There are different ways that you can market your small business to your audience in the digital age. You can use online advertising, but advertising is similar to renting an audience. There is email marketing, but this form is more of a sales channel rather than a means to build a connection with your customers.
One of the best choices for a small business owner has to be social media marketing. Social media allows you to build an audience and create a connection with them. Research shows that 68% of adults in the United States are Facebook users. This goes to show how big social media is.
Here are some tips that you can use to take advantage of social media for your business.
1. Research your audience
To know what platform to use, you need to know who your audience is. Connecting and engaging with your audience is crucial if you’re social media marketing strategy is going to succeed.
There are many methods you can use to get a deeper understanding of your audience. You could:
- Perform a survey on your audience to understand their needs
- Examine audience demographics to know which platform will work best
- Collect feedback using user feedback tools
By understanding your audience, you’ll be able to craft a social media strategy that connects to them and builds a strong bond/relationship.
Find Your Platform
There are many social media platforms available online, each with its own type of audience. As a business, it’s not advised to be on all platforms. It’ll be difficult for you to maintain all of them more so for a small business.
For instance, a B2B business will have much better lack on a platform such as LinkedIn where most of the audience there are businesspeople.
Images and Video work best
Posts that have videos and images perform better than posts without. This goes on to show you how important images and videos are to social media. If you’re looking to increase engagement on social media, then it’s important to include videos and images with your posts.
With all that said, don’t post images/videos for the sake of it. It’s a bad habit to fall into. Make sure you have your audience in mind when selecting the videos and images to add on your page.
The content that you post should add value to the user’s lives in some way. The posts should be unique and high-quality. If your writing skills aren’t the best, read the best essay writing service reviews and order content from quality sites like Edugeeksclub.
Listen and Promote
Most businesses use social media to promote their services/products. This is not a bad thing, but the tide has been changing for quite some time now. Social media has now become a customer service platform. Communication is open-ended on social media. Customers have a way to voice their opinions and qualms with businesses.
Instead of focusing on promoting all the time, also take the time to listen. You can find tips on how to improve by looking at the frequently asked questions of not only your audience, but also your competitor’s audience as well.
There are many tools that you can use to see what people are saying about your competitor’s. Through listening to your audience, you can also solve their problems at a faster pace, which will be an advantage to your business.
Determine Your Goals
This is a no brainer, it’s always important to set your goals before you start the business process. The same applies to social media. You need to know what you aim to gain from a social media campaign.
Do you want to build brand awareness and thus, more followers? Do you want to get a good ROI out of your campaign? What is your main goal of your social media strategy?
You can use the SMART strategy to set your goals for your social media marketing strategy.
- Specific: In short, make sure that your goals are Specific, that they should pinpoint what exactly they need.
- Measurable: You also need to make your goals measurable. You need to a way to know when you hit your goals. Is it a certain number of followers? Is it a certain conversion rate?
- Attainable: You also need to make your goals Attainable. You can aim high, but make it high enough to reach. Unattainable goals are frustrating and demoralizing.
- Relevant: Make your goals Relevant as well. They should tie into your overall marketing goals.
- Timely: Make sure to add a Time frame to your goals. This will help keep you on your toes and accountable as well.
The goals set will help drive the overall strategy that’ll be used for the business.
Conclusion
Social media is used by most savvy marketers today. The number of businesses using social media is only increasing: You’re losing out if you’re not on it. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel. You can look at previous successful campaigns or even to your competitors to see what works best. Always look at the stats and test different strategies to see what works best for your business.
This post was written by Sharon Hooper, an online marketing specialist and blogger. In her free time, she loves to help college students learn the writing skills and master the art of online marketing. Currently, she is working as a marketer at Paper Writing Pro Service, UK essay writing service, essay writing help uk, professional writing services. You could follow Sharon on Facebook.