Marketing

Social Media: Building A Strategy To Go Viral

When it comes to creating a social media strategy, there’s no cookie cutter way to become a winner. In this increasingly digital world we now live in, there are many different social media platforms to choose from, and a plethora of marketing tools and tactics you can use to achieve results. Keep in mind that every social media platform is different, and your audience can behave very differently than someone else’s.

Download All our business resources

This is because at the end of the day, you’re working with people and trying to guess their feelings and behaviors, which are very difficult to anticipate. For a little help with figuring out your audience’s tastes, feelings, and behaviors, take a look at our guide to Customer Research, which will help you get an idea of which platforms would likely be most popular among your users.

Marketing Funnel

Let’s get started by taking a look at your marketing funnel – or the path you want users to take for you to get a sale. A good way to think about your marketing funnel is that you’re sending mice through an elaborate maze. You can never anticipate exactly what the mice will do. However, once you get a sense of how the maze works and learn what incentivizes your mice, you can help direct the mice towards the end of the maze more effectively.

You can also think of your funnel as the “customer journey.” First, you’ll start with the awareness phase, where your goal is to put yourself on your future customer’s radar. From there, the customer will move into the consideration stage, where they’re quite literally considering whether or not to trust you and purchase your services.

From there, if they continue, the customer will move into the conversion stage, which is when they actually contract you for your services. If all goes well, you’ll want to push the customer into the next two phases which are all about building loyalty and getting your customers to advocate for your business to their networks.

Conversion

Before we take you through the awareness and consideration stages of the funnel, you’ll need to decide on your end goal – or the “conversion”. Just like sending mice through a maze, you need a clear picture of what exactly you want the mice to do – otherwise you’re relying on chance for the mice to get from point A to point B, which is never a good idea.

Ask yourself, what do you want your potential customers to do? Do you want them to call you directly? Request a quote by filling out the form on your website? Pick the conversion that best suits your business, and use it as the endpoint to drive your new clients towards.

A general rule of thumb in marketing is that 80% of your content should be aimed at nurturing your relationship with customers while only 20% should be sales.

Consideration

The next thing you’ll need to define is how to get your audience to the consideration stage. For example, if your goal is for your audience to request a quote by filling out a form on your website, they have to land on your website first, and the website has to give them a reason to fill out the form. Or, if you want someone to call, they first have to, one, know your number, and two, have to have a reason to call.

Always have a simple, logical sequence of actions you want users to take in the back of your mind and clear pathways to get them there. Make it so easy to complete your goal that anyone could do it. Keeping with that same example where your goal is to get people on your website filling out a form to request a quote, every piece of content you put out should in some way lead back to that goal. Ask yourself questions like…

Does it nurture your relationship with the customer?

As mentioned in our Networking Playbook, people like to work with people they trust, so it’s vital that you build that trust and connection on social media. This can be done by sharing information that’s valuable to customers in a way that’s either entertaining, inspirational, or educational.

For example, you might share tricks and tips based on your expertise and show how you’re uniquely equipped to answer customers’ needs. You can also utilize fun memes related to your trade, quotes and personal success stories, reviews, case studies, behind the scenes content, or employee/customer features, also known as highlights.

A general rule of thumb in marketing is that 80% of your content should be aimed at nurturing your relationship with customers while only 20% should be sales. Remember that by no means do you have to stick strictly to this 80/20 ratio. Use whatever ratio and method that best suits your businesses’ needs.

Does it get you sales?

This is where you can finally get shamelessly promotional. Your goal for that other 20% of content is to directly get sales and collect potential leads. This content should be aimed at either pre-qualifying customers and collecting their contact information. It’s best to ask for an email address or phone number, that way, you’ll have a reason to call and make your pitch, giving them that final push they need to explore your offerings.

Your 80% nurturing content can go a long way in helping keep you top of mind and showcase your expertise, so you’re the first person that your future customers will think of to call when they run into issues. You should also consider utilizing an exclusive offer, which can make a customer that’s in the consideration phase finally pick up the phone or sign up to get a quote on your website.

Awareness

But for any of the considerations or conversions to happen, you’ll first have to find a way to get on your future customers’ radars. Simply creating a website and Facebook page isn’t going to cut it and get you sales.

You’ll have to find ways to make your presence known online, and the easiest way to do that is to go into spaces where your audience is already spending time. Think about what you and your friends/family do online. What kind of people do you follow on Facebook? Are you in any groups? Where do you go for local news? Are there any local events or places you frequent?

