Social media is a great way to stay in touch with family and friends, while providing us with entertainment in our lives. But it doesn’t have to end here. Social media now is no longer a niche tool but a must have for any business serious about getting their marketing right.
And marketing is super important because there are millions of businesses looking for a slice of that customer pie of billions of customers. That’s right, about 2.89 billion people login to Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp or Messenger every month! And most of them will spend more time than simply check in on friends then log off. They want something new, and you can provide them with that. This is your chance: a prime opportunity to pitch your business as something worth paying attention to.
How Social Media Rules Marketing
Your brand’s social media campaign has the potential to make or break your business or product. While most celebrities and influencers have sizable followings on social media, few have learned the rules of the game.
90 percent of Instagram users follow at least one business. More than 200 million of them visit at least one business profile every day. 60 percent of responders say they’ve made at least one purchasing decision on a social media platform. Thus, businesses which take advantage of what social media channels have to offer find that dividends are high. In fact, a huge amount of sales take place on social media itself.
Grove collaborative, a cleaning products company, for instance, ran an Instagram Stories campaign. They found they attracted more new customers with less outlay: 37% of new customers came from Instagram story ads and the click-through rate was 2.1x all other ads. Lumi Deodorant ran a highly successful Facebook advertising campaign that saw sales increase by a full 7 times.
Unlocking Social Media’s Hidden Potential
While social media is the best way to do marketing, it’s not the easiest. About 25 million brands are already up and running their marketing campaigns on Instagram and other social media platforms. They mean business, but so do you. But among this hodge podge of countless businesses, how on earth is anyone ever going to find you?
The secret to social media success lies in eye-catching imagery that gets the word across and even gets them to talk about it with others. Most web visitors read only 20% of the text they see, but they see 100% of the images.
Tweets with images receive 150% the amount of retweets as tweets without images. Whereas on LinkedIn, images receive 98% more comments. Compelling, engaging, scroll-stopping images are where your future in social media marketing lies.
Now, you understand that social media is important and that engaging visuals are the secret to visibility. But where are those graphics supposed to come from? Eye-catching visuals typically require a lot of hard work and a huge budget, but not always.
The Secret to Visual Social Media Marketing: Online Editors
To get high quality visual content made, you needed to pay professional graphic designers to create it for you. This and the added back and forth between countless changes and explaining your point of view can be tedious and even demoralizing. Today, online graphic design softwares like PosterMyWall allows you to create professional social media images for free in a matter of minutes.
Their free, ready-to-go templates range from product advertising to event flyers to announcements, allowing you to skip through most of the design process and stick to only adding the information that makes your social media posts distinctly yours. Customize the templates with text, images, clipart or even your own video and audio, at a reasonably low price. Additionally all social media images are free to download without a watermark.
Apart from design creation itself, the other big time sink in social media marketing is downloading, uploading and posting the designs at different times of the day and week according to peak engagement times of different platforms. There are several dedicated social media scheduling tools on the market that can solve this problem for you but that also means yet another tool to manage.
What you need – and what you can get with PosterMyWall – is an end-to-end social media marketing solution. PosterMyWall lets you not only create the designs but also publish them directly to your Facebook and Twitter pages with interesting captions without even leaving the site. If making repeated posts is a hassle for you, you can simply create all your posts for a day or week at once. Then schedule them for later with the scheduling tool in PosterMyWall’s design sharing options. This can perfectly streamline your social media process and consolidate all steps from content creation to distribution in one tool.
Visuals That Sell: Video Ads
If an image is worth a thousand words, a video is easily worth a couple million. Videos on a page are 12x more likely to be watched than text is to be read because videos are processed 60,000 times faster than text. If you want to catch your audience’s attention, you’ll want to move into moving pictures.
Luckily, creating promotional videos is just as easy as making promotional graphics. You don’t even need to switch your design software to create videos. PosterMyWall’s video templates allow you to create your own stunning video content. All you need is a little time and you can drag and drop your way to a great video. You can even convert an image design to a video and vice versa. With countless stock video and audio options, you also don’t need to shoot your own video every time you’re looking to create your own video.
If you find that video promotions are your thing. You can subscribe to PosterMyWall’s Premium Plus plan to get unlimited downloads of stunning promo videos and keep your audience engaged.
Stay Consistent With Your Branding
Designing high quality visuals is now easier than ever. And yet, most businesses fail to get results despite the availability of graphic design tools like PosterMyWall at their disposal. Why is that? Well, marketing is not just about visuals that look good. It’s also equally crucial to speak the brand’s language, consistently. Many brands may use ready-made templates but end up with visuals devoid of their brand’s touch. So you’re not even sure who’s doing the advertising until you read the fine print, which no one has the time to do. Your brand can’t afford to make this mistake. One of the ground rules of visual marketing is keeping a consistent brand identity that your fan base can latch on to.
It doesn’t have to be difficult. In fact, if you are using an online graphic design service, you can use customization functions. These allow you to make each piece of advertising completely your own. Choose a palette of colors that represents your brand. Then use them every time you prepare a new social media graphic. With a tool like PosterMyWall, you can upload your logo from your phone or computer directly to your designs (or create a new transparent logo if you don’t have one already). With a Premium account, you can also upload your own custom fonts to use in your designs to maintain visual consistency with the fonts you’ve used on your website, your stationery, or elsewhere. This way, each piece of visual content you create for social media acts as your brand ambassador and takes your brand identity wherever it is shared.
Once your designs are ready, you should make the most out of them by sharing them across your social media platforms. A consistent posting schedule gets you more eyeballs on your marketing messages but also helps reinforce your brand identity in the minds of your audience. You can also resize or recreate your designs for a variety of platforms. With the free resize feature on PosterMyWall, repurposing your content for different platforms is a simple, one-click move.
Get Creative, Get Real
If visuals are the key to social media marketing. Engaging, personable posts are the hand that turns that key. Once your followers have been captivated with your posts and actually engaged with them, they’ll begin to look forward to more interesting content from you.
Create visual posts that invite responses. Then engage with your followers in the comment section. Opinion posts and polls such as This or That questions and themed quizzes can be an excellent way to elicit this kind of loyalty-building response. You can do this on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. These posts, if designed well, have the tendency to get shared a lot. Make sure to add your logo and other branding elements to them – your brand should follow your content everywhere.
Get Started Today
Social media marketing can seem intimidating because of all the thought, time and effort it requires from your already limited resources but if you learn to crack it, it can be your best friend. You have the right audience for your business in front of you. All you need to do is reach out to them. – That becomes simple (and affordable!) if you find yourself the right software. Software to create, brand and distribute your content. With the suggestions and solutions given above, it’s time to get ready for quick and brilliant social media success! Start winning on social media today!
