There is more to social media marketing other than accruing followers, engagement, and likes. Social media marketing for small business most times leaves startups with the difficulty of putting up the right strategy. As well as how to leverage the right social media tools to arrive at their business goals.
To actualize your marketing goal, there are some basics you need to pay attention to and move further to generate leads that will pay off your marketing efforts.
Social marketing for small businesses requires that you put an effort into building a brand online presence, make due use of call to action, build an excellent value & service base, and finally drive traffic to your website.
Marketing for Small Business the Right Way
In this post, I will teach you 8 ways to grow your customer base for startups and small businesses.
#1: Have a Target Audience
The first thing in business before everything else is to know who your target audience is. Here is the gist, knowing them alone isn’t enough to land you enough customers. In today’s world, data contribute to the big pile of social media marketing success. So to go far, you must dig out your audience relevant information. Dig deep into their interest, age, gender, educational level, work level, what social media platform they use and which one do they spend most of their time. For your business to work, your first assignment is to dig deep into audience research.
#2: Choose a Platform
If you’ve dug out your audience information. You will be able to know the particular social media platform they use the most. That should be the right media platform to choose from. But you need to understand that different content format thrives in different media platforms. You also need to choose the platform that makes good use of the type of content your business shares. In line with what your audience wants to see.
#3: Create & Optimize for Business
The next thing to do is to create a business profile and optimize it to match up with your brand. Make use of a brand logo, if you have one, fill your bio, and make your service offers clear. You might as well add a call to action button, like a landing page link or blog post.
#4: Build a Personal & Corporate Brand
In media marking, you don’t start by marketing your product or service to your audience. You need to be trusted first before people can buy from you. Don’t go into media marketing to invest one dollar to make two dollars. You need to deliberately build brand loyalty. Before asking for sales.
Help your audience solve their micro problems, by showing a genuine interest in their problems. First go for niche authority using your content, posts to engage with your audience.
#5: Stay Consistent
Maybe you choose to use two or more social platforms. We do know that different social platforms call for different content types or posts format. But make sure your brand remains consistent in all the platforms. Be consistent in your post approach. The number of posts in a week. Be visually consistent; design, colors, and images.
#6: Publish Content that Resonates with your Audience
Be very much aware that you are marketing to people not to yourself. It demands you to think about the way your audience thinks, and what your audience wants to view or read. Because you like it doesn’t mean your audience can connect it with it. Look for what is trending among your audience and craft your post or content around it.
#7: Go for Paid Ads
Most of the social media platforms no longer give room for organic content. There is a big limitation on your brand if you only resort to growing your business organically. why not pay less and get your brand in front of millions of potential customers. Go for Instagram stories, Facebook sponsored ads, promoted tweets, etc.
#8: Leverage Popular Hashtags
Back are those days where the use of hashtags was only applicable to the Twitter platform. Today you can leverage popular hashtags on Instagram, Pinterest, and Twitter to push your brand in front of a large like-minds audience.