Social media has become a huge aspect in conducting business in this tech-driven 21st century. We are looking at more than 3 billion people actively on social media globally (it might interest you to know that at least 2.25 billion are on Facebook). Another interesting thing to note is that approximately 95% of prospective customers are now on social media. No wonder we now see numerous social media marketing campaigns. You must know, however, that a social media campaign is objectively evaluated by how many people ultimately make purchases. The truest and most objective KPI (Key Performance Indicator) on measuring ROI (Return On Investment) on any social media campaign are conversions. Therefore turning such campaigns into conversions is paramount & how to achieve that is what this article focuses on.
CTAs Are Critically Important
Whenever you conduct a social media campaign, calls to action (CTAs) are imperative. There are so many ways you can do this depending on your ads content. A particular survey conducted revealed that of all possible calls to action, the “Join Now” one is most effective. Usually in any campaign, the social media platform must redirect users to your website, preferably or to a payment site. Therefore it’s very important to incorporate a button or option that users will click as a response to your calls to action. You really can’t talk of a complete social media campaign without this feature. Calls to actions have been noted to achieve exponentiations of as high as 285% for click rates (which ultimately lead to conversions).
Landing Pages Must Encourage Purchases
I’ve already hinted on this above, thus, a landing page can be your website or a payment site. Let me just point out here that it can actually be wiser to allow users to make purchases on the social media site. This has a tendency to increase sales prospects, however most businesses have to redirect users off the social media site to make payments. Your landing page must be a one-stop destination; people hate long processes. From the point of redirection make it easy for one to complete a purchase in at most 3 clicks.
Be Solution-Centric
Lots of businesses make the mistake of imposing their products or services on people during social media campaigns. There is vicious competition out there these days and what will make your brand cut it is a compelling value proposition. Therefore in your campaigns, build your message majoring on how your brand solves day to day problems. People want their lives made easy and they want lasting & robust solutions to their problems. Therefore, if you craft your social media campaign like that it will drive consumers to scramble for your products.
Social Media Influencers Are Key
You probably have heard about social media influencers right? I have touched on them before and they are a powerful driver of conversions for businesses today. Surveys have shown that people have an 82% to 94% confidence & trust in what social media influencers say or recommend. Thus, if you use social media influencers in your social media campaigns, your sales will shoot through the roof. Let me give a global example, there is a jewellery company called Alex & Ani which once used a popular budding young female teenage rapper for one of its social media campaigns. So impactful was the campaign that their website crashed due to the high number of people who were placing orders & making purchases.
Targeting Should Be Accurate
A social media campaign is incomplete without targeting. This is because products or services always have particular groups of people that they resonate with. This pertains to characteristics such as age, gender, sex, location etc. Let me give an example, 86% of users on Facebook are aged between 18 & 29, whilst for the same age group, 58% are on Instagram & 47% are on Twitter. So suppose you are doing a campaign for a 10 km marathon competition sign-up, it wouldn’t be wise to do it on Twitter because most of its users are adults & senior citizens. Rather you would do it on Facebook that is mainly comprised of young & agile people.
User-Generated Content Validates Your Brand
By user-generated content I’m referring to stuff like reviews or testimonials by people who have used your products or services. Incorporating this into your campaigns will do wonders for your sales. People like making sales decisions based on what are called social proofs; generally 70% of people trust user-generated content.
Promos & Competitions Are Alluring
Running competitions or promotions obviously draws people in and drives sales; strategies to employ are up to your discretion. On promos let me give a recent example, between 12am & 6am on Valentine’s Day, Ownai (the local e-commerce site), ran a Treasure Hunt promo where people could buy heavily discounted products such phones starting from as low as $5 on Ecocash.
Optimizing For Mobile Is Crucial
You must know that over 85% of people now use mobile for accessing the internet. This means you must optimize your websites to have mobile-friendly & highly responsive ergonomic interfaces. If your site isn’t optimized for mobile, there will be issues of UI (user interface) distortion, slow page loading speeds etc & that will seriously injure your sales prospects. It is also said that over 75% of users will make initial judgements of how good your brand is by how your website looks – so this is important!
In all your social media campaign initiatives you must understand the primary motivation for why people visit social media sites. It’s primarily to have fun – for entertainment purposes. Therefore I highly recommend that you devise your campaigns in fun and entertaining ways. The other thing also is that people will most likely buy into products or services that have an after-sales round-the-clock support framework. If people know that from your social media campaigns they are more inclined to buy what you are selling.
