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Social Media Marketing For Small Business
How to Create a Social Media Strategy For Small Businesses
Your success may be established by setting the correct goals, but figuring out which strategies are working is just as important as proving your success! Scaling your social media presence has never been easier
Introduction
Increasing brand awareness can be achieved with a strong social media strategy where you post consistently using various styles of posts at optimal times. You should never run out of ideas on what to post on your chosen social platform with a pre-planned content calendar.
Social media marketing is a very important aspect of running a business in today’s connected world. Social media is a great way for local businesses to get attention, authority and build trust with clients or customers. In this blog, we will look at the different aspects of social media marketing and how it can help businesses to succeed. It can certainly be helpful to business owners, but it can also be a waste of time. Our aim is to help business owners understand social media marketing and how they can use it to build a solid marketing strategy.
Identify The Right Social Media Platforms For Your Business
If you start with one or two platforms that make the most sense for your business, as you will likely know where your ideal customers or clients are, you will save time and avoid disappointment later on in your campaign.
Identifying your target audience is perhaps the most important step. Who are you reaching out to on this platform? What kind of people are likely to be interested in what you have to offer? Are there definite age ranges that are more responsive to your brand? Male or female or are they equally likely to buy from you? Do a bit of research and build your idealised Avatar and start test different types of posts. If you don’t know, find several competitors and research the tone and offers shown and reverse engineer their target market. This becomes easier if they advertise as platforms like Facebook and Instagram show you all the ads they have run and for how long, this is all good information. Remember, the more receptive the audience is to your message, the more likely they will engage with your page and like and share the good information you are presenting.
You may want to make an audit of the platform to measure the posts that engaged and those that didn’t. There are many audit process templates online to use to get you started
Not sure which platform is best for your business? Here’s a basic rundown:
- Instagram, is also known for its huge community of social media influencers. You can Partner with creators or influencers to create sponsored posts that can be a great way to reach relevant audiences and potential new customers at a fairly low cost.
- Facebook, no matter what market or industry you can pretty much be sure your ideal target market can be found on Facebook! The most popular social media platform can be an all-purpose site where you can share photos, company updates, check-in, with information, videos, and other informative content to build brand awareness and trust.
- Twitter, is a platform for short messages and shareable media, making it ideal for company announcements, articles or blog posts, and customer support.
- YouTube, is the second biggest search engine, which means users who search for and discover your content is more likely to have a strong interest in the topic and a genuine intent to engage. YouTube ads are currently cheap at the moment and can drive a lot of visitors to your site.
- Pinterest, is a great visual platform for driving traffic to your site, your business brands can create “boards” full of curated pins, this can be done quickly, making it easy for your audience to find related pins all at once. Again if your business fits in with the Pinterest market advertising is relatively cheap.
- LinkedIn, is a great business to business platform for building your network, raising brand awareness, and attracting other companies to engage with your business.
Offline-to-online Marketing Tactics to Bring Your In-store Experience Online
A successful offline-to-online marketing strategy can bring your business’s in-store experience online for your customers to enjoy. If they go to your online platform it makes things a little easier because they know if they can’t get into your high street store they’ll have an option to get the product or service online. There are also enticements for them to go online such as:
1. Offer free shipping on everything.
2. Offer a satisfaction guarantee.
3. Offer a money-back guarantee.
4. Tell them they can get a refund within 30 days and send them a full refund immediately by check.
5. Offer an online coupon for your in-store customers.
6. Offer an extra online bonus discount for your in-store customers when they refer a friend.
7. Give your in-store customers the option to order online.
8. Give your customers a reason to buy from you by offering unique, special or discounted items that they cannot find elsewhere.
Sharing the business from your physical to Internet store will mean orders can be fulfilled on a balanced timeframe. It will inevitably mean more sales and could be the first step to expanding your firm and possibly hiring one or more employees to help fulfil the product or service orders.
How to Plan a Social Media Marketing Campaign, Step by Step
A social media marketing plan is a way to plan and manage your social media marketing strategies.
Social Media Marketing has become a vital part of the marketing mix for small business owners. With the right social media marketing strategy, you can not only give your business a boost but get ahead of your competition. To promote or advertise your small business, you will need to have a very clear idea of how you are going to attract clients. You will also need to know exactly what you want to achieve so that you can plan the campaign properly.
