With the increasing expectation that organisations maintain a healthy presence on social media, your time can quickly get consumed with developing interesting content, posting regularly and moderating comments, but is all the effort worth it? Can social media marketing engage local customers and clients and measurably increase conversions?

Typically, deciding which product or service to purchase is a complex one with customers weighing up several options, visiting stores and websites, and talking to friends. The buying cycle is more complicated than seeing an ad and buying the product. 

Understanding how buyers decide which product or service is best for their needs will help you engage customers at each stage of their decision-making process. Social media marketing is an amazingly effective tool to nurture people from the first contact with your organisation to purchaser and brand ambassador.

Marketers are well aware of the concept of ‘touch points’ –  it takes several ‘touch points’ with your prospective customer to ultimately turn into a purchaser. When using social media, a touch point could be:

• An engagement with a post
• A visit to your website
• Viewing a product or organisation video
• Downloading a brochure.

When marketers approach their social media campaigns with a longer-term understanding of their consumer’s decision-making process, they achieve better results. The objective is not to create a “purchase now” post to get conversions immediately but to engage as many viable customers from your catchment with exciting and engaging content. Get creative and talk to the real buyers out there!

How to use social media to engage locals

Great content is central to a great social media strategy. Start by sharing the content ideas below on social media:

• Get staff and customers talking about important messages in a short video
• Create a blog on your organisation’s website that’s more than business news and updates
• Post interesting articles and resources for consumers that have shareable value
• Create or join a local community group.

Ok, great, so you’re starting to get engagement, is that it? Don’t make the mistake of stopping there. We love likes and comments but what do they help if we never contact these engaged followers again? The beautiful thing about social media today is that you can create audiences based on previous engagements with your posts and ads! Take it to the next level by re-engaging those who are showing interest by:

• Creating retargeting lists of people that have visited your website or specific pages of your website
• Building your email lists with downloadable resources
• Building Facebook audiences from people who viewed your videos
• Building Facebook audiences from people who have engaged with specific posts
• Building lookalike audiences based on your current ideal audiences.

How do you build retargeting audiences?

The first step is to set up a Google remarketing pixel and Facebook Ads pixel on your website. You can then use these pixels to your full advantage by creating rules of how audiences should be built using the tool available on the Google Adwords platform or in the Facebook Ads Manager.

The opportunities for retargeting engaged contacts are almost limitless. By using social media to its full potential, you can quickly see how a carefully planned strategy can lead a potential customer from liking a post on Facebook to visiting your website to seeing a remarketing ad to take a particular action (eg. subscribing to an email list to receive or download information) to accepting an invitation or purchasing a product or service.

The next time you stop to post to your social media, take a moment to sketch out the full ‘life cycle’ of how you will re-engage with the people that like or comment on your post. Have fun, and don’t be afraid to experiment!