5 Robust Social Media Marketing Strategies That Get Results

Social media is daily increasing in popularity and digital marketers are taking real advantage of this popularity. They are devising strategies to increase their reach, get more traffic, leads, customers and sales by improving their social media marketing tactics. Right now, social media appears to be working for everyone but in various shades. These here five social media marketing strategies have been variously tested and have robustly proved to be useful to get desired online marketing results.

1. Skillfully Use Engagement Contests for Branding

For marketers who know how to use them, social media contests provide real opportunities for brands to grow their business. Most human beings usually like contests particularly when the rewards are great. So, if you can organize engagement contests, you can get the contestants involved and engaged with your brand for as long as the contest lasts. By using the right software, you can automate the process of collecting data about contestants in social networks using special programs. That way, you can actually collect the email addresses, phone numbers and more personal marketing data from all contestants. This data becomes useful down the road for branding, getting leads and customers and ultimately making more sales all because of the contests you are running. For best results, always make sure the prizes you offer match your target audience. If these prizes are good, they significantly help your business to increase brand awareness and generate more leads.

2. Reply Promptly to Facebook Messages

Brands are increasingly taking real advantage of promptly acting on messages via messenger or direct on Facebook. This is because most of the messages from subscribers involve asking a question, placing an order or leaving a review. These usually require very prompt and timely response from brands. Facebook for instance has pretty strict rules for sending messages between brands and customers. When a user contacts a brand via messenger, they only have 24 hours to respond to that message. If the brand responds promptly, a chat conversation can be established to quickly resolve a business problem. AI and Autoresponders come in very handy for brands to deal with business messages on social media. These can buy a bit of time for the business owner to personally respond to messages that may be too sophisticated for Autoresponders to handle. These are messages outside the FAQs which the responders are usually programmed to deal with. The bottom line is to always keep the customer positively engaged in conversation to see if a sale can be made through such efforts.

3. Promote High Organic Engagement Posts

Promoting high organic engagement posts is a great strategy marketers use to increase brand awareness and attract new users to their social media pages. Doing so is a very effective tactic to get new followers, clicks, and more of their website’s landing page visitors. It is for this reason Facebook has a “Promote Post” option among its in-house marketing tools. The feature encourages and allows brands to promote existing posts to new audiences. These are posts that have shown promise through analytics data relating to audience engagement. Such analytics data directly shows which posts are best performing in terms of likes, clicks, comments, and shares. Comments and re-posts are especially very valuable since they directly reveal the quality of a post and its relevance to the target audience. It is such posts that should be promoted more. Brands can thus effectively use such posts to promote ads and other valuable posts that are attractive to their target audience. Promoting existing high-performing posts on Facebook and Instagram has a distinct advantage for marketers. Such posts are great to preserve the social proof. All the likes and comments a valuable post manages to earn are usually visible to new users. Very likely therefore that more people will pay attention to content that is already appreciated by many other people. The direct effect of social proof at work!

4. Tag Relevant Brands and Influencers

It is an effective social media marketing strategy to tag other brands and influencers in your content. However, because of the spam rules in most social media platforms, you must make sure the tag action does not look like spam and does not annoy people. You can avoid this by making sure you do it only with relevant content that such people can relate with, that is, content that connects directly with them in some positive way. If other brands and influencers who have an audience-match with you accept to partner with you, the partnership directly benefits all parties. If you can help share their content by tagging them, chances are, they’ll be happy and willing to reciprocate. That makes a win-win situation for both parties.

5. Market with User-Generated Content (UGC)

User-generated content (UGC) is no doubt a very powerful social media marketing tool. But, before you share UGC on social media, always be sure you get permission to do so. Photos and testimonials created and shared by customers can help your brand with social proof if shared with permission. You can greatly increase your business reach if you manage to turn UGC into social proof. If your target audience is made to see the reviews of other customers, it is more likely to help them make a vital purchase decision. For this reason, it is hugely important to pay attention to campaigns that encourage the creation and dissemination of UGC on social media. 

To encourage social media users to share content with reviews or tags from your brand, you can do the following:

-    Use UGC in your stories or feed, and always tag the author.
-    Widely share with permission content from users frequently and enthusiastically.
-    Create your own content and tag other brands and influencers.
-    Add UGC asking you to share your favorite products from your brand.
-    Use a branded hashtag in the content they share.
-    Place a CTA in your bio on platforms like Twitter or Instagram, asking users to tag your brand.
-    If you quote others, mention their product or brand in your post.
-    If you quote an affiliate program or sponsored content, mention the product involved.

Last Line

Best way to get real marketing benefits from social media is to use robust social media marketing strategies that can help you to get results. The foregoing strategies are quite handy in that quest. Just give them a try, will you?

