As a business owner, you cannot exaggerate the power of social media marketing, as it gives you the blueprint for making the most of your social media channels. The benefit you stand to gain when you utilize social media marketing is countless.
As of 2021, the volume of people using social media platforms worldwide is over 4.48 billion. From this statistic, about 93.33% of people are active users.
This is like a gold mine for every small business owner. It will be a waste not to expose your business to this expansive network of prospective customers.
Although social media marketing appears overwhelming, its importance to the existence and survival of small businesses can’t be overemphasized. A study established the essence of social media marketing by stating that 78% of salespeople who utilize social media outsell their counterparts who don’t.
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What Is Social Media Marketing?
Social media marketing (SMM), also known as digital marketing, is simply optimizing social media platforms to build a company’s presence, expand awareness, drive website traffic, grow engagement and increase sales.
It is a medium that equips companies with ways to engage with existing customers and reach new prospects that will most likely convert into customers when optimized rightly.
Social media marketing downsizes costs without leaving out results. As a business owner, you do not need to pay for space for your product to be showcased to millions of people.
We cannot discuss social media marketing without mentioning social media, as the former cannot exist without the latter.
Social media is widely known to be one of the most effective ways to reach more customers without necessarily having a physical store. People want to shop at the convenience of their homes as this saves them time and stress. Small businesses that want to be in front of millions of people should take social media platforms seriously.
Elevate Your Small Business’s Social Media Marketing Using This Tips
The benefits of a well-mapped social media marketing plan include increased brand awareness, trustworthiness, and brand acceptance; every small business needs this to stay in business.
If you have been looking for ways to enlarge your small business through social media marketing, here are fifteen ways to help you elevate your small business’s social media marketing:
Choose the Right Social Media Channels
As a small business, being on all social media platforms might not be feasible for your business. Each social media platform serves different interests and needs.
For instance, a social media platform like LinkedIn may not be helpful to a molder. Alternatively, it is a fantastic platform for a chef. A local grocery store may not see the need to be on Reddit, but a local jewelry store will rake in more votes on Reddit.
It is essential to choose a platform that best promotes your content and focus more on those platforms. If you are pondering on how to find out the best platforms that will make your business thrive, here are some ways:
Check the Platform’s Demographic
Every social media platform fascinates different kinds of users with varying interests. You need to conduct in-depth research to discover whether most people who utilize the platform you intend to use are your targeted audience. If you are marketing your product or service to the wrong audience, your efforts will most likely go down the drain.
For instance, if a business owner who sells baby diapers is marketing their product on a platform used by people in their 60s, the sales will be drastically low compared to when such a person utilizes a platform primarily used by people in their 20s and 30s that are still in the child-birthing stage.
Functions of the Platform
As each social media platform interests a different audience, the expectations, and tones associated with them also vary.
Knowing the platform’s intention will help you to narrow your options and choose the best platforms that align with your business’s content. Opting for a platform that restricts your type of product or service won’t do you or your business any good.
Time Dedication
Some social posts require more time than others to create and manage. For example, creating content on Instagram would require more time than when you ordinarily create content on Facebook.
This is mainly because Instagram’s algorithm favors business owners who post high-quality videos on the platform over their counterparts who don’t. Therefore you need to have time on your hands to create highly engaging content on Instagram.
On the other hand, for Facebook, this does not matter – high-quality videos may not influence the result you amass. If you don’t have enough time, opt for social media platforms that aren’t time-consuming.
Content Research/Management
Researching the content that best suits your business will make content creation and delivery less stressful. In addition, knowing how to always communicate with your target audience in the same similar tone will make them understand your business, product, or service, which will, in turn, improve your engagement and sales.
When you can identify the best-performing content, it’ll be easier to craft a unique content strategy for your business. Content management software can help you create, modify and manage content. It also makes content distribution to various channels seamless and easy.
Prompt and Reliable Customer Care Service
Having good customer care service does a lot of good for your business. It will improve the rate of returning customers and automatically generate referrals for your business.
Jeff Besos, the executive chairman of the world’s leading internet-based enterprise, Amazon, said,
“If you make customers happy in the physical world, they might each tell 6 friends, but if you make customers unhappy on the internet, they might each tell 6000 friends”.
This points to how a good and reliable customer care service is vital to every small business intending to thrive in its existing market. A business owner who invests in customer service is building a deep bond between the business and its customers.
