HOW TO MARKET EFFECTIVELY WITH EMAIL, FACEBOOK, AND INSTAGRAM

It’s easier than ever for small businesses to interact with consumers through advanced digital media and marketing tools. With these tools come an overwhelming variety of options. Where and how do you effectively market to your online audience? How do you emphasize marketing so you see success without occupying all your time?

We’ll go through the keys to streamlining your marketing campaign across the most common platforms: email, Facebook, and Instagram. Stop wasting your time, and start seeing results. Let’s make 2019 the year of your marketing masterpiece!

1. Know your Goal

Formalize your marketing goals to reap greater rewards in the long run. Most marketers find that if they establish specific goals with concrete KPIs, they’re more likely to reach (or even surpass) those benchmarks.

It’s critical to have one serious marketing goal that you’ll keep consistent throughout all of your campaigns and strategies. What is your call to action going to look like?

What do you want to get from your online marketing right now? You want to set goals that will take your business to the next level. For example, you don’t want to have the goal, “get more customers.” Although that’s the overall purpose of your social media, it’s not specific and likely won’t elevate your marketing.

Instead, create SMART marketing goals: specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely. For example, if you want to boost your sales, you might have a SMART goal: increase current sales 5% by the start of Q3.

But also consider this. If you want to increase your sales, you might first need to attract more prospects or engage more leads. So you might need to delve down to a more specific, foundational goal before getting there. For example: “increase lead list 30% by the end of March” is a concrete goal. If you grew your lead list by a third, you’d have more people you could then sell to in order to increase your sales.

Some common marketing objectives to consider include:

• Enhance brand awareness
• Launch new product/service
• Target a new customer base
• Gain more followers
• Get more leads
• Engage and foster customer relationships
• Boost conversion percentage
• Increase the number of sales
• Enter new markets (like foreign expansion)
• Improve internal communications within the company
• Increase profits

Remember that when you hit your goal, it’s time to reevaluate and start the next goal. For example, you could start with a goal for brand awareness, move to one for leads, and then have one for sales conversion.

2. Create a cohesive campaign.

Once you know your goal, you can start to build a marketing campaign around it. Brands that “throw up” content often don’t see much traction. Instead, you want to have a specific campaign related to that goal. This creates a consistent, cohesive message across all platforms, which is more likely to attract and engage your audience.

Basically, you want one call to action no matter where your audience comes into contact with your brand. It takes several impressions to finally get a conversion, right? So, you want your prospects to see the same CTA several times in multiple places to really imprint the CTA in their head. Every time they interact with your brand, they know what the next action is they need to take. This boosts your conversion to get you to your main goal.

The best way to do this is with a specified campaign strategy. For example, Disney is always putting out content on their social sites and emails. But when they have a new movie coming out, they create a specific campaign for that movie. This campaign is on every platform, sharing the same message, trailers, and images for that movie. No matter where you run into Disney, you know they have a new movie coming out—and you have the same experience of that movie release each time.

What will your campaign look like across all platforms? What is your call to action?

3. Know your demographics—but personalize.

One of the biggest mistake marketers make is assuming their demographics. Knowing who your target customer is not the same as knowing who you’re interacting with on different social platforms or through email. You want to figure out who you’re talking to on each platform and how they are related to your ideal customer. You’ll also want to determine ways to best attract your target persona so you can collect relevant leads and improve your conversion rate.

Learn how to determine your business’s customer demographics here. Compare this with your social media and email analytics. Are they aligned? Why or why not? Are you attracting your ideal target, a periphery target, or a non-target? A major discrepancy in these demographics could explain why your marketing campaign isn’t as successful as it could be.

But even though you know the demographics of your audience, don’t forget that each purchaser is unique. Personalization based on consumer data is the most effective way to engage and convert leads. Start using personalization in ecommerce here.

4. Build Email Lists

Email is how you keep in contact with people. Your email list has become your lead list. A key goal of your campaigns should be to collect email addresses and grow your leads. Although your social media following is important, you don’t actually “own” these prospects. If you were to sell your business, an email list would be worth something. But if Instagram shut down, you could lose all of those followers—and all of your customers with it.

Learn more about the importance of email campaigns here.

Facebook and Instagram are a great place to collect email addresses, though. Create marketing campaigns that will integrate multiple platforms together, so your social engagement becomes leads and leads become customers. Your marketing campaigns should emphasize the integration of social, email, and purchasing.

Read: Five Auto Emails You Should Be Sending

5. Market and Sell Simultaneously

Facebook and Instagram have started implementing e-commerce features directly on their platforms. Not only can you advertise to customers, but you can actually sell to them directly after they see the advertisement. This is streamlining the buying process and increasing conversions drastically. More Shopify options for email drip campaigns are also creating a faster purchasing process than previous digital marketing had.

It will be critical for small businesses to take part as social selling becomes more common. Customers are going to start making faster purchasing decisions the moment they see an item—so you want to be able to get your brand in front of customers and convert fast.

6. Create a schedule.

It can be a challenge to keep up with multiple platforms at the same time. Create a schedule and timetable for each campaign. Make it specific: What content will you post and when? When do you need the content created? Who will make the content? 

Creating a social media and email calendar ensures that you’re interacting with your customers enough without overloading them with too many promotions. In fact, too much content is actually the number one reason customers stop interacting with a brand. Still, a schedule ensures consistency of touchpoints to keep customers engaged and ready to convert.

A content calendar will help you create consistent touch points without overwhelming your audience or your marketing team. See our analysis of the top social media scheduling platforms here. 

7. Go for Video.

Video has become one of the most influential digital marketing tools. It encourages clicks, builds engagement, spreads awareness, boosts conversion, and has a high rate of return on investment. Even using the word “video” in an email subject line encourages a higher open rate. 

Best yet, you can use the same video or clips across multiple platforms. From IGTV to Facebook stories, from live streaming to brand stories, there are endless possibilities for video in your marketing campaign.

Get the scoop on video in ecommerce marketing.

8. Outsource.

It can feel like a lot to keep up with all of the ins and outs of the different marketing platforms from email to social media. So leave it to the experts. Outsourcing your marketing is a great way to tap into strong resources and skilled expertise that your team may not otherwise have. Learn how and when to outsource here.

Outsource your marketing to a client-centric company who knows how to balance all of the moving parts to see the greatest success. Contact Seller’s Choice now to start marketing, pulling in leads, and growing your revenue with the marketing company that truly is the seller’s choice.