Social Media Marketing Strategy For Small Businesses

Being a small business owner, with a focus on community and individual customers, your main aim would be to directly connect with your audience to build brand awareness and loyalty. So, how about you make use of the one medium that offers you these results without spending much or even anything – Social Media! It bridges the gap between your brand and your customers in a perfect manner. How can it not? Afterall, there are around 4.2 billion active social media users that spend around an average of 2 hours and 25 minutes on different social media platforms every single day. This opens a large window of opportunity for small businesses - to grab the attention of their target audience, increase brand awareness and even make sales directly through social platforms. Moreover, a study reflects that there is a 57.7% chance that people will buy from a brand they follow on social media. So, you don't have to do much, just find your possible prospects, build a relationship with them and keep on nurturing this relation for brand loyalty and engagement on social media. Though it is not easy as it seems, it is essential for small businesses, now more than ever, to engage in social media marketing.

Here are some pretty straightforward social media marketing tips and strategies that will help you achieve your goals.

1. Define your goals
It is simple to get started with social media for business purposes as it doesn’t cost anything to create an account or to post on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or any other social platform. However, you can’t just blindly keep on posting on social media without any reason. It is important that you define your marketing goals because once you do this, it will be simple for you to come up with content ideas to post about. So, create goals that follow the SMART framework-Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Timely. Choose goals that will actually have an impact on your business. For instance, if you own a shoe store and have just made a profile on Instagram, then your first main goal would be to increase followers and engagement.

2. Decide the right platform
Social media offers you a lot of platform options where you can attract and engage customers. However, rather than setting up an account on all platforms, it is best if you begin with a social channel that suits your brand and your goals. Once you have built a solid presence there, you can move on to others. Taking on all the social channels at once can dilute your marketing efforts. For instance, if you are targeting Gen Z, you can focus on Facebook and Instagram as most users there are between 18-24 age group. Whereas, if you are targeting baby boomers, social channels such as Facebook and Pinterest can be on your go-to. In fact, adults over the age of 65 are Facebook’s fastest-growing audience. To use social media effectively for your business, you need to conduct market research according to where your audience is present.

3. Understand your audience
One reason why social media is so effective is that it lets you understand your audience. In this sense, the best way for you to grow on social media is to post valuable content that helps your audience in some way. So, do a little bit of research and figure out which accounts they follow and what kind of posts they engage with. This will give you an idea of what matters to them and what you are supposed to post. One common mistake that most businesses make on social media is posting about their products, services, and employees, but they forget to focus on how their brand or its product or service help the customers. It is best if you post something that is helpful and informative for your customers. For instance, if you are a travel agency, you can post inspirational travel quotes, unknown facts about cities or food delicacies specific to a particular city.

4. Start conversations
Once you have identified your target audience and understood their preferences, now is the time for you to start conversations with them. Your content should be informative, promotional, inspirational and should include a call-to-action. Ask questions, get opinions and talk about things to build a connection with your audience. This interaction between your business and its prospects is what makes social media a perfect sales funnel for your business. Posting good content is how you grab people’s attention but having conversations is how you get people to buy from you. You can use Facebook live, Twitter threads, Instagram polls and many more to interact with your customers.

5. Post consistently
After building a profile on social media channels, you have to be active to drive engagement and conversions. If someone by any chance stumbles upon your page, and the most recent post was from three weeks ago, then they aren’t going to follow you, that’s for sure. Because what’s the point of following a brand that doesn’t even post. Moreover, think about those who are already following you, they won’t navigate to your page to check if you have posted something or not. You need to post new things that will appear on their timelines and homepages. Also, every time you post new content, you remind and reinforce your brand in the audience’s mind. To make posting easy for your business, you can develop a content calendar for every month and schedule your posts using various software like Hootsuite, Adespresso, etc. So, if you are a small business, planning to enter the realm of social media marketing, then these given strategies can help you get started and steer your business towards the path of success. In the end, social media is a must for your business to stay relevant in today’s era.