How to Improve your Social Media Marketing in Baton Rouge
Today, social media marketing is not only important, it’s essential to successfully market a business or product. On average a person spends 1.72 hours each day on social media. You want them to find your content! Every audience is different and will require a special style of online marketing. Here’s a few key things to keep in mind to improve your social media marketing particularly if your audience is in Baton Rouge, La.
Know Your Audience
Everything you do on social media is for your audience. Understanding your customers and gearing your content toward them is crucial. Whatever product or service your company provides should have a clear consumer base that could stretch across multiple demographics. There are so many great ways to involve the city of Baton Rouge in your posts to make them feel more personal and local for people viewing your posts.
Connect to them with Football
Being in Baton Rouge, most of the people your posts will reach will be LSU and/or Saints fans. Consider posting things weekly for games or even jokes about the opponent for big games like Alabama. This will get people involved on your page and will likely cause people to share your content. Those of us who have time in Baton Rouge, know far too well how terrible the traffic is.
Or the Baton Rouge Traffic
Maybe post a joke such as, “Stuck in traffic? Pull off onto Perkins and stop in for a bite to eat at Sloppy Joe’s. The traffic will be there waiting for you when you’re finished.” Share this along with your content to bring it all back home and remind people that your company is local and within their reach. People take pride in the great city of Baton Rouge and if your company makes it clear that they do too, customers will be more likely to become returning customers.
And then there’s paid advertising
A very helpful feature that the top social media platforms offer is creating paid advertisements for your business to generate more clicks to your website, views on videos and more. The benefit of these ads is you can choose exactly what type of audience you want to reach by targeting:
- specific ages,
- locations,
- professions,
- income,
- interests and more.
This will ensure that your ads are put right in front of the people you want to see them. If you need help with this step, you can read our guide to creating Instagram ads here.
Create Original Content
It’s great to share posts or links relevant to your brand and to Baton Rouge, but designing original content will help create a cohesive brand identifiable to your audiences.
Make fun, consistent graphics
Instead of simply posting a text status giving information about a sale, event, or update, create a graphic using images and laying text over it. This will catch people’s attention and they will be less likely to simply scroll past your post. In following posts, create consistent graphics with the same fonts and colors or your company’s logo.
Engage with videos
Video marketing is becoming increasingly popular. Video testimonials from employees and satisfied customers are a great way to get your name out there and interest potential customers. On a day that isn’t raining, (I know, almost impossible) film some quick shots of your business and create your own social media promotional video. Making a short video on LSU’s campus stating that your company supports the Tigers is also a great way to rally support from the Baton Rouge community.
Make complicated info. interesting with infographics
Designing infographics that include information about Baton Rouge is a great way to generate shares and likes. Including your business in infographics is a great way to show your involvement in city, without it appearing as an advertisement. Include other local places near your business to promote community and to bring more people to your area.
Start a blog!
In the past few years, blogging has taken the world by storm. Create a blog for your business that can be accessed from your website. Be consistent with your blogging. Decide on how often you would like to post and stick to it! Create lists, helpful tips, and include information that would help people in the community. For example, in a college town like Baton Rouge, an insurance company might explain to students if they can have car insurance from another state on their blog. Be creative when it comes to your blog posts and remember post them to your social media profiles. Clever and attention grabbing names for your blog posts will help to receive more clicks to your website!
When posting anything, remember to be brief. Social media is a quick and efficient way to get information and people do not want to sit and read a novel on their Facebook Timeline. Be quick, and to the point without withholding too much information. Include something along the lines of, “Visit our website or stop by for more information!” with a link to your website.
Post Timing
Now that you’ve created original content, when it comes to actually posting, it is important to go back to: knowing your audience. Younger people tend to check Facebook most often around lunch time and again after they finish school around 2pm-3pm. These are great times to post if your product or service is more likely to be consumed by young adults. People with children tend to check their Facebook accounts after they finish dinner and are unwinding after a day of work. Between 6pm-9pm are great times to post things that would be more appealing to this demographic.
It is also important to note that social media activity is 18% higher on Thursdays and Friday and 32% higher on Saturdays and Sundays. On weekends, posting around lunchtime can help to gain you more likes and shares on your posts. Twitter however, tends to see the most amount of traffic on Wednesdays while LinkedIn shows very low engagement on Mondays and Fridays.
Contests
Baton Rouge is a fun, energetic, and vibrant city, and social media marketing in Baton Rouge should match that personality. There is a vast mix of ages throughout the city, largely due to LSU’s campus at the heart of the city. Consumers in this area love to be involved and to try new places and things around town. Consider 
creating weekly or monthly contests on social media to gain traffic to your site, generate “likes,” and get people to your business.
LSU has a large greek life community and if it applies, a great way to get the community involved in contests is to host a competition between the sororities and fraternities at LSU. Start by researching all of the organization and create a graphic for each that says something like “XYZ loves your company!” The members of these organizations will reach out to other chapters across the country, their family, and other college friends to help them win.
When it comes to prizes for these contests, it’s important to keep in mind that these organizations each have their own philanthropies they support so consider giving the winners a donation to their philanthropy, gift cards, or access to your product or service.
For more general competitions that might not be geared toward college age students, try posting images of a recognizable spot in town and tell your audience that to enter they need to guess the location. You can also do contests like this by asking a simple question like, “What is your favorite thing to do on weekends in Baton Rouge?” Have people comment on the image, tag a friend, and share the post to be entered. This will get your message out and make your customers excited to engage in friendly competition. Choose your favorite responses or choose a winner at random. Offer gift cards as prizes to yours or other businesses around town that residents would love to receive.
Encourage Feedback and Participate in Conversation
Leverage user-generated comments & reviews
It is so important to make your audience feel that if they are commenting, reviewing, asking questions, or participating in contests, your brand cares enough to not just answer, but to give them a thoughtful and friendly response. Ask for feedback on your page and in person. Then ask for permission to share that customer’s response on your social media. When creating your original content, include stellar reviews from satisfied patrons, giving your social media a positive look and feel.
Respond to reviews (yes-positive & negative!)
When people leave reviews directly on your Facebook page, Trip Advisor, Yelp (etc.), respond to them, whether they are positive or negative. If it is negative, apologize or give a non-defensive reason for whatever they seem to be unhappy with. If the review is positive, thank them for taking the time to leave their kind words and express how they are welcome back anytime. This makes people feel that their opinions matter and that you care enough to change what needs to be changed and keep doing what is working.
Ask questions
When you are consistently posting original content, you’ll notice many people commenting and engaging with your social media pages. A good way to continue to encourage this is to ask questions within your posts and graphics. If your post reads, “TGIF! We love the weekend and can’t wait for our sale starting Monday! What are your plans for the weekend?” Get people involved and interested to engage in conversation and make sure to respond to them. If people are commenting, like or reply to their comments. A little bit of attention to your customers on social media goes a long way.
Understand Why Social Media Matters in Baton Rouge
Baton Rouge is a large, social city with so much to do. Don’t let yourself get overlooked by potential customers. It is important to understand that social media marketing is something that will require work and time. It constantly needs to be updated, monitored, and utilized. Appealing to the masses is the way of the world these days and being able to bring your company’s information directly to the computer screens of thousands of people is an amazing feat of technology that we take for granted. So use it to your advantage as much and as often as possible!
Now, log onto your Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram and get posting!
