If you’re marketing for a small business, social media marketing is essential to your success.
Social marketing is a marketing technique that uses social media, such as Facebook, TikTok, Instagram and other platforms to market products. This marketing technique has increased in popularity over the last few years because it’s relatively inexpensive and easy to use.
As the marketing landscape has changed drastically in the last few years, if you’re not using social media marketing techniques like Facebook posts or Instagram Stories, then now is the time to start given 74% of consumers rely on social media to guide purchasing decisions.
What is social media marketing?
As marketing becomes more and more competitive, small businesses are looking for new ways to get their name out there. One way is marketing on social media.
Social media marketing can be a great opportunity to expose your brand and increase revenue by increasing awareness of your company’s products and services using multiple social media channels.
Some of the most common social media channels include:
- Facebook – 1.8 billion daily active users
- Instagram – 500 million daily active users
- Pinterest – 478 million daily active users
- Twitter – 199 million daily active users
- TikTok – 23 million daily active users
As you can see, based on the daily active user counts, social media platforms link businesses with a huge audience of potential customers globally.
However, making the best use of social media marketing isn’t as easy as just posting something every now and then. It’s an accessible and cost-effective marketing tool that businesses of all sizes can see great returns from but the key is to utilise it often and curate content so it resonates with your desired audience.
How to implement effective social media marketing?
To help you get the most out of your social media marketing campaigns, we’ve put together some of the best ways for small businesses to implement social media marketing techniques to promote their brand!
1. Set your goals
The first step in putting together a social media marketing campaign is to identify your goals.
Identifying goals will help you determine the type of marketing strategies that are right for your business, as well as ensure you stay focused on achieving them throughout your campaign.
For some businesses, their goal may be brand exposure while for others it might be lead generation and conversion into sales. A good rule of thumb is to start by defining one primary goal and adding a secondary objective that compliments or helps further achieve this main purpose. It is also important to be yourself and stay true to your brand and business objectives. Inspiration is everywhere but there is no point copying a similar brand’s style as what works for them, might not work for you. Be creative and think of techniques that speak to your audience to stay true to your campaign goals.
2. Choose your platform
Once your objectives have been determined, it’s time to select which social media platform/s work best for promoting products/services in order to reach customers most effectively.
It’s critical to choose the platform where your target audience spends the majority of its time online and to then create marketing materials that suit that particular platform i.e. TikTok is video content and Instagram both photos and ‘story’ videos.
It’s also important to understand how each marketing and advertising interface works to maximise on marketing impact with minimal investment.
While some content can be recycled across platforms, you can’t just repurpose a Twitter post into a Facebook post and expect similar results. Each platform has been created with different purposes in mind which is important to understand to best utilise and achieve your set goals.
3. Understand your audience
Before embarking on a social media campaign, you need to understand your audience.
Understanding who you are targeting before embarking on a social media campaign will help make sure you don’t waste money or resources by using platforms that might not fit your desired demographic.
For instance, an older demographic of users tend to congregate on Facebook while a younger audience prefers newer platforms that are ‘trending’ like TikTok.Twitter is great for catching people’s attention with short punchy statements that create brand awareness while Pinterest is great for positioning your brand as a thought leader with how-to guides, infographics, and DIY plans.
As with all marketing efforts, you’ll get the best return on investment by knowing exactly who your marketing is aimed at and how to get that positive reaction from your targeted demographic.
4. Actually engage with that audience
One of the more interesting aspects of social media marketing is the level of interaction with a target audience. The businesses that make the largest impact are the ones that actually interact with their customers on social media.
While time is always at a premium in a small business environment, setting aside a little time to engage with followers on social media by answering questions and comments can have a huge impact on the success of your social media marketing efforts.
If you have the budget, hiring a part-time social media manager whose specialty is across multiple platforms, can really help to boost customer interactions, enhance your online presence, and improve brand awareness and recognition through very little effort.
In closing
Social media marketing offers small businesses the opportunity to reach out to millions of potential customers globally for little to no cost, making it a hugely valuable tool for increased brand awareness and customer conversion.