For example, you might want to attract new customers, build trust online, or increase brand awareness by promoting your content on Facebook or Twitter if their audience has the right demographics.
Understanding these goals is the first step in creating a social media marketing plan.
The next step is figuring out what you want to say (the message). Do you want to tell people about your product? Share photos of happy customers? Announce a sale? You’ll also need to decide whether you want to post announcements on all your social networks simultaneously or stagger them across different platforms over time.
The success of a social media marketing campaign depends on the goals that are set for it. These goals need to be specific and measurable if they are to achieve success. Some people do not understand the importance of setting smart goals, which is why they set vague ones instead.
For example, if your goal is to increase “likes” on your Facebook page, there is no way you will know whether you have succeeded or not. But if your goal is to attract new customers and increase sales, it will be much easier for you to measure the success of your campaign.
The other thing that should be considered when planning a social media marketing campaign is content. This can take many forms – videos, images, blog posts etc. This type of content should also be planned in advance.
Tasks such as sharing updates, scheduling updates, social listening, collaborating with team members, and others can be accomplished through a social media management tool or having a member of staff or freelancer do these tasks for you.
How to Set Smart Social Media Goals
Defining your goals before you start creating your campaign is the first step to success.
Moreover, setting SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Timely) goals will ensure you stay on track and achieve your objectives. Here are some tips on how to create SMART goals:
Specific – Make sure your goal is specific. Instead of saying “attract new customers”, say “attract 20 new customers in the next 30 days.”
Measurable – Make sure your goal is measurable. If you want to increase sales, make sure your goal is to raise sales by 10%. If it’s the number of customers you want, make sure your goal is to get 20 new customers in the next 30 days.
Achievable – Make sure your goal is realistic.
The focus on specificity makes SMART goals superior to other goal-setting frameworks. People set vague goals such as “Be more successful” which leave people without a true obtainable goal. Try, “I’ll be more successful in my business in the next month by taking on 4 new clients at £2000 per month reviewed on a 90-day cycle”.
How to Effectively Listen to Social Media Conversations
Have you ever wondered how top copywriters and other smart people manage to come up with some of the most memorable headlines and sales messages?
It is a great strategy to listen to and research on social media. If you set up the right searches, you can respond to your customers in real-time. Listening to mentions and conversations about your brand on your social media platforms is referred to as “social listening.” Once you’ve gathered the data, you’ll need to analyse it to find possibilities to take action.
Social Media has been a powerful tool for both brands and individuals, but it has one major drawback, there is no way to know what people are talking about. In today’s busy world, companies need to spend more time on the customers’ conversations online rather than creating them.
When it comes to social media marketing, some of the top copywriters and other smart people do their research on trending keywords and phrases using social listening or social media monitoring tools such as Radian6 or Hootsuite, so they can put them in their headlines and marketing strategies for a better chance of success.
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Put a System in Place to Track Social Media Performance
If no one is paying attention to your social media posts, then you are not going to get any engagement or sales. To get the sales, you need to get a system in place to track your social media performance. Then you can figure out what works and what doesn’t work. Social Media is a crucial aspect of any social campaign, but not all businesses realise this. There are many different elements to social media marketing, including regular posting, engaging with your followers, building your audience and so on.
If you want to get more out of your social media, you need to make sure you’re following the right process and using the right tools. One of the biggest mistakes many business owners make is trying to do everything themselves. There’s a lot of confusion around social media and what it can do for your business. People think that you just set up a Facebook account and then just sit back and wait for orders to roll in. That’s not how social media works. If you want to get the most out of your social media, you’ll need to put a system in place and track your performance.
Different Platforms Attract Different Audiences
The networks your brand should approach and what types of content to publish are directly related to social media demographic information. Don’t spread yourself too thin is is a key lesson as of 2021.
Focus on networks where your core audience is active. Don’t publish a lot of content that the audience doesn’t care about. It probably won’t be discovered by your target audience because if you didn’t do your research outlined earlier you’ll never know your targeted audience is on another platform. Your social media posts need to be carefully crafted to deliver information, fun, surprise and an irresistible offer from time to time just for your audience. They won’t share your content with their friends if you don’t give them value or ask them.
Unless you have a large budget for advertising, your social media content needs to be crafted to provide real, in-depth value to your targeted audience. They have to connect with your brand emotionally and find your brand to be a trusted one.
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