COVID-19 has taken control and redirected how businesses have been able to continue their success and keep their doors open during the pandemic. Restaurants, boutiques, and other stores have had to get extremely creative to encourage their customers to continue to support them without leaving their homes.

We have seen a range of ideas from curbside ordering and outdoor trunk shows to grocery delivery and many other creative incentives that attempt to keep these businesses alive despite the Coronavirus. However, it can be hard to keep generating fresh ideas to ensure that your buyers remain loyal. Here are five ways to boost your social media marketing to keep your customers returning time and time again.

1. Analyze your audience’s trends

To ensure the most engagement for your posts on social media, you should begin by getting to know your audience. There are many platforms available that can help you understand viewer analytics including Hootsuite and Google Analytics. With these platforms, you can break down the demographics - for example: age, gender, race, and marital status - and compare this information to engagement data collected by the platform. This can show you which outlets have the most success.

You then can begin scheduling your posts to fit within the recommended parameters and monitor your engagement with these tactics in place. Sprout Social has some additional tips to help you learn about the best times to post on social media in 2021.

2. Listen to and reward your customers

Everyone loves giveaways, and this is a great way to expand your reach. By offering a promotional giveaway, you can easily engage your audience. Simple engagement tactics can include your followers sharing a post to their story, tagging friends, and following your account. All of these virtual word-of-mouth tactics are a great way to grow your following and spread your business’s name and brand.

It is also important to utilize the story aspect of your social media platforms. When posting stories, you can ask questions, post polls, and remind your followers of upcoming events, sales, and promotions. Polls are a great way to get your audience to interact with your business. Many small businesses will ask their followers questions regarding what styles they’d like to see in stores, what type of promotions they prefer, and other ways to show your consumers that you care about their opinions.

3. Research your competition

It is important to stay on top of trends when marketing with social media. One way to do this is by researching your competition and monitoring the tactics they use. By trying out similar strategies that seem to work well for your competition, you may be able to stumble upon some tactics that work well for your own business. For example, learn how they deal with unhappy customers, announce promotions, when they post, and how well their posts do. You can then take this information and expand on it so that you can do it even better.

4. Always have a relevant call to action

A “Call to Action” helps your business by driving your sales and increasing your brand awareness. It is essentially a quick statement in a post that lets your reader know what you want them to do. By ending your post with a call to action, your audience will be encouraged to further interact with your business. For example, a simple call to action could be asking your followers to tag five friends in a giveaway post, share a post to their story, or visit your website. It is extremely important to make sure your call to action is clear and concise so that your audience understands what is being asked of them.

One of your main goals as a business is to make sales. To do that, your call to action should ultimately encourage buyers to choose your product over other options. To write an effective call to action, read these additional tips.

5. Host a Q&A session

At the end of the day, customers want to feel connected to the brands that they follow. Anyone who handles social media for your business should allow followers the opportunity to actively engage with your brand through content on your channels. This provides your audience a chance to ask questions about your business which can make your followers feel connected to your brand.

How we can help

It is extremely important to make sure your customers feel valued and appreciated when trying to engage with them online. Make monitoring trends a priority so that you can yield the best results when creating your social media strategy.

Auburn Advertising is a public resource service from Inner Spark Creative, a local agency and marketing partner. We exist to share information about advertising and marketing so we can help businesses in the Auburn and Opelika areas thrive. For more information on effective pandemic social media strategies, contact us today.