But First, What Is Social Media Marketing Automation?

Social media marketing automation is the process of using automated tools in order to automate your social media content, presence, and reach. Automation tools can help reduce the amount of time spent on looking for content ideas, posting, and even growing your account. It’s one of the best investments you can make for your business.

Benefits include…

#1 Save time

Social media campaigns require planning and a lot of time. Fortunately, automation tools can help you with scheduled posting, auto-posting, and even auto engagement responses, which will allow you to spend more time on engaging with customers and investigating growth opportunities.

#2 Reduce effort and maintain consistency

Automation saves you the effort of posting your campaigns daily by allowing you to pre-schedule posts on all social media channels, reducing human error, and following a consistent schedule.

#3 Increase engagement

The time and effort automation will save you can be used to be more productive like plan more in-depth promotions, get better opinions, feedback and reviews, deliver more personalised customer service, and create quizzes and other interactive experiences.

#4 Better insights

If you have one platform for your social media automation campaigns, they come with crystal clear reporting and analytics that will help you understand your ROI and customer insights like engagement by time, and more. Clarity will help you create future successful campaigns.

When automating social media, keep note of the following:

DO offer customer support 24/7

When it comes to customer support, always be responsive and personable. Automated messages are fine, but it’s always better to send personalised feedback when needed.

Do listen to customer conversations

Automating social listening tools to flag keywords, conversations, topics, and mentions will help you stay informed about whats happening on social media without getting distracted by all the noise.

Don’t automate your behavior or comments

Using bots to leave comments or to follow/unfollow people can put your reputation at risk, while also risking the potential sales and exposure you could have made if done manually.

Automate – Engage – Succeed

Keep in mind that social media platforms are all about posting relevant and engaging content for users to interact with and share. Consistency is important and it’s one of the fastest ways to build your brand online.

Automating your social accounts and campaigns can help your business in a variety of ways, and it also boosts your productivity and allows you to focus on what really matters, growing your business. Just remember that automating social media marketing goes beyond just scheduling posts. You have to think, plan, create, publish, and engage regularly in order to connect with your audience on their level.

Social selling involves communicating with potential customers that meet your buyer persona profile, turning them into satisfied clients, and then into raving fans that will spread the word to their friends and family.

Selling on social media is the new normal. Everything in the digital marketing world grows at lightning speed. So don’t let social selling pass you by, or you might just miss all of the opportunities that come along with it.

1. Know Who You Are Selling Too

The most effective business owners make money because they know their audience and how to reach their audience. When we say audience, it includes your current customer base and prospects who your product or service is intended for.

If you don’t yet know who your audience is, it’s best to do market research before you spend money on an advertising campaign or objective. Once you know your target customers including their interests and demographics, you can leverage this information and run very targeted campaigns, while spending less money because you don’t have to “guess” who you are marketing too.

Customers buy from businesses who are active on social media, have positive online reviews, and who answer support queries fast and in a friendly way.

It’s important to regularly check your social media streams for any mention of your business and related keywords and make sure to engage with those posts, especially if they are questions related to your industry or products/services. If someone asks about a potential service you’re providing without directly tagging you, they’ll still show up in your search results, and you can give them the answers yourself and they might want to find out more.

By actively engaging in your network, providing support, and building up your brand by being genuine and helpful, customers are more likely to recommend you to others.

Customers only buy from businesses if they know, value, and trust them.

Businesses often make the mistake of sounding too “salesy” which ruins any chance of building up trust and gaining traction. The first step to selling on social media is to build trust with your followers first by providing value as often as you can, on a regular basis. This means being consistent with posting useful and relevant posts. setting weekly campaigns will keep you on track to achieve your targets.

By building trust, and showcasing your industry expertise, your followers will be more likely to spend their money with you, as opposed to your competitors.

You can’t meet targets or goals if you don’t set them in the first place. When defining your objective, you must be precise, realistic, and include time frames. Are you trying to sell to increase event signups, introduce new service offerings, products, etc? what exactly are you measuring?

For example, Do you want to boost brand awareness, generate new leads, increase customer engagement, or drive sales? and what methods will you use to achieve these goals?

A clearly defined objective will provide a blueprint to help you achieve the desired results.

1. Offer Discounts And Promo Codes Exclusively Through Social Media

By providing special deals to your customers on social media on a regular basis, they remain engaged at all times and it also created word of mouth traffic by customers sharing it to others. Start with an offer that you know customers would share and recommend with their friends, and make it easy for customers to take the action you intend.

For example, a coffee shop might post a Facebook announcement highlighting their new menu items, and offer a free cappuccino when a customer orders something from the main menu. Customers then have to show they liked your Facebook and shared it with others to redeem the free coffee.

I often see businesses focus on everything else, but they forget to be proactive about customer reviews. Remember, customers buy from those they know, like, and trust. By tracking online conversations that mention your brand, product, or service on social media, you can ask or direct customers to leave a review, either on Google or Facebook (where most customers spend their time)

When you request a review, provide a link and enough detail that it’s clear where you want people to comment. Again, show your customers you appreciate their time and effort in speaking about your business, and provide a comment to each review you receive.

If you’re gaining little to no traction by interacting organically with users on a daily basis, and you would like to invest your time to see faster results, you can invest in paid social media advertising.

Social media ads boost your reach and can help you achieve hundreds or thousands of more views on your posts. This can result in more brand visibility, and if done right, more sales.

The benefit of live video is that your followers will be notified when going live. This will help you reach a wider audience, build trust with them and also position you as an authority in your industry (if you focus on educating, and no hard selling)
Research your audience in-depth to understand what they want, and use different themes like behind-the-scenes videos, insider interviews, and giveaways to keep your audience engaged.

