Are you tired of barely making ends meet with your social media efforts? It’s time to step up your game and learn how to make more money with these 7 easy steps. Whether you’re an influencer, business owner, or just looking to monetize your online presence, these tips will help you maximize your earning potential and turn your social media into a cash cow.
Make More Money with Social Media
It’s easy to think of social media as something fun and exciting to do for your business that will drive customers in the door. Unfortunately, social media marketing isn’t always sunshine and rainbows. Your social media is an investment in your business. You have to treat it like an investment into your business’s future in order to be successful.
All successful social media business accounts have a few things in common. They are great at capturing their audience’s attention with eye-catching graphics, catchy headlines, and a good hook in the caption. Once they have it, they know how to connect with their customers, build trust, and establish authority in their niche.
Finally, they know how to set up sales funnels, use ads effectively, and sell without being salesy. All of these add up to the perfect formula for social media success for a business.
The following tips will help you make more money with social media by replicating the steps that successful businesses use on social media. Although each could be its own post, this is the gist of how to make social media work for your small business.
Step 1: Increase Brand Visibility and Awareness
Branding
Before you work on establishing brand visibility and awareness, you need to create a simple branding kit in order for you brand’s images, voice, and overall image to be cohesive across all platforms. This is important because it establishes credibility, creates a recognizable image that people will recognize, and looks professional.
Think about it. When you hear names like McDonald’s, Nike, or Microsoft, there are certain fonts, logos, colors, and images that pop into your head. You also may have an emotion or memories tied up with those brands. That’s what makes the difference between a cute design and branding. You have to be consistent and unique enough to stand out in a crowd.
Eye-Catching and Consistent Graphics
Once you have your brand identity pulled together and all of the necessary components, use those components in the graphics on all of your social media platforms. You can use Photoshop if you have a design background and a subscription, or GIMP and Inkscape, which are free, open-source platforms.
Or you can use apps like Picsart, Visme, or Canva if you don’t have a design background. Personally, I use Canva for almost all of my designs, business documents, and social media graphics. I’ve used it for many years now and am a Canva Pro member. If you would like to sign up for a free trial of Canva Pro, you can click my affiliate link here.
If you don’t want to use the affiliate link, I understand. I still highly recommend that you check them out. I used their free membership for years before going pro and loved it!
Posting Content
When you post your content, it should capture your audience’s attention. Spend some time writing a catchy headline with power words. Then write a compelling hook for your first line of copy to draw them in. They say that the purpose of each sentence of your copy after the first should be to keep the reader reading.
Get to the point, break up your paragraphs and sentences to make them easy to read, and use bullet lists. The longer the post is, the less likely it is that your audience will read all of it, so get what you need to say out in the first lines of copy.
Be consistent with your posting so that your audience knows when to expect your posts and at what time of day. That makes it easier for your target audience to find your content and become aware of and recognize your brand.
Step 2: Connect with Your Target Audience
Connecting with your audience is one of the most misunderstood parts of social media marketing and this is where I have struggled in the past. It’s easy to post to social media and move on to other things, but if you’re not checking in and engaging with comments on your posts, replying to messages in your DMs, or engaging with the posts of others, you can’t succeed.
Engagement and the Algorithm
Every social media platform is a business that needs to make money to survive. They will always do what is in their best interests to ensure that they are getting paid and that you’re seeing content that will make you return again and again. They want it to be addictive.
That’s where algorithms come in. These are formulas that determine the content that you see in different parts of a platform. Engagement is often a huge part of their equation when it comes to choosing whether or not people should see your content. If your followers are really engaging with a post of yours, they’ll push it out to followers of your followers, then out to their followers, and so on.
Engagement tells them that the content is good and that people are responding to it, so it’s good for their business to share it. But, engagement goes both ways. The algorithm also takes a look at who posted that content, the type of content they post, how frequently they post, and how engaged they are on the platform.
If someone is very active, it’s much more likely that the algorithm with push out the content to a larger audience. It’s that simple.
Another factor is that the algorithm looks at accounts that have engaged with you in the past. So, if you comment on someone’s post and they reply, the algorithm is more likely to show your content to them in the future. So, don’t ghost after you post. Engaging with others is more important than you may realize.
Storytelling and Relatable Content
People connect more with you and your brand if you share your story. That includes the struggles, your wins, the lessons you learned, and what you value. When you tell your brand’s story through your content, you build a connection with your audience. They become invested in your story and want to encourage and support you.
These people are the ones who become die-hard fans and will support you through thick and thin. They’ll check up on you if you don’t post for a while and make sure that you’re okay. They become invested in you and your brand through content they can relate to.
You need to be open and relatable in order to be likable. Set boundaries about what you are and are not willing to share and be open to talking about certain parts of your life and business. You don’t have to share everything to be a relatable figure. Keep it within your comfort levels, and stand firm.
Step 3: Use Stories and Live Features
Speaking of building connections, stories and live streams make it easier to build a direct connection with your audience. These are perfect spots to share behind-the-scenes content, your life, and engage your followers. It’s a more intimate setting with a much smaller group of your followers, but this is where your biggest fans will go.
Authenticity
Stories and live streaming are great places to show your authentic self. You know…the person you are when you’re away from the office. Your audience wants to know more about you, like what your values are, if you have hobbies, and what you do on an average workday.
Now, more than ever, authenticity matters. Your target audience wants to know who they’re following, what they represent, and if they can be trusted. If you have followed the recent drama of mascara-gate (look it up, if you don’t know what it is), you know that truth in advertising affects your credibility and your career.
