Becoming an influential brand on social media is the ultimate goal for many small businesses looking to grow through digital marketing. In the past, brands struggled to gain traction through traditional marketing channels like the newspaper, television, and radio. Only businesses with large marketing budgets and lots of resources could afford to become well known on a national scale. However, the advent of social media has provided small businesses and individuals alike with the opportunity to achieve national influence for next to nothing.
Achieving social media success, though, isn’t easy. Many brands make common mistakes in their digital marketing campaigns that prevent them from developing a significant following. To learn more about how successful brands are growing their following on social media, I spoke to the team at Women’s Best, a sports nutrition brand with a social media reach of over 150 million users.
The brand was founded by Lukas Kurzmann, David Kurzmann and Thomas Mark in 2015, and has already reached an 8-figure annual revenue. They serve customers in over 85+ countries, and are also about to open their second HQ in Munich, Germany.
In the next several years, Women’s Best is looking to maintain their leading position in the fitness industry and continue to grow their presence on social media. Here are a number of ways that the team at Women’s Best became the leading fitness industry brand on Instagram.
Focus on your own brand and ignore the competition.
When it comes to building a brand on social media, it’s important to stay focused and ignore the competition. If you regularly compare yourself to influencers and brands with millions of followers and massive social reach, you’ll never be able to visualize your own brand becoming a social media success. The team at Women’s Best has a positive, focused mentality: “we are a strong believer that we should just focus on delivering the best to our customers on our own way and wishing the same for every other company in the market”.
Focusing on yourself and continually improving is a great piece of advice that’s applicable outside of the social media space. For Instagram marketing, make sure that the content you’re producing is high quality and specifically designed for your target audience.
It’s much more effective to produce content that appeals directly to 100 users in a niche community than content that attempts to appeal to thousands of users who aren’t interested in your brand. Ultimately, the users that actively engage with your content are much more likely to convert to customers, which is the end goal for many brands in digital marketing.
Use influencer marketing to spread your vision to a wider audience.
Many brands have begun leveraging social media influencers to spread their message to users that they wouldn’t normally be able to engage with. Influencers are individuals or brands that have an established social media presence and have some sort of credibility with the community that follows them.
Women’s Best believes that their success with influencer marketing came from “working with athletes, ambassadors and influencers whom we feel grateful to receive their support and are sharing our same vision and interest to change peoples life to better”. In other words, their team specifically chose ambassadors and influencers that shared their vision and values.
Aligning the goals of your brand with the goals of the brands you partner with is an important step for developing long-term business relationships. Additionally, this alignment of goals can help to encourage your influencer’s followers to engage with your brand and purchase your products. Make sure that you test out your marketing campaigns with a variety of different influencers to see which individuals provide the most reach and return on investment.
Learn from your mistakes.
The team at Women’s Best had a great piece of advice that they thought every digital marketer should take to heart: “obtain as much knowledge as possible about your business and learn from every mistake you do then turn it into a lesson.”
First, if you don’t truly know about your business, you can’t create content and effectively execute marketing campaigns to grow. Invest in analytics tools and research that can help you refine your target audience, and learn what techniques are most successful for your brand specifically.
Secondly, learn from your mistakes and use them as an opportunity to improve. Ask yourself why a particular post or marketing campaign wasn’t successful, and then make small changes next time to realize slight improvement. Over time, you can turn your failures into successes and develop a huge following on social media, just like Women’s Best.