As video, in general, continues to rise in popularity, you can be sure that that live video will only grow stronger. So now is the time to get started with, focus more heavily on, and master live streaming to grow your business.

Remarketing is a powerful feature that allows you to create ads that target people who have already been on your website and are familiar with your products or services. You can run remarketing ads on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

• Remarketing allows you to target:

• Anyone who visited your website

• People who visit specific web pages of your website

• People visiting specific web pages but not others

• People who haven’t visited in a certain amount of time

With a remarketing campaign setup, you can then create separate offers that specifically target each of these groups.

As business owners, we know we should use the influence of social media to promote our content and engage with our target customers, but what about strategic partnerships?
If your social media strategy is ever feeling stagnant, looking to partnerships is an effective way to get the ball rolling again and grow your network in ways you couldn’t have done all on your own. Strategic partnerships can also be beneficial for businesses with limited resources or knowledge on how to create a complex campaign strategy.

Examples might be to feature each other’s guest posts on your social profiles, Let your audience know about contests they’re currently running, feature a new service or product that just launched (and vice versa for them to do to you)

For those businesses that want to not only survive but thrive in the 21st-century market, then social media partnerships are the answer.

This may be the most important step when it comes to succeeding on social media. Your results will show you how your social media efforts are paying off and how you’re stacking up against your goals. It might seem basic, but tracking your results, analyzing the data, and then making the necessary changes to optimize them is important to your overall success.

Your data should drive you. If it is telling you Facebook or Twitter is your most effective channel, consider shifting your focus to that.

An effective social media strategy is never concrete. It is consistently making the required changes when necessary. So keep testing, create different strategies, and start optimizing it as you continue to grow and learn more about your business and your audience.

Most people are on LinkedIn to forge strong business connections, not to follow hundreds of companies. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t optimize your company page, but your personal profile is where you’ll really have an opportunity to attract prospects and where relationships can form.

Therefore, it must be captivating enough to make a powerful first impression. You can make thousands of connections on LinkedIn, but if your profile doesn’t provide key information, those connections won’t know what you do or why they should care. It’s always better to spend time or money (if you prefer to hire a professional) perfecting your profile than to risk losing leads because it looks unprofessional or doesn’t engage the user.

If you’re not experienced with copywriting or would prefer your Linkedin profile to be professionally crafted, we recommend hiring professional services from companies specialised in writing Linkedin profiles, such as JDC EXEC.

Here are a few tips to get you started with your personal profile:

• Be clear about what you do and how you can help prospects

• Your headline should be more than just your job title. Use it to show how you can add value to prospects

• Turn your summary into a captivating, but true story to engage prospects the moment they land on your profile

• Choose the right profile picture and head photo/background photo

• Add in your website link to your bio and website section

• List your relevant skills, awards, and achievements

• Endorse your connections; they’ll usually endorse you back and this looks great on a personal profile

• Request recommendations from connections who you’ve built personal relationships with

Businesses looking to go beyond manual efforts like sending connection requests and engaging with prospects manually can take advantage of Linkedin’s various advertising options. LinkedIn facilitates extremely specific and precise targeting; thereby helping you reach out to the right audience.

If you have a unique or quality piece of content written on your website, you may want to use Linkedin’s sponsored content ads, while if you want to keep things short and sweet, you may want to go with Linkedin text ads. The key to Linkedin ads is knowing exactly who your customers are, and writing compelling calls-to-action and personalised messaging that your prospects can resonate with.

It has also been observed that the quality of leads from LinkedIn is far superior compared to those acquired from other channels. However, LinkedIn ads aren’t for every business. You’ll need to run some tests to see if they are profitable for your own business.

Through these industry-related groups, you can learn a lot about your customers by tuning into the conversations. You may discover new industry-wide mistakes and learn about options to solve those mistakes or pain points. Find out more about your industry by watching from afar will give you real, everyday insight into ways you can make a difference. Be sure to join groups directly related to where your customers are spending their time, and also on non-customer related groups so you can also communicate with those in your industry and gain valuable insights you might have not had before.

Use this as a targeted way to add value to others, share insights, and build out your network with prospects. Another way businesses are standing out with Linkedin Groups is by using content marketing to position themselves as the “thought” leader in their industry.

When searching for prospects to introduce yourself on LinkedIn, you are given numerous filters to help you narrow your search. This allows you to get really strategic and find your ideal customer. You can drill down to country, city, suburbs, language, industries, connection levels, and so on. With this information, you can better write a personal message that fit’s their criteria.

For example, if you search for CEO’s and filter by 2nd-degree connections located in Cape Town. Instead of sending a common template to someone, study their profile and find a way to insert a question about their city in your request, or something happening in their industry which you can relate too.

By creating customised connection requests, you break the ice and open up an easy dialogue with the other person, without coming across as spammy.

Linkedin has no shortage of people who are out for their own interests, and your prospects recognise that immediately. One of the best ways you can stand out is to establish yourself as the opposite.

Here are some ideas:

• Daily LinkedIn Posts: This is a great way to share your point of view with meaningful insight to help others in your industry. Think of this as a long-term strategy with payoffs at the end.

• Articles: This is your opportunity to showcase your knowledge to start conversations and get feedback.

• Comments: Meaningful comments make you look authentic, interested, and intelligent.

• Shares: Sharing a prospects content helps your followers with valuable new information, while getting you noticed by your prospect.

The key is making sure your content solves/answers the burning problems/questions your prospects have.