Highs and Lows of E-Commerce Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing programs are always very handy to promote e-commerce businesses. Technically, affiliate marketing is a unique advertising model wherein independent marketers, also known as affiliates, earn a fixed commission every time someone makes a purchase using a unique link attached to the affiliate’s recommendation. It has become a lucrative business for content writers, bloggers, e-commerce store owners, advertising professionals and influencers, many of who earn passive income from the business as affiliates. Yes, affiliate marketing may be a very simple business model that is performance-based but it has its highs and lows as well as benefits and drawbacks.

Here are some Highs and Lows of e-commerce affiliate marketing you must passionately take into account if you want do well in the business.

Highs of E-Commerce Affiliate Marketing

Low Cost to Start and Minimal Investment to Operate

One of the major attractions of affiliate marketing is the considerable low cost involved in starting and running the business. Affiliate marketers are spared the huge costs of paying overhead expenses like rent and utilities as well as operating expenses, such as labor costs and machinery/equipment costs. They only need minimal costs to set up their affiliate websites and keep it running. It simply requires very low investment to get a stable internet connection, website hosting and domain, and subscription. This applies only to affiliate marketers who choose to have their own websites. Others who don’t want their own websites can simply join a reputable affiliate marketing program like Strong Future International, SFI for FREE and they’re in business using the free website allocated to them by the host affiliate SFI program.

Flexible and Convenient to Operate

Every business always aims to get more business, increase sales and profits. Affiliate marketing business is no exception. Affiliate marketers can directly increase sales on the products they are marketing by running multiple campaigns on various websites to promote their affiliate links. By doing this, they can always optimize the links that are performing well and discard those performing below par. That requires a lot of flexibility. That is why they can easily promote various products within a niche or even in related niches and without any limitations to any specific affiliate marketing program. The icing on the cake is that affiliate marketers can choose to work remotely, anywhere they like and at their own convenience to consistently promote products and earn good commissions. For so long as they have unlimited access to a laptop/smartphone and internet connectivity, they can work from home or anywhere else in the world. That’s ultimate business flexibility no doubt.

A Convenient Additional Income Stream

For people needing a side hustle or to simply explore a second income opportunity, affiliate marketing is it. Having more than one income stream has become a very smart survival strategy in today’s uncertain times. Affiliate marketing cannot stand in the way of your 9-5 job if you have one. At your convenience and outside your office hours, you can go online, promote products, source buyers, make sales and earn commissions while drinking coffee on your dining table at home. The more efforts you put into your promotional activities, the more sales you generate. That ultimately helps to enhance your commissions earning capability.

Lows of E-Commerce Affiliate Marketing

No Permanent Customer Base

Every business owner craves a solid and dependable customer base to grow their business, but not so with affiliate marketing business. Affiliates are always in search of customers; all without a guarantee these customers will be loyal customers who can be relied on to always buy using the affiliate links the affiliate marketer is promoting. Because of this, affiliates usually don’t have a permanent customer base. That is why affiliates must as a matter of business survival always strive to improve their marketing tactics. When they do, it helps them to boost website traffic and get more people to click their links. But, because buyers have the option of buying elsewhere including even from physical stores instead of using an affiliate link to make a purchase, the customer base becomes extremely fluid and unreliable.

Requires a Lot of Time, Efforts and Patience

Technically, affiliate marketing is a business model that requires affiliates to be very patient if they want to get good results. To be a successful affiliate marketer therefore, you must be ready to put in a lot of efforts and be prepared to accept that it might take a while before good results start coming in. It takes time, patience and enormous planning and experimentation to try out different strategies and tactics to know which ones work best for the type of products you are promoting. This allows you to fine tune your marketing techniques to know which are best to use to enable you to earn more commissions.

Affiliate Programs are Outside Your Control

You may be having a successful affiliate marketing business of your own but the affiliate program you work with largely controls the business. Reputable affiliate programs like Strong Future International, SFI simply require that affiliates join their programs FREE and start promoting products right away. Affiliates mainly promote products at their own pace while other business services like product handling, commission assessment and payment and customer care are handled and controlled by the affiliate program. If you sign up for SFI affiliate program as an affiliate, you’re expected to abide by all the rules of the program. Affiliates are therefore not very much in control of the business outside their promotional activities which are even regulated by the affiliate program. It is only the affiliate program that can decide on and implement changes in the program. These changes include how commissions are paid, percentages of commissions, and the frequency of commission payment and so on.

Last Line

If your affiliate marketing business gets off the ground, the commission can become a reliable second income stream. You can even have a dependable passive income from it in the long term. That is inspite of the foregoing lows of the business. If you are involved in affiliate marketing right now, instead of allowing the lows to slow you down, you can always find your way around them and allow the highs to keep you going. That is the way of successful affiliate marketing business.