How To Use Social Media Marketing For Small Businesses

Social media marketing has become part of every business and an important part of most sales strategies in big and small organizations.

Smart business owners have taken social media as part of their marketing and have made huge gains.

What are the benefits of social media marketing for businesses?

Social media marketing benefits for businesses:

• Get attention for your business
• Increased brand awareness
• Build a strong community for your business
• Provide quicker customer service 24/7
• Advertise to a broader audience
• Increase website traffic from social media channels
• Generate leads from social media
• Generate more sales directly from social media

There’s no doubt that Social media management and marketing are super important for your business and its overall digital marketing efforts.

Other, benefits of social media marketing see the Hootsuite list.

If you are ready to jumpstart your social media marketing, keep on reading and take notes.

Set clear social media marketing goals

Knowing what you want to achieve or work towards is the starting point with your social media success.

A lot of business owners make the mistake of using social media without knowing what they are getting from it. Having likes, and followers is nice and all, but what’s the point of all that if it doesn’t contribute or benefit the growth of your business.

If you as the owner doesn’t know what you want, how are you planning to achieve the right results?

Social media analytics work best if you have a purpose for your business social media.

Your business goals should align with your social media marketing, to best work towards your overall monthly or yearly marketing plans.

Write your goals and make sure they are realistic and attainable. There’s nothing worse than business owners who make up goals and set unrealistic expectations.

Examples of social media goals for businesses:

• Increase followers by 35% each month
• Get 10 – 20 high leads from Instagram or Facebook account monthly
• Increase brand awareness 60% first term
• Drive traffic from content to specific products/services offerings
• Promote online shop and drive 20% sales directly from social media

Use numbers on your goals to properly measure results. Have deadlines, and make them specific.

Do a social media audit for all your business accounts

A social media audit helps you research and learn about the metrics of your accounts. Understanding what’s going on behind the curtains of all your social media accounts will be a good benchmark for your new social media marketing goals and able to track if you making progress and how quick or slow that progress is happening.

A social media audit can be a basic report with the important metrics, or it can be a very well detailed breakdown of all the key metrics for your business.

Do not compare your accounts with your competitors. This is the part you focus completely on your business social media marketing accounts to have the best foundation for any strategy moving forward.

Social media audit includes the following:

• Accounts names and number of followers
• Engagement metrics organic and paid (separately)
• The Demographic information
• Content metrics, best performing post and post type (Images, Video, Blog, GIF etc.)
• Competitors analysis

Once you have gathered all the information from your social media audit. You will have all the data to start making successful improvements to your business accounts.

How to find your target audience

Finding your target audience on social media can be tricky. However, it is very crucial to growing a community and a loyal fan base. Social media business accounts with random followers don’t have a strong engagement, with low reach and conversion rate.

Use this simple formula to identify your ideal audience.

Break it down into three(3) categories. That will allow you to know who, what, and where about your target audience.

How to find your social media target audience – using content:

• Test the audience you think is your target.
• Test the audience you think may be your target.
• Test the audience you don’t think it’s your target.
• Listen to all the feedback from all three (3) groups and you will find your real target.

Break down all the information into your business audience categories to what best fits your business and what you want to achieve with social media.

Understanding your audience will help you create the best content, strategies and voice for your brand/business.

Create a social media strategy

Posting what other businesses are posting on social media because you saw how another business is succeeding on their platforms. Doesn’t mean the content type, scheduling, and strategy will work for you. All that it will do is make your accounts look duplicated and not original.

Followers are not interested in duplicates and copycats. Be original, authentic, or do it better than anyone before you.

It is difficult to rebuild reputation on social media with today’s users.

Come up with the strategy that best fits your business goals. It’s true that it is difficult for most businesses to mix their social media goals, with their business goals.

Most business owners forget that industries don’t find success the same way on social media.

Restaurants/hotels social media accounts tend to grow faster than construction/retail social accounts. Understanding how your industry performs on social media will help you avoid obsessing over followers and setting unrealistic expectations when making your goals or hiring a social media agency to manage your social media accounts.

Also understanding that some industry accounts don’t grow fast will help you focus your strategy on other more important things valuable to your success and business growth than simply building followers.

Building a social media strategy that focuses more on building a community. Is worth more to your business than increasing followers these days. You need people or a community that supports your brand online. They will talk about your business day and night, they will buy your products or services, they will expect things from you and mostly promote the business for you.

There’s a difference between a social media strategy and a content strategy.

Social media content strategy is based on:

• Your ideal customers/clients – what they need and what they want to know.
• Your expertise – what makes you the better option for them.
• Your business foundation – who you help, your business branding etc.

