Modern marketers are inundated with claims that social media platforms hold the key to their financial success. Some, however, are left unaware of how to actually go about tapping into these platforms in order to earn an extra buck. While it’s certainly true that social media platforms contain a plethora of marketing opportunities ripe for exploitation, it’s equally true that you need an excellent strategy to tap into the true potential of these platforms without wasting your scant advertising budget as a bootstrapped startup.
One excellent method for making the best use of social media platforms is to leverage them in order to supercharge your inbound marketing.
Here’s why social media may be the missing key ingredient needed to turn your startup’s inbound marketing operation around:
It’s all about attraction
The first and most important thing to understand about supercharging inbound marketing is that this entire business endeavor is based around attraction; if you can’t rope more consumers to your webpage at the end of the day, then your money was wasted and your creative talents spoiled.
It’s thus imperative to establish helpful metrics that will gauge your success. If you’re not particularly IT savvy, this may mean hiring a tech guru to help ascertain if your social media marketing efforts are actually paying off by driving more prospective leads to your webpage or brick-and-mortar storefront.
You could pay a huge sum of money to have your advertisements plastered onto the social media feed of every prospective customer within a hundred miles. Unless you’re implementing this strategically, this method is ludicrously expensive and will ensure your business goes broke before it starts generating enough results for your strategy to pay off.
Focusing on content is your best bet, as this will ensure interested users share your brand content without actually necessitating that you spend huge sums of cash on an extensive marketing campaign. Nevertheless, don’t think this is cost-free, as generating excellent content usually entails paying top-dollar prices for creative minds capable of churning out convincing copy.
Content marketing has been shown time and time again to generate better results than paid search when it comes to acquiring new leads and customers alike.
You should thus focus on first attracting creative content producers who can fill popular social media channels with messaging that will, in turn, drive huge sums of consumers toward your startup’s website.
Related: 8 Business Titans Reveal the Best Social Media Tactics to Promote Your Company
Don’t be too sales-y
Whether you’re working with content producers in house or hiring externally, keep in mind that social media users will reject content that seems too advertorial. Don’t be afraid to step in if what your content producers are generating is too boilerplate to pass as legitimate content in the eyes of most of your target audience.
Of course, you’ll need to appreciate that accurate lead targeting is also an essential part of supercharging your inbound marketing operation. After all, social media platforms are rife with misinformation and fake accounts, so your entire effort and marketing budget could be wasted unless you’re directing your creative energy toward prospective leads who will actually click on your links, visit your webpage or purchase your merchandise.
Platforms like Facebook are well-aware of how crucial accurate targeting is, so they’ve gone so far as to release helpful tools that will help business owners and marketing gurus generate custom audiences that are particularly receptive to your specific brand of messaging.
Don’t become too dependent upon one platform, however, as the real potential of social media platforms partially lies in the fact that they’re incredibly diverse and contain different audiences, meaning you can bounce around from one to the other in order to really supercharge your inbound marketing.
Your brand image is essential
Even if you master the intricacies of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and other platforms, it will all be for naught unless your brand image is tightly tailored to give consumers the exact impression you hope to deliver when they’re first exposed to your messaging. Your brand’s tone of voice, public image, and even the color scheme you use when communicating to a prospective audience can all have a huge impact on whether or not they click your links or follow up with you in the future.
This means that relying on brand ambassadors is also a risky endeavor; some entrepreneurs have taken to hiring influencers or other social media gurus who already have extensive followings to share their messaging. You must be careful whenever you place the reputation of your brand into somebody else’s hands. Taking too many cues from other successful marketing campaigns can actually be dangerous; what’s cutesy and acceptable for one brand may ignite a PR crisis or even a consumer boycott if that same strategy is leveraged by a substantially different brand.
Many brands have attempted to hop on the Twitter personalization bandwagon, for instance, only to make utter fools of themselves because they didn’t realize what they were getting into.
Sign Up: Receive the StartupNation newsletter!
Conclusion
As you’ll soon discover, inbound marketing strategies can be studied and used as inspiration, but not copy and pasted as if they’re universally applicable regardless of the business in question.
Remember to diversify the platforms your startup relies upon and focus on hiring only the best of content creators, and your business will soon be leveraging social media to supercharge your inbound marketing strategy.
