Are you marketing your business on social media and seeing little results despite your huge effort?

Gone are the days when we could post a great image, talk about our business, throw on a couple of hashtags, and have it land in front of the eyes of our dream clients. People and social media platforms want something more.

Now more than ever, a strategy is essential to marketing your business on socials - but first, you need to dial in on what kind of marketing will provide the results that you’ve been losing sleep over.

Connection-based marketing is your golden ticket to standing out from others in your industry and creating true relationships online. Connection-based marketing is a marketing strategy that focuses on building strong relationships with your clients and providing information that targets their needs and interests. It encourages client loyalty and long-term engagement.

The one thing everyone is craving to find on social media? Authenticity.

Especially since we spent the last few years experiencing social changes in the world, the ache for connections and authenticity in our lives has skyrocketed. The best tip for any interaction on social media is to just be human!

Ready to put this method into motion? To start using connection-based marketing on your social media platforms, follow these 3 steps.

Know Your Ideal Client

Before you can create content or begin marketing your business, you need to deeply understand your ideal client. Here are some areas to consider for your ideal client avatar:

• Desires
• Pain Points
• Personality
• Characteristics
• Interests + Hobbies
• Habits
• Needs - emotional, physical, mental, and social.
• Lifestyle - what they eat, drink, and where they shop.
• Their version of success

Get to know them on a deep level so that you can infuse their language, thoughts, and interests into your marketing content. You want them to feel like you've been best buds for years and know the inner workings of their heart. To get started, take these bullet points and do a “brain dump” to get everything out of your brain and onto paper!

Build Trust

The key to connecting with your audience is building trust with them through your content. Create content for THEM and not yourself. You want them to feel like you’re reaching out through the screen and pulling on their heartstrings.

You are not alone if you have been caught in the cycle of creating content that may satisfy you, but doesn’t exactly register with your audience.

Once you nail down your ideal client, put yourself in their shoes to evaluate the content you are creating. Here are some surefire ways to build trust with your content:

• Educate your audience on things they want to know
• Share your own experiences with them to show your vulnerability
• Utilize video to showcase your personality - did you know that our brain can’t tell the difference between online videos and people in real life?!
• Share testimonials and case studies
• Show your audience how you solve their pain points
• Make your audience feel like they know YOU too

Show them what's possible and empower them to achieve their deepest desires (& how you can help them do this).

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Engage

Create reciprocity through engagements.

In the social media realm (and often in the real world), people only want to give you something if they get something in return. Figure out how you can do this through your digital marketing platforms. This can look like:

• Creating a free resource with an opt-in through an email marketing platform
• Giving new followers a personalized greeting message
• Going out of your way to engage with the people who are engaging with your content - polls, commenting on posts, responding to stories, etc.

Go give their profile some love too! Don’t wait for profiles that align with your ideal client to come to you, take the initiative to find them yourself. To find new accounts:

• Check who is already engaging with content from leaders in your industry
• Look at hashtags that your ideal client may be using
• Search through a peer’s audience
• See who is interacting with one business that may be interested in your services too (following a hair stylist and may be in need of a nail technician)

Dedicate 15-30 minutes each day to interact with your community and find new followers - show genuine interest in them. Once you grab their attention with all of your interactions, they will feel greatly inclined to return the gesture and interact with your content.

The Connection-Based Recipe

Now that you have walked through the big three components of connection-based marketing, the recipe just needs to be made and followed through on your socials.

To recap:

• Ideal Client - You need to know your ideal client inside-out to reach them best.
• Trust - People don’t buy from businesses, they buy from people. Build genuine relationships online.
• Engage - Reciprocity is your best friend. Give engagement, get engagement.

Putting the focus on building connections through your content does not have to bring burnout and cause you overwhelm.

It looks like slowly implementing changes that align more with what your ideal client is looking for without jumping in too hot.

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