How to Use Social Media to Increase Sales in 7 Easy Steps

One of the most effective ways to drive improved growth for your business is to learn how to use social media to increase sales online.

Due to its sheer size, a lot of businesses both small and medium sized are already using the social media to drive improved sales for their business.

In fact, according to a survey in 2022, 54 percent of social media marketers believe the social media has positively impacted their company’s revenues and sales.

So, if you’re not experiencing this with your own business then you’re actually missing out. But you shouldn’t.

That’s why, in this tutorial, I’m going to show you how to regain lost grounds and start using social media to increase sales for your business, in the following paragraphs;

Choose the Best Platform

With over 4 billion monthly users, the social media is undoubtedly one of the largest market for businesses of all kinds.

But, one of the major challenge with this medium is that from Facebook to LinkedIn and Twitter, there’s a lot of social media platforms out there, serving the needs of specific audiences.

As a business, to key into this multi billion market, you don’t have to be on all social media platforms. On the contrary, you must be able to filter out and identify the best social media platform you can use to achieve your goal.

This is one of the first steps you must take, if you plan to successfully use the social media to increase sales.

To get started on this step, you’ll want to understand your business clearly, identify the kind of audience you plan to attract to the business.

After this, go ahead and outline the top platforms frequented by your preferred audience, based on your audience’s data and then create your social media page based on that platform.

With this in place, you’ve sorted out the first step to make more sales with social media.

Set Clear Business Goals

To really use social media to increase sales for your business, you have to identify and set your business goals clearly.

Doing this gives you access to the needed data you’ll use to create your social media content strategy as well as a marketing plan.

So right now, head over to your drawing board and find out the goals you want to achieve with your business over a set period.

After you’re able to sort this, use this data to create your social media goals and the steps you plan to use to achieve the goals.

For example your overall business goal could be to drive xyz number of sales over 6 months.

As parts of your strategies to achieve this, your goals you will identify the total number of these sales you plan to achieve using the social media and the steps you plan to do that.

TIP: At this stage, you will have to also develop a business plan that will lead to achieving this goal.

The plan could be anything from a posting calendar to the kind of post, post ideas and number of times you plan to post on a monthly, weekly or daily basis.

Get Your Social Media Strategy

Now that you’ve sorted out your business goals, your next step to use social media to increase sales is to create a social media strategy.

A lot of gurus might tell you there’s no need to create a social media strategy.

But practically, no serious entrepreneur goes into social media marketing without getting in place a proper strategy because your social media strategy plays a crucial role in delivering your outcomes.

For example, it’ll outline your goals, how you plan to achieve them realistically, the kind of content you aught to post, when to post them and strategies to promote them.

Getting all this together is definitely going to be one deal breaker that’ll transform your results.

So, you want to get it in place a realistic social media strategy, alongside a posting calendar, schedule and preferred content types.

Create Valuable Content Consistently

Social media thrives on content. From Tiktok to Instagram, the algorithm favor fresh and valuable content.

So, one of the steps you’ll take to really use social media to increase sales will be to create valuable content for your audience.

Remember, a valuable content has to be entertaining, informational, educational or any piece of content created purposefully for the purpose of adding value to the users.

Before creating your content, try to understand the kind of content that matters to your audience.

Although in some cases, your preferred Platform is going to affect your content choice but there are platforms that needs a mixture of content.

So you still have to find out what your audience prefer, be it short video, images with caption, audio or text content.

You can do this, by checking out other competing brands like yours. Also, using feedback from engagement with your content, you can get a good idea about content that matters to your audience.

TIP: As much as possible, ensure you post valuable content. Also, be sure to post quality content consistently as this will increase your visibility, drive expanded reach as well as indicate your seriousness as a brand.

Engage your Audience

Social media is beyond sharing posts and making sales. It’s a place to socialize, engage with your audience and also gather new fans.

So beyond making sales, you have to go beyond to build a robust relationship with your audience on your preferred social media platforms.

Also, considering that one of the easiest ways to use social media to increase sales is to evolve a brand that is trustworthy and reliable, you have to invest in building real time relationships with real humans on the social media platforms.

This will demand you learn how to listen, communicate and build engagement with your audience either by liking their posts, replying to their comments and inquiries on your posts, or using other social media strategies to connect with them at a personal level.

Engaging with your audience will also include sharing the kind of posts that’ll drive engagement, including other perception boosting content like testimonials, reviews, etc.

Leverage Advertising

One of the not so popular ways to use social media to increase sales is to leverage advertising.

Although a lot of businesses are using this strategy, most other small businesses are yet to get it right with social media advertising.

When done well, social media advertising can in addition to your organic effort improve visibility as well as drive sales for your business online.

Where you can’t set up social media advertising correctly, reach out to our team to get this sorted for you.

Measure & Analyze

To get the most out of your social media marketing effort, do not stick to one plan and leave everything to chance.

At intervals measure and analyze your results to see better understand your outcomes. This is the right way to use social media to increase sales.

Without measuring your outcomes, you may not understand the areas you’re doing well at or the ones you need some improvements on.

Make an effort to measure and analyze your strategies alongside your outcomes. Doing this will give you further insight that will drive better results for your marketing.

Conclusion

You have all it takes to use social media to increase sales for your small business using these strategies because they have been successfully used by other businesses like yours.

But one thing you have to keep in mind is that getting sales successfully from the social media is not a quick fix. It’ll require effort, consistency and discipline.

To get a hang around things you might need a team of social media management professionals to work with in achieving your goals. And you can reach out to us here.

Where you need a social media expert to review your social media strategy and guide you on the steps forward, you can also reach out to us here.

Now it’s your turn! What’s your biggest challenges when it comes to using social media to increase sales for small businesses? Drop your comments below.