The game in social media is attention. It’s one of the rarest commodities today. That’s because people are now bombarded with tens of thousands of messages on a daily basis. Promotions and ads drown in the wave of information available today. How then do we get people to notice our promotions?
Promoting your business on social media is both easy and hard. It’s easy because anyone can do it with little to no cost. But it’s also hard because doing it right entails a good strategy and great content. Your promotional pieces need to have a specific characteristic. They need to meet certain criteria. Do that, and your audience will notice you.
I’d like to share with you five characteristics of a great social media promotions. Ads like these promise to grab the attention of an audience.
It comes after something of value
In the book “Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook” Gary Vaynerchuk introduces the concept of a jab. A jab is a piece of free content given to people made available before you make an ask. Give promotional content (right hooks) only when you’ve given value. Wour promotion is more likely to turn into a subscription, sale or following if you give value first.
It has a catchy one liner
In email marketing, one of the biggest factors to a winning promotion is the headline. It’s no different with social media. Great promotions communicate a headline that catches the attention right away. It’s either the headline is funny, controversial, emotionally-moving, shocking or even depressing.
It’s relevant
Great promotions go with the current events. Promoting a Christmas product at the start of Spring is always a bad idea. Why? Because people want relevance. When our content is relevant, it’s relatable and people love to relate to brands. Talk about Super Bowl on Super bowl. Talk to entrepreneurs about business tactics. Talk about home and parenting topics to stay at home moms. Be relevant, and people will notice you.
It points people to the right direction
Catching people’s attention won’t matter if you’re not going to point them the right direction. A proper promotion should give people the proper information to reach you. That might be a phone number, an address or a URL. This sounds pretty second nature, but there are tons of ads out there that don’t do this.
It has one clear call to action
Too many times, I’ve seen ads with multiple calls to action. Call us, like us on Facebook, visit our shop, check out our latest product, give us your email. All the possible things we want customers to do, we ask them to do at once. It’s not going to happen. When promoting, give one clear call to action that’s easy to do and simple to follow up on.