Effective Small Business Social Media Marketing Techniques

These days, irrespective your brand or industry, you cannot afford not to have social media as part of your small business marketing strategy. That is unless you want your small business to stagnate. As a marketer, depending on your experience, your brand and even your temperament, you have the option of using many marketing techniques for your marketing campaigns, but social media marketing should always be a sure choice. You have the option of exploring several social media marketing strategies among which are:

Influencer Marketing

If you have a massive following in your social media handles, you can become an influencer for brands. First, you must grow your audience to a reasonable size for it to be effective for influencer marketing. If you do not have that sort of following yet particularly on the most popular platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and the likes, you can partner with micro-influencers to get your brand in front of your niche audiences. Most Micro-influencers tend to have 10-100 thousand followers and often come off as more relatable and approachable for partnership arrangements than the big celebrity influencers.

Messenger Marketing

If you need quick one-on-one messaging, you can use social messaging platforms like Whatsapp, Facebook messenger, AI-powered chatbots and Skype. Feedback in instant and reliable and you can market any product/service through these messaging apps. Aside customer support and resolving customer problems instantly, messenger marketing is very effective using these apps. Through the instant messages, you make product/service suggestions to customers to help solve their problems. Promos, discounts and new products arrivals can be better announced using these instant messaging apps.

Employee Advocacy Programs

Smart marketers can deliberately turn their employees into extensions of their social media programs. That way, you can easily start an employee advocacy program. There are online platforms like GaggleAMP and Dynamic Signal that encourage employees to share content on their social network in exchange for points, prizes, and internal recognition. If your employees take advantage of these platforms to share your content on the platforms, a combination of their collective following in addition to yours can help give a much wider exposure to your marketing content than if you relied on yours alone. There is always a very big difference in the reach of your business through employee advocacy programs.

Organic Social Media Marketing

Do you know you can actually do practically anything and even advertise on social media for free? Great if you do! But, in case you don’t, be informed that you can do organic social media marketing for free just as other free social media activities. Some of these free activities include, publishing marketing content, publishing posts, commenting on articles/content, inviting users to like/share your page, engaging with reviews, and actively interacting in social media groups. Most marketers know that it is hugely challenging to grow a large and engaging following particularly on pay-to-play networks without spending money, but you can still do a great deal of marketing on social media without expending a dime. That is done by way of organic marketing.

 

Social Media Advertising

Many social media marketers find social media advertising intimidating, but it is incredibly lucrative if you know what you are doing.  Once you learn the ropes and do what is expected, getting the right results is a given. Through social media advertising, you get access to tons of metrics. Through such metrics, it is possible to know if the strategy you are using is earning you profits or helping you to make losses. Whichever it turns out, you can always at any time adjust your strategy to get the best results. The most result-oriented social media advertising you should be using at any point includes techniques like Facebook ads, sponsored posts, YouTube ads, and LinkedIn InMail.

Live Streaming

Live streaming is a great way to showcase your products and engage with your customers in a more personal way. Live streaming because it is real time, manages to turn talk-at-you marketing into back-and-forth mutually beneficial conversations. It still promises to get more personal as internet technology tends to deepen marketing activities by the day. Such experiences can make the difference between a one-off purchase and a life-long customer. Smart marketers always explore viable ways to Host a webinar or go behind the scenes of a product launch to build trust and relationships with the audience particularly through live streaming.