Extending your reach to maximize your audience is probably the most important focus area for your development as a social media promoter.  Pursuing a wider audience is the foundation of what it means to be an online marketer, and with a wider audience exposure, more people will see your brand, your engagement metrics will show results over time, and you will be able to sell your products and services to a larger and more diverse audience.

Core Strategies

This article addresses core strategies for extending your reach and how they can impact your online presence, including bringing growth to your customer base.  A larger reach means more potential customers, and draws new customers to your universe.  With a wider reach, you are more likely to see an increase in engagement metrics such as likes, comments, shares, and clicks. More people interacting with your content can lead to a more vibrant and active online community, thereby increasing your brand awareness among a larger audience.

The underlying and undeniable truth to all of this is, having a large audience also gives you greater credibility.  A brand that reaches a substantial number of people gives a sense of confidence among potential customers, and come across as authoritative. When others see that your content is being widely shared and engaged with, they’re more likely to view your brand as trustworthy and reputable.  At the same time, you also increase your chances of experiencing the ever-elusive viral post.  While a posting that goes viral is generally not something to plan for, for it to be in the frame of possibility, it helps to know your audience, have a strong message that hits a chord, and to have a large audience to begin with.  A viral posting for a small-time blogger is just another article for someone with a large and well-cultivated audience.

To achieve a successful extended reach in your social media promotional campaign, it’s important to develop engaging and shareable content, utilize appropriate hashtags and keywords, collaborate with influencers, run targeted advertisements, and actively engage with your audience across various platforms. Keep in mind that while extending your reach is important, maintaining the quality and authenticity of your content should always be a priority.

Action Items

With that as the basis, there are a few key actions items that must be on your activity list on a regular basis to achieve audience and engagement growth over time.

• Use Relevant Hashtags – Research your market and commonly used hashtags.  This step could be rated as the easiest step with the largest benefit for the amount of time it takes to simply add some hashtags.  There will be other articles in the future on the effective use of hashtags.  Get the basics done first, by incorporating popular and relevant hashtags in your posts.  The benefit of this simple step is that hashtags will increase the discoverability of your content by making it visible to users who have similar and relevant interests. 
• Collaborate with Influencers – As the next step in your development, and with a growing base of followers which would make you attractive to another early-stage social media promoter, find someone with a similar area of interest – not necessarily the same, but ideally someone whose products/services/blogging topics complement and are tangentially relevant to yours.  Partner with influencers in your industry who have a substantial following, and keep getting the word out about your online presence. 
• Post Consistently – Maintaining a consistent posting schedule is absolutely critical, as a major metric of nearly all online algorithms is the frequency of posting, as an indicator of the quality and reliability of you and your organization as a source of good content.  Regular posts keep your audience engaged and increase the likelihood of your content being seen by a larger number of users.
• Optimize Content for Each Platform – Customize your content for each social media platform. Tailor the format, visuals, and messaging to suit the preferences of the specific platform’s users.
• Use Eye-Catching Visuals – Visual content tends to attract more attention. Use high-quality images, videos, and graphics to make your posts stand out in users’ feeds.
• Leverage User-Generated Content (UGC) – Encourage your followers to create and share content related to your brand. Reposting UGC not only showcases user loyalty but also extends your content’s reach to the creator’s followers.
• Engage with Your Audience – Respond to comments, messages, and mentions promptly. Engaging with your audience encourages more interactions and can lead to higher visibility through shares and word-of-mouth.
• Run Paid Social Media Ads – Invest in paid advertising to reach a broader audience. Social media platforms offer targeting options to ensure your content reaches users who match your target demographics.
• Host Contests and Giveaways – Organize contests or giveaways that require participants to engage with your content (like, share, comment). This not only boosts engagement but also exposes your campaign to new audiences as participants share with their followers.
• Share Timely and Trending Content – Stay updated with current events, trends, and holidays. Creating content that’s relevant to trending topics can help your posts gain traction and visibility.  Craft content that is informative, entertaining, or emotional enough for users to want to share it with their networks.
• Leverage Stories and Live Streaming – Stories and live streaming are temporary yet engaging formats. They can draw attention to your campaign by showing up prominently at the top of users’ feeds.
• Cross-Promote on Multiple Platforms – Share your campaign content across multiple social media platforms. Tailor the content for each platform to suit its unique features.
• Network and Engage with Peers – Engage with other brands, individuals, and organizations in your industry. Like and follow their posts, and make yourself part of that community, as a means of generating curiosity among other readers about your community. 
• Monitor Analytics and Adjust – Regularly review your analytics to identify which types of content and strategies are driving the most reach and impressions.

