to go.
Use social media to encourage people to sign up for an email newsletter, and then use this to market your products. Click-throughs via email are usually high. The personal nature of an email demands attention and will bridge that tricky divide between follower and customer. Better still, use automated email software to curate your mailing list. This will remove dormant email addresses and even tell you which parts of your emails are receiving the most attention.
3. Develop Your “Voice”
A business’s “voice” is difficult to define but immediately identifiable. It’s linked to branding. The tone that you use to communicate with your followers (be that lighthearted or serious) plays a major part in how much you’ll stand out on social media. Generic social media posts or accounts where every post has a different tone, inevitably melt away into the newsfeed. Establish the tone of your company and use that in all of your social media interactions.
Once you’ve established a voice on one platform, it pays to cross-post and diversify. Perhaps you tweet frequently but don’t feel at home on YouTube, or you don’t have much of an Instagram presence. Different platforms demand different types of content, and diversification is key. As more followers identify your brand across different social networks, more will inevitably become customers.