Your goal now is to get those people and communities to share information about you, or jump into conversations in those areas so they’ll end up seeing that consideration phase content you’ve created above. Or, in some cases, you might be able to just directly link them to your website.

Let’s say for example that you’re marketing your plumbing business on Facebook. You’ve got a killer Facebook page with top-notch content. You’re sharing all kinds of great plumbing tips and tricks. You’re funny and personable. Your offers are irresistible, like offering free water testing. But the problem is, no matter how great your content may be, nobody’s seeing it. It’s just you talking into the void – well, a void and two people you haven’t spoken to since high school and your distant aunt from Jersey you’ve invited to like your page.

So, how do you get more people looking at your page? The answer is simple: you share it! Join a few local Facebook groups and share tips and tricks, as well as industry news that impacts them. If there’s going to be a snowstorm or freezing temperatures, jot down a couple quick suggestions of what people should do to avoid their pipes freezing on your Facebook page and share that post to the group.

You should also tag locals with a lot of followers, or other businesses, in your posts. If you go to the local hardware store, take a photo and tell your followers how you’ve trusted them for XX amount of years, and tag that business. Comment on other people’s posts from your Facebook page’s profile – or your own if you’re sharing content to your personal Facebook about your business.

At the end of the day, social media is a numbers game. The more people that see you (awareness), and the more people follow you (consideration), the more sales you’ll get (conversions).

Example

At the risk of getting a little meta on you, you should know that you’re actually in a marketing funnel right now. Sure, we genuinely enjoy creating content like this that helps individuals grow their businesses, and making a daunting task like marketing simple and accessible for the everyday person.

But, if you’ve taken the time to read the rest of this overview, you should realize that you’re currently in that relationship nurturing/consideration stage where we help you get to know us by providing something of value to you in the hopes that you’ll like it enough to keep engaging with us. Then, we can quietly slide you a promotional offer relevant to your interests. An example of this would be telling you…

“Hey, while you’re thinking about growing your business through social media marketing, you know what would also really help? Our business management software. It’s going to reduce how much time you’re spending on administrative tasks by streamlining and automating your day-to-day so you can spend more time focusing on promoting yourself online.”

On the off-chance you click that link we provided, you’ll notice a handy UTM code at the end of the link you clicked so we can track how you came to our website, which will tell us where you came from so we know where to put more time and money into advertising.

And odds are, the reason you found this post is because we were employing some of the methods we just discussed above, like sharing our content to relevant groups and people on Facebook. Or maybe you came from another form of online marketing in that awareness stage like a Google Search or paid advertising. Take a page out of our (play)book and try this method on your audience!

General Advice

Start Small

It’s far better to be really good at one social media site, like Facebook, and learn its intricacies than to be just ‘okay’ at a lot of them. Keep in mind that even social media experts usually don’t bother to learn more than 3-4 social media channels.

At most, you’re going to want to focus on 1-3 platforms, not including local listings and directories like Yelp and Angi. As a local service business, the odds are those platforms are going to be Facebook and Instagram, sheerly because of their popularity. However, you should also consider utilizing TikTok, as it’s one of the fastest growing social media platforms of all time.

Follow Best Practices

The first, and most essential step, is to make sure your social media accounts are set up correctly, following best practices, and fully filled out. This is easily the most common mistake people make, and there’s about an 80% chance that if you have a business social media account, you’re not following best practices and it’s impacting your numbers.

To make this simple, we’ve created these social media cheat sheets you can reference:

DOWNLOAD FACEBOOK CHEATSHEET

Looking for a quick and easy guide to Facebook marketing? Our cheatsheet includes: Facebook Setup Checklist, 50+ post ideas, 20+ editable templates, sizing chart, tools, KPIs to track, and posting guidelines.

Take Time To Learn The Platform

After that, you need to take the time to really learn how the social media site works and all the features and tools at your disposal. Learning the intricacies of a social media website will help you see patterns and make educated guesses about why your audience is behaving a certain way. That way it’s easy for you to troubleshoot and test what tactics are best.

Here’s a few of our favorite websites to learn from and stay up to date with:

Blue Corona – Really good local marketing tips for service businesses
Bright Local
Search Engine Land
Social Media Examiner
Neil Patel
Hubspot
Buffer
Hootsuite
Sprout Social

Find Non-Intrusive Touch Points

Luckily, finding non-intrusive touchpoints is easy. It’s in the name: social media. Here’s a few examples what you can do to connect with people on social media and get your name out there:

Tag people in photos
Comment on posts
Like posts – 25/50 a day is usually safe (otherwise the social media platform may think you’re abusing the system)
Send direct messages to chat or share posts
Follow them – follow !25-50 ppl a day on Instagram and Twitter then after some time has passed and you get over 200/500 followers, unfollow everyone who doesn’t follow you back
Follow the people your followers or other relevant people are following
Share other accounts’ posts

Hashtags

Hashtags typically serve two purposes:

First, they make content searchable. To search for a specific hashtag, users go to the search box, enter their criteria (like #dallastexas), and browse through images related to that search.