Improving reach and impressions takes time and consistent effort, and without time and effort put into continuously refining your messaging, then you risk repeating the same mistakes time and again. 

Jot down a list of bullet points for each of the strategies described above, what you intend to do, and specifically, how this strategy applies to your promotional efforts.  While the volume of tasks would feel overwhelming at the start, picking them away one tick-box at a time will yield positive results over time.  The other good impact is that before long, these activities will become second-nature.  It will be a part of your basic skill set as a digital marketer. 

Skills Development

With the basic skill set in place, you will be able to create more sophisticated strategies to support higher-value outcomes.  As your reach grows, along with the number of potential leads and customers increases, you will also be able to manage your campaign to more effectively increase conversion rates.  Having more data on successful messaging enables you to expand the diversity of your audience, and hone messaging to attract more nuanced segments.  This level of detail and complexity will be a key factor in building a competitive advantage against others who, up to now, have more experience than you have. 

Extending your reach can give you an edge over competitors who might not be as proactive in engaging with a larger audience.  Ultimately, a consistent cadence in reaching your audience will build recognition, which will improve your branding, and ultimately customer loyalty and their online advocacy will grow.  When you reach this point, you now have an audience of followers who effectively engage in your marketing efforts on your behalf, and you don’t have to pay them anything to do that!

For now, start with the basics, and keep doing that consistently over time. 

Analyzing the success of your social media campaign is a key step in increasing your audience over time.  It gives you the chance – and the information you need – to improve, enhance and refine your messaging.  Your audience is your best resource for knowing what worked well and what didn’t work well.  This gold mine of information is being given to you freely by your audience, and with a little sweat equity added to the data (ie., your own effort in pulling out lessons to be learned), you can effectively identifying areas for improvement in your promotional processes, and ultimately, to your overall objectives.

This article highlights some key metrics and methods you can use to help differentiate yourself and maximize your promotional time and effort.

Capture Basic Engagement Metrics

• The most basic way to begin is by tracking Likes, Shares, and Comments.  These metrics indicate how well your content resonated with your audience, with increasing importance for each.  Higher engagement suggests that your content is interesting and relevant.  Even if you get trolls (who can say some very unfortunate things), that can be seen as a hallmark of your success in reaching a wide audience of people you don’t know, or didn’t know before (because for sure, you don’t have any friends who would make nasty trolling comments!). 
• Click-Through Rate (CTR):   It’s not just about getting Likes, but also attracting people to your online world.  Measure the percentage of people who clicked on a link in your post. A higher CTR indicates that your content was compelling enough to drive traffic to your platform or commercial offer.  What is a typical CTR to expect?  Around 1 or 2%.  Spam email may get one-tenth of that.  Nonetheless, with an engaging campaign message and a focus on personalized attention to your audience, you can effectively increase these metrics and generate a small volume of high-value customers (more about this in future articles).

Focus on Reach and Impressions

• Your social media reach is the number of unique users who saw your content. It shows how effectively your content is being distributed to a broad audience – as opposed to how many individuals will click your content, which is conveyed by…
• Impressions, which is the total number of times your content was displayed. It gives you an idea of the overall exposure your campaign received.

Track a Steady Growth of Followers

• Monitor the growth in your social media followers. This metric is especially important if you are undertaking a planned social media campaign that may be coordinated across several different platforms or accounts. 
• Everyone aspires to the “viral posting” that gets distributed to millions of people.  If that happens, enjoy the great success, but consider it a bonus.  Keep the consistency going, because that is what pays off in the long run.
• Clicks to website is also key to measure how many users clicked through your social media to visit your website.  This information will be the basis for you to…

Monitor Conversions

• If your promotional goal is to drive specific actions (e.g., sign-ups, purchases), you will be able to track the percentage of users who completed the targeted action as a percentage of the CTR/impressions, giving you an indication of your messaging effectiveness.  This metric also forms the basis of more sophisticated analysis, and enables you to undertake A/B analysis (later in this article). 

Referral Traffic

• Where posting on social media may be a direct way to reach your audience, referrals will be crucial to helping you build that audience.  Website analytics tools (e.g., Google Analytics) will be needed to enable tracking of the amount of traffic coming from your social media channels.

Hashtag Performance

• Hashtags are an easy and effective way to extend your reach.  Track these as their own category.  Know your hashtags and those of your audience.  Test different ones to see their impact.  Hashtags with a large volume of users are not necessarily better.  Aim for the niche. 

