Chizhov’s studio tells how to optimize promotion in social networks, calculate the numbers correctly and stop wasting your budget.
Chizhov Studio’s portfolio includes more than 260 projects. And working on the next audit and creating the next strategy, every time we understand that a large share of SMM budgets just goes down the drain. For a small business, this is like death. And for a large one, it turns into a loss of tens of millions of rubles. And most often we meet the same problems.
In this article, we will tell you how to optimize your social media promotion and get the best result for the same cost.
Implement a strategic approach to social media promotion
Social media is not magic outside of Hogwarts that turns random people into customers in an inexplicable way. This is just one of the Internet marketing tools: we set goals – we define the scope of tasks – we get the result.
Social networks can solve five business problems:
- make potential customers aware of the company,
- build brand trust
- help with the choice
- help with decision making
- sell.
We call the sequence of their solution “Strategy 3P”: Attract – Warm up – Sell.
Ineffective approach
Create an account, launch one advertising post for a wide audience, post cats, congratulate subscribers on holidays and wish good morning.
Or vice versa, publish only selling posts, not paying attention to warming up.
How to optimize
Work according to a clear plan:
- Analyze the current state of affairs, identify the weak and strong points of your strategy.
- Conduct a competitive analysis: identify the main competitors, study their approach to content: what offers they catch the audience on, what advertising funnels they use, what are their strengths and weaknesses.
- Analyze the target audience of the business, develop customer portraits.
- Develop a new strategy that includes the stages of attraction, warm-up and sale. It is important to take into account the conclusions drawn in the previous stages.
- Develop advertising funnels for different audience segments.
- Develop a content strategy that shows what content will be used to solve business problems.
- Select the metrics by which the effectiveness of the strategy will be analyzed.
- Rank audiences using the Hunt Ladder method
- An effective social media strategy is always based on the Hunt Ladder.
The bottom line is that social media users are at different stages of being ready to buy. To sell, you need to consistently lead them through the stages, and not sell them head-on.
Suppose we sell budget sofas. Our main audience is people from 18 to 45 years old, with an average income and below average from the cities where our stores are represented.
Ineffective approach
Unroll ads to all audiences with an offer to sign up for a free lesson.
How to optimize
Gather audiences, rank them according to their readiness to buy into cold, warm and hot, and develop separate funnels and offers for each segment.
For example,
Hot audience (4th stage) is ready to buy. It needs to be caught with promotions and special offers.
Warm audiences (stage 3) are interested in the product, but don’t know much about our offer yet. Both selling posts and offers leading to further warming up can work on them. For example, subscribe to a newsletter or get useful content on a topic.
Cold audiences (stage 1-2) are not yet ready to buy. They need to be interested in contests and useful content. The goal is to subscribe to the community for further warming up. Selling to these audiences is pointless.
What is the difference
For example, let’s look at the situation. All figures are conditional and show only the general principle of the warm-up strategy.
So, we have an audience of 100,000 users who match their socio-demographic characteristics (gender, age, geo, etc.). Theoretically, they can become our clients. In practice, we do not know at what stage of readiness to purchase each user is and how to work with him correctly.
Option 1. The goal is to sell the sofa
We show people a selling post with a promotion for sofas. It will only hook people who are on the 3rd and 4th rungs of the Hunt Ladder. As a rule, this is a very small part of the cold audience – about 1% of the coverage – 1000 people will click on the ad.
The average conversion of a click into an application in furniture SMM is 10%. Approximately 100 people out of 1000 will write to direct, go to the site or perform another targeted action that shows interest in buying.
The average conversion from an application to a sale for cold audiences is 1-3%. That is, a maximum of 3 people out of 100,000 coverage will actually buy a sofa. No more than the level of statistical error.
Option 2. The goal is to subscribe to the newsletter or account
We offer users a bonus that does not require them to pay money right now: for example, subscribe to a newsletter with discounts and useful content, receive an e-book about interior design in small apartments, or take part in a small prize draw.
In niches associated with the sale of budget goods of the mass segment, people are more willing to perform a targeted action that does not require paying money. Approximately 2-3 thousand users will look at the post and about 500 of them will subscribe to the account or newsletter. The average conversion of a click into an application is about the same as above – 10%. Approximately 50 people will apply.
And here’s the “magic”: the conversion of an application to a sale for warm and hot audiences is 5-10 times higher than for cold ones. With the same coverage of 100,000 people, we will already get 5-10 sales of sofas.
But once again we repeat: these figures are conditional. Their task is only to show the difference between warming up and its absence. In reality, sales are growing gradually. The process of attracting new subscribers and warming up existing ones is ongoing. In the first months, the difference will be insignificant, then there is a cumulative effect and sales increase steadily.
Get it right with content marketing
Content is one of the key elements of effective promotion in social networks. People come to social networks primarily for content.
Ineffective approach
Publish random content in the community: not having a sales funnel and not correlating it with specific business tasks.
How to optimize
Determine the range of tasks that we will solve with the help of content, and release only content corresponding to them.
- Task: how potential customers find out about the company
- There are two ways to convey your message to a new audience on social networks: launch targeted advertising or place ads with bloggers and in thematic communities.
- To solve this problem, you need a content funnel designed taking into account the sales funnel and promotion strategy.
- Objective: to build trust in the brand
- The user clicked on an advertisement for our furniture store – what’s next.
To interest him and keep him on the page:
- each design element should say: here you can buy;
- the content in the account should answer questions like how to buy, what to buy, why buy, why buy this, why buy here.
- A professionally designed account always converts better than a casually designed account without attention to the audience.
Detailed information in the header, a unified design style, well-chosen blocks of relevant stories and high-quality product images form trust in the brand
Task: help with the choice
The user is interested in buying, visually assessed the account, subscribed, but did not immediately buy – what’s next.
Imagine that you are selling a sofa in the showroom of a furniture store in a mall. People rarely immediately run to the checkout shouting “Gimme two!” First you need to look around, study the range, prices, sizes.
There is no showroom on social networks, so content will help.