Thinking about social media marketing? At Salazar Packaging, we have had, like most companies, mixed results — but have acquired nearly two decades of social media marketing experience. While the costs and opportunities differ for every firm, we hope the following insights, based on our experience, will help you make the right decisions.
1. Is your target audience using social media to discover, vet, engage with, order from, and/or learn from, companies in your market?
If only we had asked this question first! Social media, we learned after a bit of experience and frustration, is not where our customers do packaging business. To find out whether and how your customers use social media — ask them.
Many of our customers in the DTC market probably have customers who use social media to do most, or all, of the things mentioned above. The opportunity for you could be significant.
2. What do we want to accomplish on social media?
If you’re confident social media is the right marketing channel, decide what you want to accomplish. The best goals include:
- Branding. A social media page today can function like a business card did in years past. A low-cost way to enter social media is to set up a page that conveys your value proposition, a little personality, and basic company information. If it’s done well, you’ll establish credibility and give prospects an immediate understanding of what you do.
- Lead/Order Generation. One step beyond branding is to post information about special offers, new products, invitations to attend educational Zoom seminars — anything that gets prospects to order or do something. This takes ongoing attention, but is not as involved and time consuming as …
- Engagement. Social media is effective for two-way communication with your audience, by answering their questions, providing customer service, conducting polls, etc. Just remember it takes almost constant attention to build an engaged following.
- Thought Leadership. If credibility is a key factor for turning prospects into customers, using social media to promote your own authoritative content and share helpful content from other sources will make your audience confident in your abilities.
3. How do we measure what we accomplish?
Another thing we learned the hard way is that social media can be a time suck and money pit if you don’t define success and have a way to measure it.
Lead generation is the most straightforward goal to measure (Did they order? Did they attend?) — but you must have a system in place to capture and track the right data.
Progress in engagement and thought leadership can be measured to some extent by tracking such things as audience growth, social media shares, and visits to your website from social platforms.
Bottom line here is, don’t start doing anything until you have thought through #3.
4. Which social platforms should we use?
Three indispensable tips:
- Small companies are always in danger of spreading themselves too thin, so start on one or two platforms and see how it goes. You can always expand into other platforms later.
- Start where your audience already is, rather than trying to pull them in from somewhere else.
- Platforms have different strengths. For instance, Instagram is ideal for visual products: X (Twitter) is good for sharing content and engagement; Facebook appeals to brand fanatics and in some cases, works for lead generation.
5. Set a budget you can live with for a year and dive in for six months.
At this point, you can finalize your budget — make sure you can afford it for a whole year. You should also give yourself six months and a full effort before coming to any conclusions, because it takes time to build an audience and earn trust.
Good luck — Maybe we’ll see you on Instagram!
Related posts:
https://www.salazarpackaging.com/what-you-dont-know-about-e-commerce-packaging-costs/
https://www.salazarpackaging.com/e-commerce-packaging-drivers-wanted/
https://www.salazarpackaging.com/custom-e-commerce-packaging-rest-easy-weve-got-this/