Time and Day Analysis

• Analyze when your posts received the most engagement. This can help you optimize your posting schedule for future campaigns.  (Another upcoming topic:  how to determine a good time for posting)

Audience Demographics

• Understand the demographics of the users who engaged with your campaign.  Not to generalize or stereotype, but your content will attract people with similar traits and characteristics.  These may be demographic in nature, or otherwise, you can identify activity or personality-based characteristics.  Look for surprises, ie., people you didn’t expect would be interested in your content, then understand why they are interested.  This type of analysis can open up a whole new world of possibilities for content and monetizable offers, particularly if you have found an active niche, where you are filling a gap in demand that nobody else has found. 

Sentiment Analysis

• Understanding sentiment takes your audience analysis a step further than mere demographics.  While the data is essential, the art will be in generating a storyline about why your audience feels the way they do. 
• How to monitor sentiment itself is an art.  Analyze the types of comments that people make, and the way people say things.  It is a more subtle and subjective analysis, but over time and with enough data points, you will begin to recognize patterns in mood and feeling among your audience.  Have you hit a sore spot with the audience?  Is there a problem they are expressing, that you can solve?  Are they excited or motivated by what you say?  These questions are the nuts and bolts of a sentiment analysis, and understanding the answers can help to open new possibilities for marketing and monetization.

ROI (Return on Investment)

• Go as far as you can with free promotional strategies.  If you are tired of waiting for organic results, then lay down your credit card and give your account a boost.  If you had a budget for the campaign, measure the ROI by comparing the costs incurred with the benefits generated, such as increased sales, leads, or brand exposure.  No need for advanced math skills, just divide profit over cost. 

A/B Testing

• For advanced promotional strategies, A/B testing is absolutely essential.  How do you know what is the most effective message for your audience?  You don’t have to guess.  If you tried different approaches within your campaign, such as different ad creatives or post formats, compare their performance to determine which strategies were more effective.

Feedback and Surveys

• Sometimes there is no need to be clever.  Just ask!  Collect feedback from your audience through surveys or direct messages.  Look for qualitative data can provide insights into your audience’s sentiment and to understand how well your campaign was perceived.

By analyzing these metrics and methods, you can gain a comprehensive view of your social media campaign’s success and make informed decisions for future campaigns. The specific metrics you focus on should align with your campaign objectives.

Following last month’s article on keeping things simple for the beginning promoter, there are some “next level” (but still simple and easy) steps that can enhance a campaign’s effectiveness and improve your overall results in social media promotions. 

Here is the next level.

Plan a Content Calendar

• Create a content calendar to schedule when and what type of content will be posted. Write a list of headlines (or topics) that you will address.  Develop this content ahead of time, and keep to the posting schedule.  Consistency is key in maintaining audience engagement. Include a mix of promotional, educational, entertaining, and interactive content.
• This step is most crucial over the long run.  The game is not just about attracting likes and followers, but also moving ahead of your competitors.  They are already ahead of you (because you’re just starting out), but they have distractions in their lives as well.  If you are more consistent than they are, over time, YOU WILL WIN.

Add Hashtags

• Keep that content spreading.  Include relevant hashtags into your posts. This can help your content reach a wider audience and improve discoverability among a like-minded audience.

Engagement and Interaction

• Show a personal touch!  This step is relatively easy when your audience is small.  In fact, when your audience is small is the most effective time to get personal.  Therefore, you can set aside some time to respond to comments, messages, and mentions. Engage with your audience through conversations, polls, contests, and Q&A sessions. Building relationships is essential for a successful campaign.
• What if there is nobody to engage with?  Get out there and engage with other people on other platforms, and respond to other posts.  This activity will generate curiosity on the part of other people about what you’re doing.  If other people are following effective promotion practices (and many are), they will also want to engage with you.  Their engagement brings attention to your content.  The snowball begins to roll.

Visuals

• That’s just to say, keep things interesting.  Visual content tends to perform well on social media. Use eye-catching images, videos, and graphics that align with your brand and message.  Create your own, or you can subscribe to sites (some with a fee) from which you can use readily available images and videos.

Budget

• Is this a business or a hobby?  What business doesn’t have a marketing budget?  Determine how much you’re willing to spend on your campaign. This could include costs for content creation, advertising, influencer collaborations, and any other promotional activities.
• Depending on your budget, paid social media ads can effectively extend your campaign’s reach. Platforms often provide detailed targeting options to reach your desired audience.  This option can be effective after you have laid the groundwork with some existing content and a small audience already in hand.

