Building social media followers is one of the greatest and most effective digital marketing strategies to build your brand and enhance ROI.
Studies say that 71% of consumers/social media followers who have had a positive experience with a brand on social media are likely to recommend the brand to their friends and family.
For Social Proof you need a good number of social media followers and reviews. Studies show that 97% of consumers say online reviews impact their purchasing decisions. Hence, social proof is necessary for building your brand image.
So, keep in mind that your most crucial social media strategy is to enhance your social media followers and then convert them into your loyal fans.

Related Article- 
6 Simple Social Media Hacks to Convert Contacts to Contracts

However, without the presence of the relevant followers in your niche, your social media strategies and content strategy will go in vain, causing you many losses in your business.
So growing social media followers would indeed help the business to grow their customer base and sales on the online platforms.
If you don’t have enough audience on Social Media Pages, prospective customers will hesitate to buy from you.
If you don’t have an audience who is not eagerly waiting for your content, then these are the consequences:

1. Less Engagement as you are reaching the wrong audience
2. Less Engagement gives a negative signal to algorithms of the Social Media Platforms
3. This Leads to Lesser Organic Reach for all future posts on Social Media Platforms
4. This will also kill the presence of your Social Media Platforms

Here are the 5 growth hacks to build your relevant Social Media Followers  –

1. Run a Loyal Fan Contests

A loyal fan contest is a contest to get genuine social media followers. These followers  would interact and get engaged with your contests and this is how your contests will reach out to more people and that will get you many new followers too.
Your contest strategy includes the specific target audience research and find out their aspirations.
The content for the contest has to address the pain points or aspirations of the target group.
Giveaway should be something which is in the bucket list of your Target Group or any necessary thing for them and then set rules for the contest to make them follow your Social Media Pages.
Once you decide your giveaway, promote this across social media channels where the cost per reach is minimal. For example –  Promote it on FB and Instagram
Example Contest – Iva bags Fan Page Contest

In this contest(above), the target audience was all the assumed Set of people who were girls and women interested in buying “trendy bags”.
When they were offered this free trendy bag, they were asked to like the page, tag their friends, share the message on social media.
This is how they were able to reach out to the friends and followers of the people who were interacting with the contest and in result they got many organic and loyal followers who would always wait for such contests.
Expert tip – Once your contest is over then you need to retarget all the engaged followers and website custom audience with your core content to make them your brand advocates. This is how the word of mouth about your brand will increase and so more sales and more loyal customers..

2. Run Paid Facebook Like Campaign

Running paid facebook like campaigns is one of the most effective ways to increase the followers. Before running the paid facebook like campaigns you need to identify the people who might be interested in your brand as well as in the posts you share on social media.
All you have to do is create Images, Carousel or a video advertisements to communicate the benefit of following your social media pages
Examples –

• Like our page to get a free seat to our Workshops or Webinars. 
• Like our page to get Free Case study on Digital Marketing Customer Acquisition.

Expert tip – For your paid like campaigns, the below mentioned audience should be targeted

1. All the people who have engaged with you web assets and not followed your page 
2. Facebook and Instagram Engaged Fans who have not followed your pages  
3. Databases that you have collected from all your marketing activities excluding the people who have followed the page 
4. Lookalikes of your existing customers and leads who have not liked your Social Media Pages

3. Share your Social Media Pages on all the Social Media Groups and Forums

Social media groups and forums are the best sources to enhance your follower base. Hence, share your social media posts as your page in the related groups and forums of your niche in order to get more visits to your social media pages and communicate the benefit for following your social Media Pages.

4. Integrate Social Media Follow Icons on all your web assets

Integrate Social Media icons on all your web assets is one of the effective methods to increase traffic to your social media platforms.
When you add social media profile links to web assets, the users can easily navigate to your social media channels to know more about your business, contact you and to share your content. In this process many people will follow your social media pages to get updates about the offerings and knowledge you share there.

Incorporating these buttons into your site shouldn’t just be a case of copying the standard Facebook, Twitter and YouTube logos and cramming them into an empty corner. Instead, try to blend them seamlessly into your brand and website design

5. Provoke your Existing audience to Share, Comment and like

In your Video and Blog content , incentivize or provoke people to like,comment and share. This will help you to attract the Social Media Friends of your  followers.
Having a good number of comments, shares and likes is the key for getting higher organic reach.
When you get more likes and comments, your business becomes more legitimate to the people and it is more likely to get prioritised when facebook serves your content.

Conclusion:
Following all the above strategies will help you to gain the relevant followers who are eagerly waiting for your content. They will engage with every content you produce and this will eventually help in increasing organic reach and also you will do justice for all the content you create and make your prospective buyers comfortable to buy from you.

