Effective Social Media Marketing Strategies for Small Businesses

Do you have a social media marketing strategy for your small business? If not, why not? The right time to start is today. You are no doubt aware that at the moment, social media clearly presents countless opportunities for potential and existing customers to engage with your business. It is a veritable environment for these customers to read blogs and marketing content, ask questions, make suggestions, share content of their own and much more. If your small business is presently not on social media, you are missing out of the many social media benefits that can help your business to grow. If you want to reach more customers and boost online authority for your small business, just get it on social media. Social media has become a very powerful tool for helping small businesses reach more customers and do more business online. What matters most in social media marketing is to post the right content for the right audience at the right time to nurture engagement, drive clicks, and attract customers.

Find below a few strategies that have proved effective for many small businesses marketing across some of the most popular social platforms.

Publish Only Relevant Content

In online marketing, content is king. It is more so on social media. While engaging with others’ content on social media, it is advisable that you should also be posting your own content on a regular basis. This content should be packaged into standard posts, images, videos, graphics and blogs. Your content will be effective if you ensure it covers such topics that are relevant to your audience and at the same time respond promptly to all questions/comments in the Comments section of the social media platform.

Diversify Your Content

In content marketing, diversity breeds more curiosity. On social media, questions, images, graphics and videos appear to be more engaging than other types of content. Mixing these content types and determining which works best on your type of audience is the way to go. In some popular platforms like Facebook, you have an added advantage of the valuable insights the platform provides. It has tools that help its users with some insights on how often other users are interacting with which content. With the benefit of these insights, marketers can take deliberate steps to craft and post more of the content people appear to be interested in.

Use Videos to Increase Organic Reach

High quality videos as content types on social media help to increase organic reach. Google reports indicate that video content represents over 74% of all online traffic. On Facebook in particular, it is one of the leading drivers of organic reach. If the videos are short, sharp, and concise and quickly answer questions and help solve users’ problems, they attract good organic traffic to your business website.

Market with Facebook Live Videos

Marketers can rely on Facebook Live videos to increase organic reach and boost engagement for their businesses. This is because Facebook users spend more time, in fact about three times as much time watching FB Live videos compared to other types of videos. These videos give marketers the all-important opportunity to directly interact with their followers in real time, answer questions, and make product recommendations to them.

Utilize LinkedIn Search Function

If tactically engaged, LinkedIn is a great platform for sharing valuable content, interacting with customers and potential customers and winning over new customers. LinkedIn’s search function works just like a real search engine. When users are searching on the platform for any particular type of business, LinkedIn helps to direct such searchers to the page that profiles the most relevant information and has the closest degree of connections to what they are searching for. Smart marketers can thus effectively use LinkedIn SEO to optimize their pages for search and to attract more Connections to their businesses.

Take Advantage of Instagram Marketing

Instagram appears to be the most popular social media platform with Millennials, that is persons now 35 and below. For smart marketers, that is a very vital demographic info. This group of people are now the largest generation presently in the workforce and they make up the majority of users on social media. Depending on the type of products you are marketing, you can deliberately target this group with marketing messages directly to where they can be found on social media.
 
Use Hashtags Tactically

Smart marketers particularly on Instagram can tactically use hashtags to maximize organic reach for their businesses on the platform. Once the hashtags are related to the brands and products, they do nicely. This is more so when you can effectively take advantage of the hashtags your direct competitors are using.

Use Instagram Stories Wisely

On most social media platforms, the main goal is to get users to interact more with your content. This is with the ultimate aim of getting them to reach out and do business with you. One great feature called Instagram Stories comes in very handy here. Instagram Stories allow you to post polls, questions, gifs, and much more to get people to engage and respond to your content. Instagram Stories are also great to give you more insights into what your audience is interested in and what questions they are asking. You can take advantage of these insights, to better market to them.

Market with Only High Quality Photos

What this means is that you must avoid stock photos at all cost particularly on Instagram. What is very important on social media is to be sure you can effectively engage your followers visually. To be able to do this, you need eye-catching photos/imagery that speaks directly to your target audience. If you can avoid common stock images, you’ll do nicely by using high quality professional photos and/or custom graphics that give your audience vivid images of your brand/products. That helps to get the brand/products noticed even amidst stiff competition.