Second, hashtags serve as communities that bridge users with similar interests together so they can discuss a topic. Take the #plumbinglife and #plumberscrack hashtags, for example. These hashtags are often used by plumbers to share memes, photos of their work, tool reviews, and other shared interests with one another.

Hashtags are actually the primary way people search and discover new content on Twitter and Instagram. Users see posts they like inside tags, click on the photo which takes them to the account of the user who posted the photo, and based on whether they like that person’s content, they will follow the user.

This begs the question: Which hashtags should be used to make your posts searchable and connect with potential customers?

You can:

Google for lists of hashtags related to your niche (e.g. “hashtags for plumbers)
Type a broad hashtag into the search box (e.g. “#plumb”) and use autofill to provide suggestions as well as information about their popularity.
Steal your competitors’ hashtags
Use a site like Tags For Likes to find hashtags related to the one you type in as well as their popularity.

As a general rule of thumb, you should try to stick with the following hashtags:

Location-Specific

Create a list of locations you serve including your city, local area, region, and other terms that searchers might use to describe your area, like cultural slang (i.e. Philly for Philadelphia).

Then, search for each location on your list under Instagram’s and Twitter’s hashtag searches. You can also include popular landmarks (e.g. universities, stadiums).

This can also be a great way to find bloggers, influencers, and partners – for example, you’ll often see hashtags like #dallasbloggers #dallasrealtor ,#dallasmom, #dallasyoutuber, or #dallasmomblogger.

Events

If there are local events like festivals happening, post something relevant to it, tag the event (#dallasbbqfestival), and mention the organizer’s Instagram account, relevant attendees (e.g. @meatchurch)

Trade-Related

Sure, you won’t get customers directly from using a hashtag like #plumbing or #plumberslife – you’ll mostly just connect with other plumbers also using this hashtag. But larger hashtags like this are invaluable for ranking at the top of those local hashtags that do get you sales.

Because these hashtags get so much content posted to them, you won’t show up at the top very long and your post will quickly get buried. However, they’ll give you an initial burst of popularity that can help your post show up at the top of your followers’ feeds and give you the number of likes and engagement to help your post show up in the suggested posts for a tag and the explore page where it can stay for hours – or even months depending on the popularity of the post and how active the tag is.

We have an extensive list of trade-related hashtags you can consult for ideas.

Posting On Social Media

What To Post

Coming up with ideas for social media posts can be challenging, especially as a small business. This is why we’ve taken the time to create a list of ideas for what to post, calendar of social media events to post about, and professional templates to plug these ideas into to give you an idea of how you can create an immaculate feed tailored to your business.

When you’re ready to start creating posts, we highly recommend that you use Canva to do this. Canva is a free platform that allows you to create high quality designs in whatever size or format you may need.

How To Post

When it comes to the act of actually posting your images, you can usually schedule posts through the platform itself through these links:

This will give you more control over the look of posts and more posting options. However, if you’re looking to schedule your posts in batches or far in advance, we’d recommend that you use a scheduling platform like Buffer as a free option and Hootsuite for paid.

We’d recommend avoiding Hubspot as it will modify any link that you choose to post with a “hubsly” link shortener. This means that if you decide to switch platforms, any link that you posted using Hubspot will be broken, which means a ton of manual labor to clean it up later on.

For example, FieldPulse has been using Hubspot for quite some time. Whenever we put our shortened link (https://fpul.se/udDyf) into hubspot, it automatically changes the link to https://hubs.ly/H0V34TW0.

Getting Your Accounts Set Up

For some more help on setting up your social media accounts and marketing basics, take a look at these resources:

Facebook

Instagram

Twitter

Youtube

And just like that, you’re prepared to be a social media winner. We’ve gone through a social media overview, and covered the different stages of your marketing funnel in detail. We’ve also taken you through some examples, best practices, and general advice when it comes to social media, as well as how to leverage hashtags and touchpoints.

Finally, we’ve touched on a few tips and tricks to help make creating and scheduling your social posts a breeze. For some extra help getting started, take a look at our templates.

Continue your journey to a successful business

improve your business

Get top-rated features and support for a fraction of the price with FieldPulse’s all-in-one business management software for tradesmen.