Related Article-
11 Step Content Creation Strategy To Convert Your Contacts To Contracts

If you are interested to learn more hacks like this you can attend our free digital marketing webinar.

Nowadays businesses have so many social media followers but none of them buys your products or services.

Studies show that 55% of consumers say that they would boycott brands whose views don’t align with theirs and on average all the brands do not even have the overall engagement rate of 1% on their social platforms.

It is possible that your business may have a huge fan following on social media. However, the challenge occurs when your followers fail to convert when your brand is not transparent or appealing to customers or not meeting customer expectations.
According to research studies, 53% of consumers say they’re likely to buy from brands that are transparent on social media.

Most of the time we are unable to take the highest advantage of our social media followers as we are not able to convert them into our customers.
Having thousands of inactive followers on your social media profiles is meaningless if you can’t make them buy your products or services.

All the money that you spend in order to get followers gets wasted without the strategy to convert your contacts (Followers) into Contracts (Customers).

What exactly can you do to convert your contacts to contracts?
What is it that hinders your social media fans from converting?
Your first crucial step is to find out the shortcomings in your social media strategy that reduce the engagement rates as well as sales.
But don’t worry. We have the solution for you!

Here are the 6 simple social media hacks to convert contacts to contracts

1. Understand your Target Audience problems

The initial step to convert social media followers to brand advocates is to understand your target audience’s problems. You need to identify and understand the pain points, fears, frustrations and aspirations of your particular niche customers.

The better you understand your target audience, the better your content strategy and brand communication methods will be.  This will enable you to design the most effective social media strategy and planning to each specific target group through relevant content, videos, infographics etc.

As the depth of your target audience insight grows, it brings increased ROI and higher conversion rates by turning your social media list to loyal fans.
Hence, understanding the problems of your target market has to be based on audience research which needs your willingness to study each and every likes and dislikes, interests and expectations of your particular niche social media fans.

It is when you can offer what they want through your products or services, your contacts turn into contracts and you get the actual sales.

So, the success of any business does not start with “Sales”, but from “knowing your customers”!

2. Solve your target audience problems through blog and video content

Now when you already know the problems of your followers, the next step is to craft the most suited and personalized content that solves the specific target audience’s problems.

To create content that connects to your potential social media brand advocates, it is essential to answer all the WH questions related to their problems like why should you create a masterpiece content of their problems addressing your target audiences’ pain points, fears,  frustrations and aspirations.

As you create a blog or video, you need to make sure that your target audience finds it useful or it solves their problems or fulfil their aspirations.

Don’t aim for just clicks, shares and page views, rather have an intent to solve problems of your prospective customers and aim for a long-lasting customer-brand relationship, which ultimately increases engagement rates and convert followers to fans. Let your content be a trusted resource that readers can count on.

By solving your target audience’s problems through blog and video content, you create a cost-effective content strategy, gain a better competitive edge and improved conversion rates by converting your social media followers to brand advocates.

“The actual game changer is to find your Content Core and talk about what your audience cares about”.

Related article–
Content Strategy that Converts your Contacts to Contracts.

3. Update them with the latest information using image and infographic content

Rather than lengthy words, visual content is more appreciated by your social media fans. Infographics are not just a visual display of content in an appealing way, it is the simpler and most effective marketing tool to communicate your message to your target audience.

You need to create infographics in such a way that your prospects and existing customers enjoy it and feel compelled to share it with their friends and followers.
An infographic is attractive when it is well presented with relevant content that solves customer problems. Putting your logo in each infographics is a way to imprint your brand image in your existing customer minds.

When you also add embed code in the infographics, you are able to track the number of visits and potential reach of it.

“Updating the latest information through Infographics and image content is one of the easiest, less time consuming and impactful content strategies to drive back huge traffic to your blog or social media channels”.

4. Engage Them with frequent contests

Engaging your audience with frequent contests (once a month or once in 45 days) on social media is one of the great strategies to improve your Social Media engagements.

The objective of running social media contests is to increase their participation level as well as the number of active users.
Social media contests that offer a free giveaway product or service that fulfill the bucket lists/ interests/ aspirations of your target audience are more likely to get more attraction and engagement.

Examples of running engaging contests can be “like and/or comment to win”, giveaways, lucky winner contests, photo caption contests, best comment contest etc.

For Digitechniks, we run “fill in the blanks contests” for which we give away our exclusive marketing ebooks. Once in 45 days, we run social media contests where we give Digital Media Strategy and Mentorship Program for free to our target customers.

Results from contests: In this way, social media contests are cost-effective social media strategy to enhance the engagement and that will in turn increase the reach of your social Media Posts. It is run to build brand awareness, engage and delight your current customers.