Engage in YouTube Marketing

YouTube may not be a true social media platform in the real sense of it, but it does very nicely in video marketing which is its main specialty. In addition, YouTube has an organic search function that allows users to find videos on topics/products they are interested in. It is also very easy to simply publish your marketing video content on YouTube and then share it widely on the most popular social media channels. 

Market with Your Personal Stories

Getting personal on social media is a good marketing strategy. It is futile to regularly bore your audience with common stories which many of them may have heard before anyway. Getting personal with your own stories usually gives the best touch. You can do this by deliberating sharing personal stories, milestones, favorite anecdotes, quotations, updates, insights, achievements, interviews, and much more. That helps to build trust with your audience better. Trust is hugely important because most people are more likely to do business with people they trust. For this reason, if others perceive you as personable and authentic, they will do more business with you.

Use Paid Social Media Advertising, PPC

For marketers who have the budget for it, Pay-per-Click, PPC is one great option to generate better quality traffic and more marketing results faster. Marketers who are smart enough to supplement their organic traffic efforts with paid advertising; it helps them to establish a more holistic marketing strategy for their business. With PPC, you can effectively run paid ads on social media to attract clicks and leads to your business. 

Take Advantage of Facebook Ads

If your marketing budget can accommodate it, you can take advantage of Facebook ads to promote your business. Facebook ads are data-driven and it takes quite some marketing skills to get good results. These skills require that you have a working knowledge and understanding of who your audience is and what they are interested in. That knowledge and understanding enables you to set your ads targeting to reach the right audience with the right type of content. That helps to enhance the effectiveness of the ads. If you take advantage of Facebook insights and analytics, you can better segment your marketing activities for best results.

6 Ways Social Media can Benefit your Small Business

For most small business owners, social media clearly presents countless opportunities for potential and existing customers to engage with their businesses. It is a veritable environment for these customers to read blog and marketing content, ask questions, make suggestions, share content of their own and much more. In fact, some surveys suggest that over 70% of small businesses greatly depend on social media as part of their overall marketing strategy. If your small business is presently not on social media, you are missing a lot. Take quick steps to invest in social media marketing if you want to reach more customers and boost online authority for your small business.

These here are 6 ways your small business can greatly benefit from social media marketing.

1. Build Brand Authority

When your business has brand authority, it enhances its online visibility. That translates to good traffic, more leads, customers and sales. If you market your business on social media, you can quickly establish thought leadership through showcasing your expertise, sharing valuable content, and constantly engaging and interacting with your followers. Doing so effectively helps to stand your business out among its peers. It confers the business with brand leadership and authority which help it to win the trust of potential customers and customers alike.

2. Attract New Customers

For many small businesses more customers simply means more business. If you market your business on social media, it greatly increases your chances of acquiring new customers. When your social media marketing strategy is right and effective, the business easily attracts new customers organically and/or through paid efforts. That translates to more customers, more business, more sales and more revenues.

3. Boost Brand Awareness

If you are desirous to quickly build brand awareness for your business, just get it on social media. These days, nearly everyone is on social media doing one thing or another. That is what makes social media one great place to boost your brand awareness. Social media presents an array of business opportunities and tools business owners can take advantage of to reach a wider audience and build brand awareness. Many social media platforms help businesses to get in front of a wide array of potential customers through brand awareness.

4. Regularly Engage Your Followers

With social media, businesses can easily engage their new and existing followers for marketing purposes. Through these regular engagements, businesses can build brand loyalty and grow their referral networks exponentially. These engagements are also great to attract new customers and grow your business. You can further boost these engagements by answering business questions directly and regularly providing valuable content to your followers on social media.

5. Improve Your Search Engine Optimization, SEO

Some online marketing studies indicate that there is a significant correlation between improved social media signals and increased search engine rankings. Every business owner wants traffic to their business websites right? A good SEO helps to enhance that, particularly the highly valuable organic traffic. If you implement a good SEO in your social media marketing, it impacts your marketing activities particularly in terms of improving your Search Engine rankings and organic traffic.

6. Retain Existing Customers

Smart business owners do not just seek new customers only. They also take deliberate steps to retain existing customers. With deliberate efforts at regularly engaging your existing customers on social media, it enhances their continued loyalty to your brand. Enhanced customer loyalty usually translates to better business and more sales. It also helps to grow your referral networks for the benefit of the business. Your existing customers must have had some good reasons for becoming your customers in the first instance. You can continue to nurture these reasons with more engagements through direct answers to their business inquiries and concerns, providing them valuable marketing content and much more on social media.