Social media is at the forefront of digital marketing these days, with over 53% of the world’s population owning a smartphone and people spending hours a day browsing Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. Until recently, most people were unaware that most posts were advertisements. The majority of what you see on social media is some form of sponsored post or promotion, inviting audiences to try out the latest products. 57% of consumers will follow a brand account to learn more about their products and services! You may be accustomed to your typical shampoo and clothing ads on social media, but have you ever seen one for watersports?
That’s right; we’re here to show you that even a niche business such as our own at Watersports.Guru Worldwide, relies upon the powers of social media to help increase sales and online foot traffic to businesses. Gone are the days of seeking out information on websites, and welcome to the aesthetic days of becoming obsessed with the look and feel of a product. Building an effective social media plan may seem daunting at first, but we’re here to show you how you can best advertise your business by keeping up with the current trends.
Increasing Brand Awareness
- Depending on where people live, take the UK as an example; they may not think to follow or engage with a watersports account, perhaps believing that the UK waters are too cold for fun. As a business, it is your job to grab your customers’ attention to change this perspective. You must visually show them how epic watersports in the UK can be and how your business can provide them with this experience. Once you have an idea of brand awareness, you can start changing your content and personalising it to reflect your business message.
Drive traffic to your website
So you already know that you need to grab your audience’s attention and keep them engaged to increase brand awareness. If you successfully have captured someone’s attention, they should want to know more by heading to your website. Ensure there’s an easy link and a call to action that directs them to your webpage. A great way of generating online traffic is to share blog posts to your social media account with happy, helpful and snappy headings – this should drive people to your page and invite them to keep reading.
Make clear how to book and availability.
For a business such as ourselves, we want to encourage people to check out the fun and entertaining clips and pics of people having the time of their lives out on the water. This should make people want to book in for their days out, having your bookings page linked to your listing on Watersports.Guru is a great way to direct people straight to your booking page. Another good tip is to set up your social media business pages with a booking option, increasing the chances of people booking on the spur of the moment.
Ensuring that all your information is set out clearly and aesthetically pleasing is an essential part of keeping people engaged with your website or social media page. Since websites are something that we use every day, we tend to have high standards for the appearance and functionality of a website. Don’t make people hunt for information on your website; the information needs to be at viewers’ fingertips. Sadly, thanks to social media, our attention spans have diminished significantly, meaning that we have less patience when figuring out how to book something. Keeping people focussed and engaged is essential when it comes to booking an activity – otherwise, they may be put off and seek out competitors’ websites instead.
Promote package deals and offers
We all love a deal, and ensuring these deals gain traction is essential to ensuring your business sales increase. Instead of offering a price per lesson, why not offer a set of 6 lessons for a slightly cheaper rate? Making watersports as accessible to everyone as possible is one of our main goals, and we love to promote watersports as the ultimate day out for people of all ages.
Encourage customers to share their experiences.
Having a location or business page to tag in posts is an excellent way of gaining exposure. Seeing a post from someone you know raving about a product can be equally if not more effective to that person’s friends than a random influencer raving over it. We love to see our customers sharing their authentic experiences and having the time of their lives – this is what gets people talking.
If you want to see how we utilise our marketing strategies online, please head over to our social media page to see how we rely upon visual images and clips to drive foot traffic to our website. We love using the powers of social media to increase our brand awareness and ultimately grow our business. We have expanded our business to be the world’s largest online directory in the watersports and marine sector – an example that with the powers of social media, anything is possible.
