Move Your Digital Away from Spray-and-Pray

Source: www.TurfMagazine.com

Hannah TigheRun, don’t walk, away from spray-and-pray in your social engagement and selling efforts in 2015. Concentrate on individualizing your social media messages. You will get a more positive response from prospects and customers if they see that your posts focus on their desires, interests and issues.

Here are five ways to improve your social media outreach in 2015:

  1. Individualized Interest Marketing: People are becoming more jaded and selective about the content they want to see from brands. Make your posts more specific, more local and more human.
  2. Mobile First: Optimize your messages for mobile devices. More than 70 percent of users access social media from a mobile device, says Social Media Guru Jeff Bullus. Your website, message and offers need to be mobile ready. Do you know how your messages, graphics, font and spacing, for example, are coming across on all devices so that you can maximize your exposure?
  3. Visual/Video and Images Take Front and Center: Instagram, Pinterest, Vine and Snapchat continue to make giant strides in popularity. Posts with videos attract three times as many inbound links as plain text posts. Use Instagram and Vine to make it easy to create quick, quality videos. Tell your company’s story visually.
  4. Pay-to-Play/More Options on Advertising: Your marketing on social media will have to become paid in 2015. It is no longer a free option, but still somewhat affordable. Facebook recently curtailed the ability for brands to use its site to reach users organically and has virtually forced brands to switch to a more pay-to-play model. However, Facebook now allows advertisers the ability to tap into users’ behavior across the Web, as well as access to other key demographic data. This offers a more strategic, targeted advertising vehicle.
  5. Always Include Calls-to-Action: Facebook already allows you to place calls to action right from ads, such as “sign up now,” which can direct viewers to a coupon, sign up for your event and/or ask for your newsletter offsite. Facebook and Twitter are also testing and rolling out a “buy” button where people can purchase right from the social sites and ads themselves, instead of going offsite.

This will increase conversions, and your ability to track your marketing dollars’ effectiveness.