With all these techniques, you’ll be able to start generating something of a following. But you can also help this along with the right advertising campaign. And on social media, this is often going to mean paying for PPC (Pay Per Click) or sponsored posts. Either way, you can get more people to see your content but you’ll be paying in order to do this.
Thus things get a little more complicated.
Is it worthwhile? Potentially yes but only if your business is prepared. Spending money on advertisement should always be an investment which means you should always make more money as a result of that initial spend. To calculate whether that is in fact the case though, you need to be able to work out what the ‘Customer Lifetime Value’ is for your brand.
How many of your leads become customers? How much money do you make from each sale? How many of your customers buy more than one item? And with all that in mind, how much is each customer worth to you?
Knowing this, you can then decide how much you are willing to pay per click for someone to see your content.
But the great thing about social media advertising and PPC is that it allows you to see metrics, to more precisely target your adverts and even to set up ‘CPA’ (Cost Per Action), in which case you will only have to pay if – for instance – someone actually ‘likes’ your Facebook page. This way, you are getting a lot more for your money and can potentially increase your profits.
It takes a lot of tweaking and work but if you get it right, this can be a very good investment and way to grow your following.
Work With Partners and Influencers
Another way to get a leg up in the world of social media marketing is to work with partners and influencer marketers.
This is something you’ll often see on YouTube. Here, one vlogger might feature a guest on their channel, who will be a presenter from a similar channel. They’ll then return the favor and this way, audiences of both channels get a taste of what the other creator is like and some may start following them.
By sharing their followers this way, two content creators can help each other out and grow their channel. And failing that, you can always just pay for an influencer – someone with a massive following – to give you a shout-out.
Either way, this can be a great way to get a big sudden boost to your followers and a spike in traffic. But the key to success is not to be too ambitious to start with and to instead build your way up gradually.
Don’t immediately go after the biggest name in your niche – they get a lot of offers and probably don’t have the time to answer you. Instead, start with someone at a similar level to you who has the same amount to gain as you do. You can then help each other out and the boost in followers you both receive will often then be enough to mean you can approach an even bigger name next time!
Inherent in this is not to see other people in your niche as a threat but rather as colleagues. Apart from anything else, demonstrating association with them will help to give your channel more credibility and that in turn will mean others take you more seriously, more quickly.