By Dan Klein, CEO

Many business owners are taking the leap into using social media and some are having success and others are having a more frustrating experience. My hope is to provide a little guidance as you look to use this medium to reach more new potential clients.

First, try to be as clear as possible around why you are using social media. What’s your goal? You can’t help but see the ads from people who have used social media to sell their products and buy their latest high-priced car, but will that realistically work for YOUR business? Here are 5 questions you should think through before using social media to promote your products or services:

What are you selling? Are you presenting an idea or a deliverable product? The reason I’m asking is because ideas like financial planning, estate and tax planning are harder to sell over social media and therefore require more in advertising spend. T-shirts, concert tickets, haircuts and other items that are available for a consumer to act and buy are easier to promote; not so easy if you’re selling an idea or a concept (especially if it is a more emotional or higher priced concept).

Are you using paid advertising? Everyone’s heard the stories of videos that go viral and lead to tons of sales. Here’s my guidance on that – it’s bullshit. That’s the exception and not the rule. If you want to reach a certain group of people on social media you will need to pay for it, and that’s ok. It’s how social media is built. The system requires you to pay in order for people to see your messages, that’s how this works.

Have you developed a reasonable budget? In other words, how much are you willing to spend to sell your products or services? Higher priced products will require a larger ad spend. If you don’t want to invest in advertising then don’t bother using social media, it won’t produce results for your business. As an example, if you’re selling a product for $ 100 is it within your budget to allocate $ 6 or $ 10 in order to sell it? That’s the math that needs to be done in order to use social media to sell your products.

Who is your targeted audience? Over social media you can’t sell to everyone. In order for the strategy to be successful you will need to have a clear profile of who you are targeting (age, gender, location, income, hobbies, interests). Only then can you put your message in front of the right groups for your product or service.

How are you monitoring your results? If you are new to using social media and have to build up some momentum you might want to measure how many people are viewing your content and clicking on your links. People who will contact you may come later, especially if you are selling a higher priced product. If you’re selling a lower priced product then game on – you should be able to see fairly immediate results from your ads.

I hope this information was helpful, please let us know if you need any help in thinking through a strategy that would work well for your business if you’re looking to attract new clients over social media.