The Ultimate Social Media Strategy for Wine and Liquor Store Owners
If you are like most local business owners out there, you realize that social media is huge and that you should be using it to market your business.
We will focus on Facebook because it is the largest social network and has the best tools for reaching your local audience.
Step 1: Set up your Facebook page
Facebook provides two different types of profiles: one for personal use and one for businesses. Do not use your personal profile to promote your business. Instead, you need to set up a Facebook page so you can have access to all the tools and resources Facebook offers to help businesses grow their audience.
To create your page click here and then choose the option “Local Business or Place.”
After you enter the information about your store, click “Get Started” and complete the steps to create your page.
Step 2: Grow a targeted audience to your page
The next step is to start growing a targeted following to your page. You do this by getting people to “like” your page. Once somebody likes your page, the content you post to your page is eligible to show up in their newsfeed.
Getting page likes is the simplest way to start getting exposure to your business through Facebook. The fastest way to get initial likes to your page is to invite your friends and email contacts.
To do this, go to your new page, and click on the ellipsis to dropdown options, and then click on “Invite your friends”. Once you’ve invited your friends you will also want to run a Facebook ad targeting your local area so that you can generate a steady flow of new likes to your page.
I recommend that you start with a small daily budget such as $3 per day and then scale up from there once your ads are performing well.
Step 3: Get people to engage with your Facebook page
Once you start getting likes to your page and you’re growing an audience it’s critical that you have a strategy for keeping your audience actively engaged with your page.
You do this by regularly posting content to your page that your audience will find interesting enough that they will engage by liking, sharing, or commenting on your posts.
There are three basic rules you should follow when it comes to posting content on your page:
POST CONTENT THAT YOUR AUDIENCE WILL FIND INTERESTING
It’s important to remember that your audience is not on Facebook to be sold to. So, post content that is valuable and beneficial to your shoppers. Having a sale? Let them know how you can help them save money.
A good rule of thumb is 80% of the time post content that your audience will find interesting or entertaining in some way; then 20% of the time you can share content that is promotional and about your business or your products.
POST FREQUENTLY
I recommend posting between 2 to 5 times per week. Now, for those of you thinking “I don’t have time,” the good news is that you can easily schedule multiple posts in advance. This way, you just need to dedicate 30 minutes per day to finding images and content and then schedule them to post throughout the day.
Also, by posting content throughout the day you will show up in more of your audience’s news feeds as they will likely be on Facebook at different times.
POST CONTENT CONSISTENTLY
If you only post content randomly or go long stretches without posting any content at all, your posts will begin to reach fewer and fewer people in your audience. So, the key is to decide on a set schedule for posting content on a daily basis and make sure you stick with it over time so you will organically reach as many people in your audience as possible.
Step 4: Build your email list
Once you have grown an audience that is engaging with your page, the next step is to start building your email list. This is important so that you can follow up with your audience when they are not on Facebook.
By capturing their email address you are then able to send out updates and promotions directly to their email inbox whenever you want. The first thing you need to do in order to start building your email list is sign up for an email marketing service. The email marketing service I recommend is MailChimp.
First you need to create a list in MailChimp that will store your subscriber emails.
Next you can create a form that will easily integrate with your Facebook page so that when your audience lands on your page they are able to opt in and go on to your list in MailChimp.
Once they’re on your list, you can send out email campaigns that will promote a special event or offer to get them into your store.
Step 5: Run promotions to your audience to bring them into your store
Once you have grown likes to your page and are starting to build your email list, there are multiple ways to run promotions to bring more shoppers to your store.
One great strategy you can use right away is to run a Facebook campaign promoting an exclusive web-only coupon.
To do this, you would set up a funnel consisting of a capture page where potential shoppers can enter their name and email and then a landing page where they can print off that coupon.
The tool I recommend for creating this type of simple funnel is called LeadPages. LeadPages comes with a variety of different templates to make it easy to setup your funnel.
Once you have your funnel created, you can launch your Facebook campaign.
The rest is simple. Once your campaign is setup, the ad will be shown to people who like your page. Then, when they click on the ad, they can subscribe through your funnel to redeem the free coupon.
Now that you know this simple five-step formula for using Facebook to get more shoppers in your store, start implementing this strategy today, and let us know how it goes!
If you have specific questions, please feel free to leave a comment below.
