In our previous post on the “LEO” strategy for social media marketing, we discussed the first step, to Learn about your target market before you begin your campaign. We continue in this article with the final two steps of the “LEO” Method, beginning with the second step: To create engaging content for your potential customers.
E – Engage. The engagement phase is all about deploying dynamic content that will encourage a response from your target market. This is the first place that all of the research we did in the Learning step will come in handy. Like we learned in Part I, different target markets respond to different types of content. There are some universal guiding principles, however, to creating engaging content.
- Diversify as quickly as possible. Instead of deciding, “I’m going to advertise by writing a blog,” think of five or six different types media to use for advertising. This is the best way to quickly find out what type of media your audience best responds to. We’ll talk more about how to do that in the “Optimize” section.
- Make you content easy to follow. If you’re writing an article, use subheadings that explain what you’re writing about. Many people will only scan your article, so the subheads should convey your message. If you’re making a video, make sure the video tells a cohesive story from beginning to end. Embrace brevity in your writing and keep sentences and ideas as short and simple as possible.
- Write stories. Even if you’re writing a simple ad, storytelling is the key to engagement. If you can immediately draw your audience into the story of your product, they are much less likely to quickly click away.
- Have a “call to action.” A call to action is an easy way for the potential customer viewing your content to interact with your brand. For example, at the end of a blog post, you should clearly tell the reader to join your mailing list and include a fillable form right there in the post for your reader to do so immediately.
The harder you work to perfect these techniques, the more effective your social media marketing strategy will be. All that’s left is to take all the content you’ve created and make it perform optimally.
O – Optimize. After you have implemented your advertising strategy, you must always keep testing your strategy against new, potentially better content. We see this all the time; a company like Geico will run a Gecko ad, then they’ll run a Caveman ad right afterwards. They measure the responsiveness to their ads via insurance policy sales, then they refocus their advertising strategy around the ad that was most effective. And you can do that same thing with your social media marketing.
It’s important to note that this is the step where entrepreneurs fail most often. After doing the research and creating great content, they become complacent in their efforts and assume that the content they’ve created is the best content for their target demographic. Do not fall into this trap! Content can always be better; never, never, never get attached to content you have created.
The best method for testing new advertising methods is a technique called “A/B testing” (also sometimes called “split testing”). In case you haven’t heard of it before, A/B testing is where you can take two ads (or landing pages or emails or whatever) and release them to the exact same demographic, but with slightly different designs.
For example, let’s say you’re running a Facebook ad for a Christmas discount on home-roasted coffee. You create one ad that says “Big Christmas Sale: Save 20% on All Roasted Coffee.”
Then, you could create another ad that says, “Make Your Home Warm for the Holidays – 20% Off All Roasted Coffee This Holiday Season.” You give Facebook a $10 budget for each ad for the day, and you sit back to see how each ad performs.
The next day, you discover that Ad #2 drove 50% more traffic to your website than ad #1. That’s great! You now know that you should run ad #2 instead of ad #1 because it will bring more potential customers to your website. But at the same time, you can’t accept that ad #2 is the best possible ad that you can run on Facebook. You must keep continually testing to see which ad will bring convert the highest number of people. So over the next few days, you change the text of your ad, change the images in your ad, add video or other interactive elements, always watching to see which ad drives the most traffic to your website.
You can imagine how employing this strategy quickly allows you to generate a highly tested, optimally performing ad. This is one of the secrets to how the pro’s run social media marketing campaigns that boast such high conversion rates. They have a team of people who employ testing methods on small populations to see which ads and campaigns will be the most successful. Then, only after they find a highly successful campaign, they run the campaign over their entire target demographic.
You’ll notice that I used Facebook as an example for both Part I and Part II of this article, but I didn’t give step-by-step instructions on how to create ads and execute a marketing campaign. The thing I want you to take away from these articles is that no matter what platform you use for your marketing, these three steps will be the foundation upon which your campaign is built.
The exact methods for executing these steps vary greatly between social media platforms. Everything, from what type of people to whom you can best market, to what types of media are optimal, to what conversion statistics and ROI you can expect from your marketing efforts, depends on which platform you are using. So over the next few months, Logical Entrepreneur will publish a series of articles detailing more precise steps on executing marketing campaigns for each social media platform. Be sure to subscribe to our mailing list or follow us on Facebook to stay up to date with new articles coming out in this series. See you again soon!