When you run frequent contests, your social media page engagement rate will be higher with more visits, shares, page views and likes. In this way, your traffic to site is increased with higher conversion rates and better ROI.

People who participate in your contest will always wait for the next contest because it’s fun. These are the people who’ll later become your customers or brand advocates.

5. Make your social media channels as the encyclopedia of your niche

The best tactics to convert your social media fans to brand advocates is to give every possible information about your niche on your social media channels. 

The simple reason for your social media fans to get diverted to your competitor’s page is due to lack of relevant information in your page which they are searching for. When you help your social media followers with the information they want, they become loyal fans.

Hence, here the relevancy, quality, frequency, usefulness and adaptability of your information is the key. When all these components are combined in your social media content, your social media channel becomes the encyclopedia of your niche.

It is when your social media strategy works well and which in turn convert your social media list to loyal fans. When you cover your social media channels with all types of content that your prospects or existing customers are searching for.
This strategy prevents them from searching for similar social media channels where they might get hooked up with relevant information, which shift their focus and becomes your competitor’s loyal fan and buy their products.

“So, creating your social media channels as the encyclopedia of your niche is the one of the best Customer Retention Strategy and the most effective brand awareness tool to enhance your competitive edge and increase sales”. 

6. Retargeting Strategy

Your Retargeting Strategy is to make sure the content you create is reaching to all the social media followers. Your Social Media Followers should see all your content which is communicated to your target audience via  Email, Messenger and Retargeting. It is the best way to close a sale that did not convert before.

When you are developing your web assets, you need to build a system that will collect the data in the form of cookies and contacts.

The content that is created as a part of the content strategy, will get organic Reach on Search Engines and Social Media as well. Since Overall Organic reach to your list is less than 10% you have to use all the available Digital Marketing Platforms like Email Marketing, Messenger Marketing and Social Media retargeting.

Related article–
List Building Strategies that Convert your List to Contracts

As soon as the content is posted on the Website and Social Media Channels, the same blog, video and infographic content should be sent to the email Subscribers, Messenger Subscribers and retarget all the people who have visited our web assets.
By doing this, you can save a lot of money by not reaching the wrong audience. Hence for converting your social media lists to loyal fans, your content should be shown only to the people who have shown interest in your product or services.

You can make your retargeting message impactful only when your content is personalized based on the specific target market. When a user visits your website through a search term, it shows that their intent is high level.

Hence, you need to show the same content with this search term in your next social media ads through different content in order to make your social media followers to brand advocates and improve sales conversion rates and ROI.

Here is the example –
Your content strategy begins with identifying the problems of the target audience. Once the problems are identified, create a blog/Video/Infographic content and show it to your list using paid and organic strategies.

Make your social media pages as the encyclopedia of your niche by frequently posting relevant images, videos,blog and infographics. Be the trusted educational partner of your niche through regular Social Media Postings.

Through this strategy, you will be able to convert social media lists to loyal Fans.
Are you interested to learn all of these strategies and tactics from our experienced Digital Marketing coaches?
Then, don’t miss this huge opportunity to attend our Free Digital Marketing Webinar to learn How you can also convert your, Social Media Followers, to contracts. 

Over time, digital marketing has provided marketers with a lot of tools and platforms to reach out to their targeted audiences. Most of them are successful, but only a few can boast of being cost-effective and providing control over budget like PPC.

Pay-per-Click (PPC) remains one of the oldest and most effective ways of driving traffic for businesses. It is a mode of advertising that allows marketers to pay each time a user clicks on their online ads.
For small businesses with a very tight budget, PPC can be an excellent tool for driving traffic and increasing conversions. According to research, Google ads are capable of reaching over 2 million websites and apps. It will do your business a great good if you can acquire at least 0.5% of that audience.

Contrary to what some marketers think, PPC can be cost-effective. Imagine paying just $1 for a click made by one user who went on to make a purchase of $100. I would call that effective marketing.

The key to a successful PPC ad campaign is knowing the right keywords that users are searching for in your industry. If the ad copy on your landing page is well optimized with relevant keywords, then you are sure to rank higher in search engines. And according to stats you’ll find in the infographic below, sponsored ads take up to two out of three clicks on the first page of search engines.

Using the right tools such as Google Analytics and Google AdWords, you can quickly identify which of your ads are doing best in terms of keywords, clicks, impressions, conversions, and sales. You can then use those results to narrow your ads campaign towards what works best.
PPC is also known as search engine advertising. The most popular PPC platform is Google Adwords, and this is because Google owns more than 73% of the search market (paid and organic). More than 1.2 million businesses and websites are part of the Google search network and its ad network.

The infographic below will further show you the advantages of PPC and why you need to start using it as a marketing tool. Check it out.
Info-graphic Credits: serpwatch.io