Measure and Analyze

• Regularly monitor your campaign’s performance.  The easiest way is to count the views and the likes.  Comments that other people make, however, are probably the best indication of the level of engagement that you inspire.  To post a comment, someone has to think about what you’ve published and craft a response.  The brainpower they have engaged to do that indicates that you’ve touched them somehow (hopefully positively). 
• Ignore the trolls.  Even if you see the occasional troll – they can be mean and nasty – no need to get hung up on that.  Trolls don’t waste their time, they like to troll sites where they think others will see their comments.  A troll is an indication that someone sees you and your online presence as something worth trolling about.  You can see that as an amazing and satisfying milestone to have reached.  If you don’t get any trolls, you might worry and wonder why nobody is paying attention to you.
• Learn about your audience through analytics tools provided by the social media platforms or third-party tools. Track metrics such as engagement, reach, clicks, conversions, and more.

Adjust and Optimize

• Learn Learn Learn:  Based on the data collected, make necessary adjustments to your campaign strategy. This might involve tweaking content, targeting, or posting schedule to achieve better results.
• Always be learning!  At the end of your campaign, compare the results against your initial goals. Analyze what worked well and what could be improved, and apply these insights to future campaigns.

Even simple promotional efforts require some level of planning and attention to detail. Each step contributes to the overall success of your social media marketing efforts. 

If you think this plan of action is easy and simple enough, then wait, there’s more good news:  the more you do it, the easier it becomes.

Case Study – Overcoming Challenges of the Highly Competitive Nail Salon Market

Marketing a nail salon business comes with its own set of unique challenges due to the specific nature of the beauty and personal care industry.  As typically owner-operated businesses with a significant amount of hands-on (pardon the pun) delivery of service, salon owners are continually pulled in multiple directions between business finances, paying the bills, managing staff, ensuring high quality service delivery, managing customers and – most pertinently to this article – marketing.

Standing out from the competition is enormously difficult.  Not because a good quality service salon will not be appreciated by customers, but conveying a distinction of service is very difficult.  To further challenge the business, nail salons are not just about the output, ie., cutting and painting nails, but about the customer experience from the moment they walk through the door. 

Customers need a sense of identity, and a feeling of fulfillment that for the time they are in the salon, they can imagine themselves as being the boss, the leading community fashionista, and the center of attention.  If the salon an fulfil this sense of being for the customer, they will obtain another life-long customer.  Therefore, a successful salon marketing campaign must convey more than just the visual appeal of a high-quality result, but also create a positive association and brand identity.

More Challenges

But to get ahead with a successful marketing campaign, some additional challenges inherent in the nail salon business must be addressed.

• Keeping Up with Trends:  Beauty and fashion trends in nail art and designs can change rapidly. Staying up to date with the latest trends and the ability to offer them to clients must be a key theme for the marketing efforts. 
• Operational Challenges:  One typical difficulty for nail salons is the rapid turnover in employees.  That is, itself, an operational problem, but also for the marketing efforts – which require training on the part of the employee in charge – means that the owner must regularly carve out a piece of time during the day and week to keep up with consistent social media messaging. 
• Pricing:  Along with the heavy competition as mentioned above, determining the right pricing strategy that balances profitability with affordability for your target market can be challenging.  Promotional pricing must be favorable enough to bring in new customers, but not so good as to lose value/profitability from your existing (and well-paying) customer base.
• Marketing Budget:  Budgets are limited, and the social media marketing approach must reflect the need to get the maximum punch out of scarce resources.  Effective marketing can be a costly but necessary hurdle, therefore marketing efforts, particularly at the early stages of business growth, may be focused on owner-directed campaigns. 

Overcoming these challenges requires a systematic approach, aided by a well-conceived set of processes that will enable high growth potential with reduced manual input from the owner – ie., the key to success will be in appointing a capable employee to consistently develop and publish attractive content. 

How can a nail salon overcome these marketing challenges?

The objective is to implement effective strategies to improve your online presence, reach your target audience, and build a strong online reputation. Here are some steps you can take:

• First – Develop a Simple but Comprehensive Online Presence:  The easiest way to create an online presence is through the many social media platforms that are available.  Tell your customers, ask for their endorsement (positive reviews and likes) and begin to build a repertoire of positive consumer engagement.
• Second – Implement Enhancements:  Enhance your online content to showcases your nail salon’s services, pricing, and contact information, with routine postings of fashion trends, creative nail art designs, images of your salon, and feature happy employees. 
• Third – Further Leverage your Online Presence:  Continue enhancements to include promotions, regular updates on services, and a booking system that allows clients to schedule appointments online.  Track responsiveness of your audience, and encourage their responsiveness through intriguing articles and content, or through surveys and online chat sessions.