Using solutions like Help Desk Software will help you manage, assemble and respond to service-related requests; it also serves a broad range of customer support activities, allowing you to solve problems for your customers quickly. A help desk software will generally improve your customer care service, serving as a lifeline for your business.
Collaboration
Every small business that wants to be seen by many more people should consider collaborating with other small businesses. This collaboration is a win-win for the parties involved as it helps them contend with more prominent brands by combining ideas, consumer reach, and innovations. Parties involved will thrive due to their combined efforts to help one another.
For instance, a fashion designer collaborating with a make-up artist and a photographer is a fantastic idea because they can help each other reach many more customers.
In this situation, project management software will be useful for automating and streamlining management processes to reduce the complexity of large projects and tasks.
For example, monday.com promotes and facilitates team cooperation, collaboration, and accurate project reporting.
Use Attractive Visuals
Generally, people are attracted to what they see. Attractive and exciting visuals will help small businesses gain visibility and keep the business in the mind of users, which will, in turn, lead to increased sales.
Technology is so advanced that you can now use graphic design software to help improve your content game without necessarily having a deep knowledge of visual creation. It allows you to manipulate images on a device.
Using software to create jingles for your business can help to increase brand awareness, which can convert to sales. Putting up attractive designs will have customers/prospects glued to your page, and you know the result that can stem from that.
Educate Your Target Audience
An educated target audience is far more likely to patronize your business than a prospect struggling to make sense of what’s being sold. Small businesses leave money on the table by not following through on this.
Let your audience know how your product or service can help make life easier and better and make them see the dangers of not purchasing your product. Give them an insight into what they are missing out on.
Using solutions like learning management system will make this stress free for you as it organizes, administrates, documents, stores, and shares educational courses, materials, training, and development programs. Overall, it helps to make educating your customers less stressful, thrilling, and fun!
Publish Content Consistently
Inconsistency is the quickest way to kill a small business. Posting consistently will increase your brand awareness and visibility, which is definitely what every business needs.
It will also leave your brand regularly on the faces and minds of users, and they’d naturally remember your business anytime they need your type of product or service. Consistency also helps you build a community of followers who automatically become your brand advocate.
While wanting to be consistent and never run out of posts, you need to have things in place to ensure content’s smooth dishing. The secret to never going out of content is by batching content upfront. With the help of content management Software, you can publish stress-free, seamless and convenient content for your website visitors.
Advertise and Promote
Advertising attracts customers to businesses and multiplies sales. How can people buy from you when they don’t know about your service or product?
Creating awareness for your business helps boost your business and enables more people to notice your brand. It would be best if you put more effort into advertising your brand for it to be noticed amidst several competitors. In addition, promoting your business helps you to connect with your prospects and tell them more about your service.
Tools like brand management software make promotion quite interesting as it helps business owners manage the overall brand messaging of their brand. It ensures brand consistency across all channels as users can organize, manage, create, share and distribute content.
In addition, to aid promotion, you can utilize your email marketing software in sending personalized emails to subscribers simultaneously, saving you time and energy while promoting your brand to your audience. The more people learn about your product, service, or business, the larger your pool of potential customers becomes.
Automated Response
As a small business that may not be financially capable enough to employ more hands, an automated response not only saves time but also saves costs. These responses make communicating with existing and prospective customers easier, faster, and better. It can help enlighten them about important information they may need to do business with you.
According to research, more than 40% of buyers online are impulsive, and as little as not promptly attending to their inquiries can discourage them from making a purchase.
Business process management software (BPM) is outstanding when it comes to this, as it automates repetitive tasks, organizes fundamental processes, and increases efficiency. BPM software allows you to have plenty of time to focus on other parts of your business while helping you respond to customers’ inquiries promptly!
Creating a Good Social Media Strategy
A social media strategy will automatically distinguish you from your contemporaries and give you an edge over the competition. It will help you build a customized, solid, and organic social media presence.
An excellent social media strategy will help you thrive in the competitive market. It helps in generating conversations about your product, service, or brand in the online space.
For instance, on Twitter, Xbox Game Pass announced the availability of a newly introduced game. When they did this, there was a massive inflow of reviews from customers who had patronized them. From that single announcement strategy, genuine conversations started, and others who were yet to patronize the brand could see the feedback from their existing customers.
