If you are using social media marketing to drive brand awareness, to get more people to your website, as a conduit to communicate with your target audience, or if you are just embarking on your social media marketing adventure for the first time, you need a plan. Just as with other digital marketing strategies (or more traditional forms of marketing) acting without a plan could leave you out of pocket and without any discernible return on investment (ROI). Here are a few tips to get your social media marketing working to drive more freelance work your way.
If you don’t fully understand your objectives then you won’t have anything to measure your success against, and monitoring your efforts is a very important part of the process. In the first instance you need to think about what you are trying to achieve. Are you looking for more social media followers? Do you want to drive your followers or a defined audience to your website? Once you understand what you want your target audience to do, it will make it far easier to define the tasks that will help you to meet those goals.
As a freelancer you are your own brand, and crafting the perfect social media profiles is critical to developing that brand. First impressions are so crucial on the web, and you don’t have long to engage your audience and send them down your conversion funnels. Try to ensure that visitors and potential customers have a coherent experience across all your social media channels; retain your tone of voice, your logo and creative style, and your general vibe across each platform, so that people become familiar with you rather than presenting an ambitious or disjointed experience.
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Effective social media marketing is almost always content lead. Good content will support you in several ways. Firstly, your target audience will only engage in high-quality content that they enjoy or find genuinely useful. Engagements (likes, share, comments, etc.) will ensure that your content reaches as many people as possible, leading to the outcomes that you're trying to achieve, such as new followers, more traffic to your website, and hopefully, new business for you.
Across all business sectors, Facebook ads generated over 9% conversion rate in 2017 and that number is going up. It’s a great platform for generating new business leads, as you have so much control over the targeting of your ads; defining your ad audience not just by age, gender, and location but also by interests and even life events. You can laser-target your ads directly at people who might be looking specifically for your freelance skills.
Much of your social media success will be determined by the quality of your profiles, your content, and your audience; and don’t forget to measure those results to get the most out of your budget.
