Are you one of those business owners who spend hours on social media trying to make sense of it? You spend countless hours trying to woo in customers, by creating posts one after another, engaging with your audience, liking, commenting, sharing and doing everything in your capacity to make things work? But even after all the hours that you put in and the struggle that you go through, you just don’t find the results that you hoped for. This isn’t particular to a few business owners but sadly it happens to most of them.

Most business owners find this repetitive process rather therapeutic – I mean, it does look quite simple and straightforward, does it not? You’d have to curate content, post it, and then go into an endless routine of interacting with your audience. What’s not to work? But it doesn’t. Well, as a social media marketing agency in Mumbai, we hate to break it to you but this isn’t the most ideal way of growing and connecting with your audience.

You may be tempted to ask: If social media isn’t the answer, why use it in the first place? We’d say this is a misplaced concern. Social media is a great tool for any business – especially small businesses. It is very valuable if used correctly though. Blindly posting content on your social media channel is doing very little to help your business steer in the right direction. What you should aim for is quality above quantity. This may be a term you are familiar with when doing SEO (especially when building backlinks as quality backlinks matter a lot to gain prominence on the search results page). The same principle applies to your social media strategy as well. As a small business owner, you don’t have the luxury of vast financial pockets to dig your hand in to strengthen an already well established brand. For many small businesses, social media marketing is a way not just to do some serious branding but also generate quality leads and turn them into potential customers.

Let’s look at how you can create a powerful social media strategy to get more serious buyers for your business:

1) Have a clear message: As a business owner, you may be tempted to make everyone on this planet, your customer. While this is obviously very idealistic, it isn’t necessarily the right way to do it. You need to study your market and realize who your potential clients could be. Once you have that figured out, you will then be in a better position to craft a compelling message through your social media platforms as a means to attract and engage them. For example, if you have an accounting software, you may want to attract fellow accountants and small business owners who do their own accounting. If you aren’t great at creating good quality content, consider hiring a content writing company to help you with it.

2) Create a strong landing page: While you may have a strong message that resonates well with your audience, it is time that you have a well optimized landing page. Your visitors on your website can be distracted by the umpteen information found on it. And this is good when someone is taking time to explore your business but not good if they know you are the solution they are looking for. The extra distractions run the risk of them swaying away from your goal – which is to submit a form and give you their details for you to contact them later. Have a nice landing page that is optimized to arrest their information and pass it on to you. You’ll see a bump in your leads and hopefully some more paying customers.

3) Give discounts or promotional offers: Another great way of engaging and attracting other like-minded individuals to your website is by way of promoting your products and services. While the rest of the year may seem a little drab in getting a lot of sales, you can generate hype when it is festival time, or when there’s a global event such as a Black Friday sale. These are the times when consumers are looking for the best deals in town and you can use such times to your advantage. Also, you can make use of user generated content such as pics from your customers using your products and selecting a few for a giveaway. This is a good strategy to not only keep them loyal to your brand but also get more people interested in your products.

4) Track your campaigns: While it is great that you have a lot of sales happening, it is also equally important that you keep a track of the various metrics that are important for your business. Every business is different and so the metrics will vary depending on your business model. If you are running a paid social media campaign such as Facebook ads, consider making use of your page’s Facebook pixel in order to capture data to be utilized later for retargeting purposes. Keeping track on what you do on social media will give you insights as to what is working for you and what requires additional attention.

5) Optimize for best performance: As you are tracking your social media metrics, you may come across bottlenecks as why your efforts aren’t paying rich dividends. You may have to check the entire sales funnel if you find that your customers are adding products to the cart but aren’t checking out. You could also find that your customers are talking about the badly designed landing page that comes in the way of a good customer experience. Listening actively on social media and studying what your followers are talking about, will give you a lot of data so as to further optimize not only your social media accounts but also other online assets.

Remember that social media strategy isn’t a once and done activity. You’d have to continuously be active at it so as to provide the best experience you can provide to your existing customers while attracting other potential leads.