Social media is a great tool for keeping brands connected to their customers, but it can also be a powerful driver of direct sales activity.

Do you use social media to attract customers and increase sales?

If so, have you made sure that your social media profiles are contributing to your sales funnel, instead of each being a standalone element?

Here’s how you can ensure your social media efforts are tied back to driving sales for your business.

1. Plan Ahead

When launching your brand, keep in mind that your website is going to be just one of many marketing channels. You’re going to need a range of online assets to maximize your visibility, and each of those assets will form another part of your sales funnel.

Given this, consistency is key, and you should look for a brand name that’s ideally available across all the major social media platforms as part of this approach.

This way you ensure that:

• Each profile will be recognized as part of your brand, and hence contribute to the overall brand recognizability
• Each profile will rank for your brand name, and will help you better control your branded search results 

Namify is a brand name generator tool which checks name availability across Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and Pinterest:

It’s a quick way to see how your name is being used, or not, which can help guide your initial branding approach. 

2. Build a Consistent Brand Image

Aside from your brand name, your brand’s visual identity (logo and colors) is another powerful way to build brand recognition, and increase your presence more broadly.

Human beings are extremely visual, and we recall and recognize things through visual associations. This is due to ‘pictorial superiority effect‘ which relates to the brain’s ability to retain visual information much easier than text:

Given this, your brand’s visual identity should be consistent across all your social media profiles, tying into that cognitive response.

Consider visual consistency across:

• Profile pictures
• Header images of your channels and event pages
• Your social media graphics
• Your ads

Visme has a handy feature which stores your brand identity elements, and aenables your team to then apply these visual cues and motifs to every asset that they create. This will save you time by enabling you and your team to apply your branded visual elements to all your creatives with just a few clicks.

3. Align Your Social Media Copy with Your Landing Page

Social media marketing is interruptive. People generally come to social platforms to see the latest updates from their friends and family, and your product links and promotions interrupt their activity.

This is where a strong and consistent brand identity can help people more comfortable and confident when finding themselves on your page.

Think about every click that your social media update or ad is going to drive to your site. Why would this social media user want to continue interacting with your page, instead of clicking off to continue browsing their social media feed?

For example, in this Instagram ad, UPRIGHT uses the same visual elements in both the ad creative and the linked landing page:

By maintaining consistency, you’re not only reinforcing your branding, but you’re also providing more assurance to users that they’ve clicked through on what exactly they were after, while it also ensures a less disruptive experience.

4. Use Content Repurposing

Content repurposing is one of the most effective ways to create cross-channel brand recognizability, but instead of just re-using the same content across as many channels as you can, consider a more creative approach.

Each platform is different, and the ways in which people engage on each also varies, which means that you need to align with each app’s best practices to maximize your content appeal.

For example, you might:

• Publish long-form content on your blog
• Grab all visuals from your blog content and turn them into a (video) slideshow to use on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube
• Grab key takeaways from your long-form content (e.g. steps) and create a quick infographic to post on Pinterest
• Take some key points from your content and turn it into a visual quote to use on Instagram, Facebook and Linkedin
• Grab all your visual quotes and turn them into an engaging social media video

The more assets you create, the more unique updates you’ll be able to put together, with each driving more awareness for your brand, and more traffic to your site. And because you’ve used your original article as the foundation, people clicking your social media links will likely feel more comfortable interacting with your site.

There are multiple tools that can help you build an effective content repackaging strategy, including Canva, Visme and Haikudeck.

If you need help coming up with ideas on how to expand and repurpose your content, you can also run a quick search in Text Optimizer. The tool uses semantic analysis to suggest unique angles for you to use in your content repurposing strategy:

5. Personalize Your Landing Page

Marketing personalization means providing different user experiences based on each person’s previous interactions with your brand.

There are various ways to use personalization for your social media sales funnel. One of the most obvious methods is using the Facebook Pixel, which captures data on people who visit and interact with your website, then enabling you to reach out to them with more personalized promotions based on their specific actions.

Finteza is another marketing personalization tool, which enables you to adjust your calls-to-action based on the traffic source, location, and previous interaction of your users.

Social media platforms can drive brand recognizability, and direct sales – and social media marketing is at full strength when used for both concurrently. Think of each social media function and update in terms of your brand’s identity: “How will it contribute to my overall brand image and how will it help grow my brand awareness?”

Considering the bigger picture can have a big impact in boosting your branding and sales efforts.

Socialmediatoday.com

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