You use your social media account to keep up with your friends and family. But you still rely on more traditional advertising mechanisms for your business, newspaper ads, billboards, banners. Those are good as they come. But if your business doesn’t have an active, ever-growing social media following, you’re missing out on what may be the biggest publicity opportunity of this day and age. It's time to start winning on social media.
No longer are facebook and Instagram simply niche services. Today, 2.89 billion people log into the Facebook group of services (Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp or Messenger) every month. 74% of Facebook users log in every day. Most of them aren’t just doing a quick friend check and leaving it at that. Instead, they’ll spend hours scrolling: hunting for something new, something interesting, something to break the boredom. This is your golden chance: a prime opportunity to pitch your business as something worth paying attention to.
Your brand’s social media campaign has the potential to make or break your business or product. Celebrities and so-called influencers have large followings on social media. But the real influencers are brands who’ve learned how to play the game.
90 percent of Instagram users follow at least one business. More than 200 million of them visit at least one business profile every day. 60 percent of responders say they’ve made at least one purchasing decision on a social media platform. Thus, businesses which take advantage of what social media channels have to offer find that dividends are high. In fact, a huge amount of sales take place on social media itself.
Grove collaborative, a cleaning products company, for instance, ran an Instagram Stories campaign. They found they attracted more new customers with less outlay: 37% of new customers came from Instagram story ads and the click-through rate was 2.1x all other ads. Lumi Deodorant ran a highly successful Facebook advertising campaign that saw sales increase by a full 7 times.
But if social media is the next best way to do marketing, you’re not the first one to find out about it. Look at Instagram again: 25 million brands have already marked out their space. To put that in perspective, the Superbowl stadium holds 75,000 people. Put 333 superbowl stadiums, full of people, side by side, and a lone you in the middle of them. How is anyone going to find you in the crowd?
The secret lies in viral growth sparked by compelling imagery that viewers can’t help sharing with their friends. It turns out that most visitors to a web page read only about 20% of the text there - but they see 100% of the images.
Tweets with images receive 150% the amount of retweets as tweets without images. Whereas on LinkedIn, images receive 98% more comments. Compelling, engaging, scroll-stopping images are where your future in social media marketing lies.
Now, you understand that social media is important and that engaging visuals are the secret to visibility. But where are those graphics supposed to come from? Eye-catching visuals typically require a lot of hard work and a huge budget - but not always.
It used to be that if you needed high quality images for your social media, you needed to pay an expensive professional designer for them. Then you would go through unending iterations to get the perfect outcome. Today, online graphic design softwares like PosterMyWall allow you to create professional social media images for free in a matter of minutes.
The secret is their immense library of ready-to-go templates. From product advertising to event flyers to announcements, it’ll be hard to find an application of social media templates that they haven’t covered. These templates can be customized with text, imagery, and fonts. Additionally all social media sizes are free to download without a watermark.
Apart from design creation itself, the other big time sink in social media marketing is downloading, uploading and posting the designs at different times of the day and week according to peak engagement times of different platforms. There are several dedicated social media scheduling tools on the market that can solve this problem for you but that also means yet another tool to manage.
What you need - and what you can get with PosterMyWall - is an end-to-end social media marketing solution. PosterMyWall lets you not only create the designs but also publish them directly to your Facebook and Twitter pages with interesting captions without even leaving the site. If making repeated posts is a hassle for you, you can simply create all your posts for a day or week at once. Then schedule them for later with the scheduling tool in PosterMyWall’s design sharing options. This can perfectly streamline your social media process and consolidate all steps from content creation to distribution in one tool.
If an image is worth a thousand words, a video is easily worth a couple million. Videos on a page are 12x more likely to be watched than text is to be read because videos are processed 60,000 times faster than text. If you want to catch your audience’s attention, you’ll want to move into moving pictures.
Luckily for you, making promotional videos is just as easy as making promotional graphics. You don’t even need to switch your design software to create videos. Simply use PosterMyWall’s video templates to start creating stunning video content. All you need to do is the same drag and drop customization you did for your image designs except now you will have video controls as well to trim the media to your needs. You can even convert an image design to video in a single click or switch up an existing video design by replacing the media with your own video or a video from the stock video library in the editor.
If you find that video promotions are your thing. You can subscribe to PosterMyWall’s Premium Plus plan to get unlimited downloads of stunning promo videos and keep your audience engaged.
If you think about it, there are a lot of design templates available on the Internet. If making amazing designs is so easy, why don’t all small businesses have stellar social media campaigns? Well, because marketing is not just about visuals that look good. It’s also about visuals that speak the brand’s language. Most brands using ready-made templates end up with good looking but non-identifying advertising. So you can’t even tell who’s sponsoring what until you read the fine print. In short, they start to lose their brand identity. This is something your brand can’t afford to do. One of the ground rules of visual marketing is keeping a consistent brand identity that your fan base can latch on to.
It doesn’t have to be difficult. In fact, if you are using an online graphic design service, you can use customization functions. These allow you to make each piece of advertising completely your own. Choose a palette of colors that represents your brand. Then use them every time you prepare a new social media graphic. With a tool like PosterMyWall, you can upload your logo from your phone or computer directly to your designs (or create a new transparent logo if you don’t have one already). With a Premium account, you can also upload your own custom fonts to use in your designs to maintain visual consistency with the fonts you’ve used on your website, your stationery, or elsewhere. This way, each piece of visual content you create for social media acts as your brand ambassador and takes your brand identity wherever it is shared.
Once you’ve created your designs it's time to use them. You should try to get the most out of each piece of content by using it across all your social media platforms. This not only helps you to get maximum eyeballs on your marketing message but also helps to reinforce your brand identity in the minds of people. Recreating the same design in multiple social media sizes can be a lot of work. But you can simply use the free resize feature on PosterMyWall and create multiple copies of your visuals for all social media sizes in a one-click move.
If visuals are the key to social media marketing. Engaging, personable posts are the hand that turns that key. Once your followers have been captivated with your posts and actually engaged with them, they’ll begin to look forward to more interesting content from you.
Create visual posts that invite responses. Then engage with your followers in the comment section. Opinion posts and polls such as This or That questions and themed quizzes can be an excellent way to elicit this kind of loyalty-building response. You can do this on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. These posts, if designed well, have the tendency to get shared a lot. Make sure to add your logo and other branding elements to them - your brand should follow your content everywhere.
Social media marketing can seem intimidating because of all the thought, time and effort it requires from your already limited resources but if you learn to crack it, it can be your best friend. You have the right audience for your business in front of you. All you need to do is reach out to them. - That becomes simple (and affordable!) if you find yourself the right software. Software to create, brand and distribute your content. With the suggestions and solutions given above, it’s time to get ready for quick and brilliant social media success! Start winning on social media today!