Social media strategy also helps to sharpen your goals and track your business performance. In addition, a social media strategy will ensure that your social media efforts are more fruitful and are working to support your broader business goals. Below are some tips to help create a social media strategy for your small business.
Make Sure Your Goals Are FIRM
This acronym means your goals should be F-feasible, I-irresistible, R-relatable, and M-measurable.
Research on Your Buyer’s Persona
Researching helps you know who to sell to and makes ad campaigns very effective.
Spy on Your Competitors
This lets you know what your competitors are doing and how you can use that to your business’s advantage.
Conduct Social Audit
This helps you to avoid wasting time on things that aren’t working for your business. Instead, it enables you to capitalize on things that work for you.
Treat Your Employees Rightly
“if you take care of your employees, they will take care of your customers, and your business will take care of itself.”
Employees are a company’s major asset. If you want to interest and keep them, then you need to treat them with utmost importance. Make them feel like an integral part of the business and ensure they understand the company’s goal.
Inculcate a constructive criticism style that wouldn’t leave them doubting their contribution or value to the company and give them their praise after a job well done. This will motivate them to become your brand ambassadors. In addition, recognize each employee’s talent and use that to the advantage of the company.
In this instance, Talent Management Software comes in handy to identify each employee’s strengths and weaknesses. The solution will also guide you on how best to use the information gathered to the company’s advantage.
Develop Marketing Strategies
Every small business should have a marketing strategy as it serves as a plan for the marketing activity you will follow to achieve your business goals. It will let you know your ideal audience and how best to reach them. It makes you understand what to focus on and ensures you are constantly working towards the company’s overall goal.
Having a marketing strategy allows you to share the benefits your business offers with your target audience. Once you have put this in place (marketing strategies), monitoring its effectiveness will be easier.
Optimize SEO
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of inclining your website to grade higher on a Search Engine Result Page to generate more traffic. The goal is to appear on top pages of search engines like Google results for search terms that mean the most to your target audience.
Search is the ultimate way in which people discover content. SEO gives your website free, organic traffic because the more you get listed, the more people will see it.
When small businesses SEO’s are well optimized, they produce traffic which leads to more sales. SEO Software can help you identify, examine and arrange keywords and work out strategies around them, increasing your organic search rankings. This solution does other essential things, including content optimization, inbound link analysis, and link building.
Keep Track of Your Customers
You will find it interesting that most successful businesses in the social media space do not always go for selling instantly. Instead, these businesses first build and maintain relationships to nurture prospective customers.
This way, a business owner influences a customer from being a one-time customer to a customer who keeps returning for subsequent patronages. Collecting and keeping information about your customer is essential for every small business. This lets you know the best ways to serve them and serves as a real-time connection.
Little things like wishing customers a happy birthday or choosing to post and celebrate a client per week as “customer of the week” on your social media platform strengthen customer relationships.
You need to prove to your customers that your care for them does not only start and stop at the buying and selling point. You should show them your love and care for them is more profound than that. Utilizing data management software will make this easy for small businesses.
Keep Tabs on Trends
In a seemingly never-ending social media terrain, it is essential to monitor trends. Every social media platform continues to enhance its formation of content. Take a look at Instagram as an example. This platform has continued to experience reform.
In the past, you could post a static picture and rake in many likes without too much effort. Currently, that is not the way things play out. High-quality in-app edited videos (reels) have taken the lead; they help your business page grow when used effectively.
In addition, keeping up with trends helps small businesses survive in the competitive market. About 72% of businesses utilize data they get from social media platforms to make informed decisions.
In Conclusion
The benefits of social media marketing for small companies cannot be overstated. It has proven itself to be a valuable resource for startups and small businesses. Social media marketing enables small businesses to reach a substantial number of people organically and affordably.
The creation of a social media page for your business is entirely free. When brands use social media tools to share content and respond to inquiries, they enhance their credibility and attract more customers in the social media space.
It is common knowledge that businesses aim to generate as much revenue as possible from their inception. If your business plan does not include social media marketing, it is safe to assume you are building castles in the air. Social media marketing is an effective method for increasing a company’s revenue.
In addition to facilitating direct access to your target audience, social media marketing helps promote business referrals. Some people who encounter your brand but do not necessarily require your product or service may refer it to others they know who do.
Social media marketing has no negative effects on a business, so why let it go to waste? Utilize the aforementioned social media advice, and watch your business flourish.