Traditional media has always skewed towards the higher end of marketing budgets. Which is why most startups, freelance business and small businesses have turned to digital marketing methods, such as social media, to promote their businesses.
Social media has fast become one of the most effective ways to communicate with fans and customers. The growing popularity of these channels among internet users has made them an ideal arena for businesses to promote their content.
On the flip side, social media has now become so saturated with content that marketers are struggling to get their message heard.
Shifting algorithms on popular platforms has also made it harder for posts to be seen, even by existing followers.
To promote your business on social media, you need to utilize your creativity. Text posts no longer have the same impact they used to—instead, social media graphics have been found to increase engagement, and have the potential to go viral.
If you are looking to promote your business on social media, you need to adopt visuals into your marketing strategy.
Here are the three steps you need to know to promote your visual content on social media.
Step 1: Optimize Your Social Media Branding
As we have established, social media is saturated in content. Marketers have to create great quality content to keep readers engaged. But they also need to ensure it can make an impact on the audience quickly.
The reason for this is that, despite the amount of content available on social media, users don’t have enough time to see it all. Social media is only one aspect of the digital marketing world that they are engaging with—users also spend time on blogs, forums, and private messaging.
And even if you do break through to grab followers’ attention, if they don’t know who the content belongs to, your efforts will not have the desired effect.
For businesses, both established and new, brand building has to be a key focus that all marketing efforts pivot around. This is particularly crucial in the social sphere because your message can so easily get lost in the quagmire of information.
Your social media branding needs to be obvious, but not distracting. Ensure your business accounts have the same logo as the profile image (in case you have logo variations) and that your branding is visible in cover images.
However, you have to remember that social media is primarily used for entertainment. Even though your aim is to promote your business and sell your products or services, if you come across as overly sales-focused, you will lose followers.
While adding your logo onto all visuals seems an obvious way to ensure your brand gets noticed, it can end up putting social users off your page entirely.
Don’t focus all your efforts on including your logo on everything. Instead, create a brand style that includes colors, fonts, and a tone of voice that conveys your brand without being too obvious.
Take a look at the Instagram accounts of brands like GoPro and AirBnB for inspiration. These brands don’t use their logo in their visuals but can immediately be recognized by their visual aesthetic.
Step 2: Leverage Data Visualization
In recent years, data has become one of the most engaging types of content that marketers can use in business promotion. But the biggest issue with data is that it can be dry and boring to readers—nobody wants to look at endless numbers and percentages.
However, giving context to data requires marketers to write long articles, which may not have a high chance of being read in the current busy digital climate.
Sourcing data is a time-consuming process, if nobody sees it or appreciates it, that is a large amount of time and energy wasted.
To ensure your data is appealing to your audience, you need to make it attractive. The primary way to do this is by visualizing your data.
There are a number of ways to visualize data on social media. Charts and graphs present information concisely and precisely to viewers, like the example below.
They are also small enough to be seen in the feature window of a social media timeline, which will increase the chances of engagement for your post.
While charts can be attractive in their own right, infographics are a variety of data visualization that has consistently produced great results.
Infographics are rich in visual quality, and present data alongside attractive visuals and context. They make for great shareable content and have the potential to go viral.
A number of online resources allow you to produce infographics quickly and easily, so you can create excellent quality content for your social media.
Step 3: Repurpose Your Content
You may have a wealth of content at your disposal but once it’s been shared, you will need to create more content. At least, that’s what marketers had believed until recently.
But there is a better way—repurposing your existing content. Look through your blog posts and choose key points to share as separate posts on social media. You can opt to make quotes out of these points, or use templated graphics, like the below example.
Alternatively, you can share the salient points of a blog post or long-form content as a series of charts or in an infographic.
If you have video capability, you can turn a piece of written content into a 3-5 minute video, with a prompt to read more on the blog.
And those videos can be further condensed into short 30-second snippets to be shared on Instagram, or as GIFs and animations.
The content you have created doesn’t need to remain the way it is—by creating visuals with them, you not only reach a new audience, but also save yourself the trouble of having to create new content.
Conclusion
Social media can seem like an impossible hurdle to climb, especially for startups and small businesses. But by optimizing visual marketing strategies, you can promote your business without having to spend too much money or time.
Ensure your brand is clear, but not intrusive, in your social media visuals. Leverage data visualization techniques, and repurpose existing content into visuals.
With these three steps, you will be well on your way to spreading brand awareness and increasing your sales.
image source: Unsplash- https://unsplash.com/photos/CNbRsQj8mHQ
