5 Social Media Marketing Tips for Small Businesses
The social media landscape has evolved beyond imagination, making it the obvious place to be at to promote your business. We know how social media universe can be an overwhelming place for small businesses, thus calling for a robust plan in place for a successful brand.
Through our experience, here are 5 tips that every small business should head towards in the era of new age marketing.
1. Be Smart — Ditch some of your social networks.
Social media may be free but your time isn’t!
So, choose the social channels that
o Require minimal and smart work
o Cater to the audience of your offering
o Give you optimal returns
Just skip the ones that don’t work for your brand instead of exhausting brain power and resources just to “maintain your brand’s online presence”.
How do you decide which social media platforms you should be on?
Every social media channel has a purpose. For instance,
What was one a channel of constant streaming of everyone’s lifestyle and thoughts is now used to populate video content and market products/services amongst an refined sect of audience. So
o Set clearly defined goals for every channel
o Identify your buyers and their habits
o Find out which country/state/vicinity gives you maximum returns
Be sure to push on the network doing wonders for your specific business and the customers that it caters to and build it from there!
2. Find out what your competitors are doing. NOW!
Have you thoroughly monitored what other companies in your field of business are doing on social media? A competitive analysis could open the gateway for different ideas for your future marketing efforts.
See what they’re doing wrong, but more importantly, see what they’re doing right! Take inspiration and reverse or re-engineer the concepts.
So be sure to analyze and take cues from the successes and failures of others.
3. Maintain originality — Value adding content is key
Here’s a view of the amount of content being uploaded every minute on the internet at the starting of 2017 — (2014, the innermost layer, 2015 in the middle, outermost 2016 — can have a simple info-graphic replicated)
Content creation is harder, now more than ever. Good thing you have content curation.
What is content curation?
The art of inspiring new content through the existing or simply presenting it in a new, value generating way that is unique to your audience.
Quality is better than quality — get this belief in your head and devise a content development strategy keeping in mind each phase of the marketing funnel that has helped you reach out to and convert your end consumer through digital.
You just need to make sure that your content aligns with your audience and the social media that you leverage to display it.
4. Be Social — Engage with your community
Engagement is a two-way street, remember. Be it Facebook, Instagram or Twitter, brands should constantly look to engage and interact with the community and icons in their audiences.
Follow people, like, share and comment on their feeds & posts to build a relationship and thus a following. Sure, it sounds simple but is often ignored by businesses, mainly because of limited exploration of imagination when it comes content. Refer back to point three to understand this better.
5. Invest In Tools — Have an arsenal of tools for optimization
The thing that differentiates offline to online marketing is the one core feature. Online media enables you to track and analyze your marketing efforts, methodically and intensively.
It’s not just about sharing and the likes thereof but rather the analytic metrics and ways to jumpstart your marketing efforts that a brand should consider.
Go right ahead and invest in social media management and analytic tools to measure and optimize the digital campaigns. Tools like Buffer, Hootsuite can save hours of time each week with their scheduling option and take the efficiency level up a notch. Additionally, the learnings you get on the posts you put out help you get better on social every day.
To conclude:
Get ahead of other brands and companies by implementing these points for your social media presence. Lastly, be patient since social media is a long term strategy and small business owners should take it as learning experience.
The more you experiment and experience, the smarter you get on social.
Keep in mind that the worst thing that a business can do is reflect an erratic activity. So be content-consistent!
Which one of these tips did you find most actionable? Let us know in the comments!