With a functional and value-added online presence, you will need to optimize for search engine results (SEO).  Use relevant keywords, meta tags, and descriptions in your articles and content.  Include your location and service highlights.  Claim and verify your Google My Business listing to improve your visibility in local search results.  Leverage your increased online activity from search using social media advertising to target local audiences and promote special offers.

When you see the results of these efforts, you can take your marketing to the next level by generating unique and high-value content of interest to a wider audience.  Consistently post a blog on your website to provide helpful tips, nail care advice, and beauty trends. Share links to these articles on social media.  Create engaging video content, such as tutorials or behind-the-scenes looks at your salon, and post them on platforms like YouTube and Instagram.

Continually encourage satisfied customers to leave positive reviews on platforms like Google, Yelp, and Facebook.  Respond promptly and professionally to both positive and negative reviews to show your commitment to customer satisfaction.

With a foundation of growing traffic both to your social media postings and ultimately to your physical location, you can begin implementing more advanced strategies to both continue to grow the business and also to monetize your online presence through the sale of related products. 

• Email Marketing:  Build an email list of clients and potential customers and send out regular newsletters with updates, promotions, and beauty tips.  Personalize email content to make clients feel valued and engage.
• Paid Advertising:  Invest in pay-per-click (PPC) advertising campaigns, such as Google Ads and Facebook Ads, to target specific demographics and geographic areas.  Monitor and enhance your ad campaigns based on their performance.Provide Loyalty Programs and Special Offers.
• Collaborate with Influencers (nationally-recognized influencers are very costly.  Keep it local, aligned to your current and prospective customers).

Consistency is Key.  Maintain a consistent online presence for both search engine effectiveness, as well as brand development in the minds of your customers.  Having a strong online presence requires an ongoing process.  It may take time to see significant results, but by consistently implementing these strategies and adapting to changes in the digital landscape, your nail salon can overcome online marketing challenges and attract more customers.

While there are some operational and inherent business challenges mentioned above, the good news for nail salon owners is that when it comes to online marketing, the business itself offers some distinct advantages.  Nail care is inherently a visual activity, which aligns perfectly to the most effective tactics for online posting. 

• Visual Appeal:  Nail salons offer visually appealing services, such as nail art and manicures, which can easily be captured in photos and videos. This visual content is highly shareable on social media platforms, making it easier to showcase your work and attract attention.
• Passionate Customers:  Nail care and beauty enthusiasts are often passionate about their self-care routines. They are more likely to engage with your salon on social media, leave reviews, and refer friends and family.
• Trends:  The nail care sector frequently experiences trends in nail art, colors, and designs. Staying up-to-date with these trends and incorporating them into your marketing can generate buzz and excitement around your salon, and is always a source of refreshing content.
• Customer Loyalty:  Salon clients often develop long-term relationships with the owner and staff at their preferred location.  This means that customer complains on social media are limited.  Building strong customer loyalty can result in repeat business, referrals, and positive word-of-mouth marketing.
• Local Focus:  You are not competing against large companies (national brand-name chains aside).  Your clientele is local, which allows for focused and targeted marketing efforts. You can concentrate on local SEO, community engagement, and partnerships with neighboring businesses.
• Affordable Promotions:  Offering promotions, such as discounts or package deals, is a common marketing strategy in the beauty industry.  Therefore, there is already a general expectation on the part of customers that promotions will be made available, so they are incentivized to engage with your social media presence to capture these promotional opportunities.
• Potential for Niche Marketing:  You can specialize in specific nail services or themes, such as eco-friendly nail care, nail art for special occasions, or unique nail designs.  Your growing social media presence complements the offering of niche services. 

Success in marketing any business, including a nail salon, requires a well-thought-out strategy, consistent effort, and a strong focus on customer satisfaction.  The aforementioned approaches can be implemented with a few simple steps.  The separation between you and your competition will come with the rigorous and consistent application of these strategies.

Companies are seeking solutions for social media within the context of movement restriction orders. There are some amazing learnings that are underway, showing the power of social media marketing even in difficult times. This post will be updated as results are further analyzed.