That’s why it’s so important to be yourself, to be honest, and try to be transparent. If you make a mistake and people find out you weren’t authentic about one thing, it will bring everything else into question. Wouldn’t you want to know more about a business or person you’re investing your time or money on? I know I do.
Expand Your Reach
Since stories and live video are features that are short-term, they are boosted out to your audience as soon as they become available. This means that your reach will be greater. The more people that see your content, the better. Be sure to use these opportunities to engage with your followers to get the most out of it.
Although stories and live streams are temporary, they can have a lasting impact on how your audience feels about you. This means that over time, your reach will expand beyond those followers and possibly to their followers or others who follow accounts like yours.
Step 4: Build Authority and Trust
Before you can make more money with social media, you have to put in the work to establish yourself as an authority in your niche. This is one of the ways that you build trust on social media and it can be the most challenging when you’re starting out.
Authority essentially means that you are considered an expert in your field. You can show your expertise through your content, but as we know, that can be written by AI. So, building authority in other ways is crucial to ensuring your social media marketing pays off.
Collaborations
One way to establish authority is by collaborating with others in your niche or a related niche. If one expert recognizes you as an expert, their audience will be willing to accept you as an expert too.
You don’t have to collaborate with other content creators. You can collaborate with brands that value your expertise in their products or services. If a reputable brand is willing to say you are the expert, your target audience will be more willing to accept that as well.
Interviews, Podcasts, and Q&As
You can also build authority through interviews, podcast appearances, and Q&As. With these sorts of media, your knowledge is tested and you have to prove that you know what you’re talking about. Live interviews and Q&As are particularly useful for building authority because there’s no chance for editing.
Editing and cutting scenes are so common these days that no one trusts what they’re seeing. Live video has a much better shot of standing up to credibility tests.
Step 5: Promote Your Business Effectively
Whether you are using organic (aka free) marketing techniques or you are paying for ads, you need to know how to promote your business effectively. There’s a delicate balance between promoting your brand or product and being too salesy or “pushy.” If you follow the steps above, you will already be ahead of the game and on the right track to doing this right.
The 80/20 Rule
In marketing, we have a rule that’s called the 80/20 rule. This rule states that 80% of the time you should be posting valuable content. The other 20% of the time your posts should be promotional in nature. Now, when I say promotional, I am talking about new blog posts, email lists and opt-in freebies, and the promotion of products and services.
So many businesses break this rule. They don’t share anything of value with their target audience but only talk about their products or services post after post. Instead, post content that has some form of value to your customer. For example, if you’re a skincare company, share skin care tips, morning routines, information about types of treatments, etc on your socials.
Your social media is not a store, so don’t treat it like one. And you might be wondering; Why should you do that if your purpose is to make more money with social media? People are there to learn, have fun, be social, and connect with your brand. Social media is about the social aspect of your brand, so keep promotion to 20% and you should do fine.
Step 6: Boost Brand Awareness and Sales with Ads
There are two ways you can use ads to make more money with social media. You can increase brand awareness by pushing a well-performing post out to a larger audience or you can create ads for your product or services. With organic social media marketing, your reach is limited, but with ads, you can target specific audiences that may have never heard of your brand but are your perfect client or customer.
Paid Advertising vs Organic Marketing
With organic marketing, you are at the mercy of the social media platform’s algorithm. They will only show your content to your followers and maybe push it out to a larger audience if it’s popular with yours and there’s a benefit for them to do so. With ads, that isn’t the case. Ads allow you to specify who you want to see your ads.
For example, your target audience might be women in their 30s that follow personal finance and personal growth topics. You can define this demographic as your target audience for your ad. That way, when the ad is shown, you know that it is being shown to the right people.
Some platforms, like Facebook, make it difficult to grow on the platform unless you pay for ads. That means that if you choose a platform that can be difficult to be seen on, ads may be your best bet for both growth and sales. Fortunately, you can specify the purpose of the ad and you will find that ads for growth are less expensive than promotional ones.
Just remember, not all ads will give you the results you want. The results from your ads are based on the quality of the content in the ad and how well your content performs with that new audience. If your ads don’t work, then you most likely need to work on your content or the target audience for your ads. These are the most common problems people face with they start using paid advertising.
Step 7: Create Effective Sales Funnels
Your social media accounts and pages should be part of a sales system for your business. That means that every post should be part of a sales funnel. Whether the content is intended to grow your following or nurture your audience, it needs to lead to a more narrowed part of the funnel.
Sales Funnels
Sales funnels are going to look different for every business. For example, a toy company could have the opening of the funnel be a product demonstration, ad, or word of mouth. This would be the portion of the funnel where the target audience becomes aware of your brand or product.
After that, maybe they sign up for your email list to receive coupons or they may have to see the ad or demonstration several times before they express interest in the product. Then, a sale might be all the incentive they need to convert them into a paying customer.
With social media marketing, you might see a funnel that looks more like:
Brand Awareness>Follower> Active and Engaged Follower>Email List Subscriber> Email>Sale>Converted
It’s important to plan what your sales systems are going to look like and to start out with a content strategy to take you from Point A (Awareness) to Point B (Conversion). If you do this early in your social media marketing journey, it will save you a lot of time and help you make more money with social media, much earlier than you would have otherwise.
Make More Money with Social Media and Watch Your Business Grow
These strategies will effectively increase your sales if done correctly. Be sure to do your homework and have a firm understanding of who your target audience is, what their pain points are, and you your product or services solves them before you begin. Then use these steps to set your business up for success on social media.
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