When you create content on social media depending on your platform, you want to make sure that content is going to actually resonate with your real customers/clients and attract them to take some sort of action.

Social media marketing is more than reminding people to buy from you but to choose you over another business, your competitors.

Social media marketing is not only about selling to your audience

How do you feel when someone tells you to buy something you were planning to buy.

It’s human nature to refuse to do what others want you to do. Traditional marketing has transformed over the years because people refuse to buy what you want them to buy unless they have total brand loyalty to you.

To overcome this, start by establishing connections with your audience. Engaging

with them through social media and building real connections and relationships. You don’t have to spend the rest of your day on social media engagement

with your followers. Therefore, you need an engagement strategy that will keep you consistent and avoid burnouts in the long run.

These days it’s more difficult to build real relationships because everyone wants to be the best or seen as a leader.

However, this does not mean don’t sell. It means you must be more strategical with your sales posts and approach on social media.

As you can see in this study about what consumers find annoying on social media. Insight made by sprout social.

 

Be social on social media and connect with ideal customers

If you want customers or other businesses to connect with you at a personal level. Then, be the one to start building those connections. Socialize as you would in real life.

Everyone wants results, growth, viral content but no one wants to do the work to achieve all that.

Not being direct with your sales on social media does not mean don’t sell your products or services to your audience/followers.

Traditional direct selling does not work on social media. Well not enough without coming off as annoying and pushy.

Instead of throwing your offers randomly to your social media audience. Try personalized social media selling.

This process can start way before you even start making your paid campaigns.

By using content marketing to market and promote your business offerings before you start showing up on feeds with untargeted paid ads.

Content Marketing builds trust with your community.

 

Combine marketing, sales and content strategy to put your product/service in front of your audience.

Social media for businesses is meant to grow or benefit your business in one way or another.

That’s why this part also includes making sure that your landing pages or website is designed to convert or make people take action to any call to action you have on your website.

Create a great offer that will convert your followers into buying customers. Use your content to build trust with your ideal community, show why you are the better option through your content.

Engagement is great but conversions are better. Here you can find how to drive conversions from social media.

Content should be created for the platform you plan to use. Re-sharing the same content on all platforms won’t give you the best results you want.

Promotion is still important in today’s social media. You can create content with all the viral tactics and still not get anywhere. “Small businesses make the mistake of posting and hoping someone sees their post”.

This is a huge mistake a lot of business owners do with their social media. Just posting is not enough anymore.

You need to attract the right people: On social media

Most business owners assume that if they can have more followers it means more success.

It’s one thing to have followers, and it’s another to have an audience full of your ideal customers/clients.

Use this checklist to get you started:

1. Be clear on who your ideal customers/clients are.
2. Be clear on what you do.
3. Make sure you understand your audience very well.
4. Create content that will help these clients/customers in some way or another.
5. Don’t be afraid to give before asking.

How to repurpose content to other social media platforms

If you don’t have much content and want to reuse the same content on other platforms try this out.

Create one valuable content and after, distribute it into different platforms using different content types of the same original content. Here’s an example:

• Website content from a video/infographic into a blog/article. If you are great with video content. Convert that video into a blog. Many people still prefer reading blogs.
• LinkedIn content from your carousel designs into a single image post or caption post.
• Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest do the same, only in this case include SEO titles and descriptions to your content.

Understand what is each platform purpose

For community building use these platforms:

• Instagram
• Linkedin
• Twitter
• Facebook
• TikTok
• Email

For search engine benefits use these platforms:

• Youtube
• Facebook
• Pinterest
• Website

Build trust on social media

The reason customers/clients don’t buy from you is simply that they don’t trust you.

They don’t trust that you can help them achieve their goals.

Use your content to show your value and social proof in a creative way to show your expertise and trustworthiness.

How do you build trust on social media?

1. Build trust by showing up as an expert or the better option in your industry. Show them how great you are. Show off your expertise.
2. Build trust through your content – Show your audience that you understand their problems and you are able to solve them. Show them the experiences of choosing you.
3. Build trust by showing up regularly – it is part of the most important things to do to build trust on social media. No one trusts someone who is active once a month on social media. Be consistent and create a habit for your ideal audience to expect you to show up.

Once you have your social media marketing strategy ready: You need to sell.

At this point, you should have an engaged and active audience.

Now it’s time to give your audience that little push to buy your services/products.

Assumptions are the cause of failure for many business social media accounts. Business owners or inexperienced agencies managing business accounts assume that people know what you do or offer.

Don’t assume, remind them constantly what your business service/product is.

Show them the value you are providing and the main transformation they will get if they buy from you.

It’s about converting your social media followers into buying customers/clients.

Conclusion

Social media marketing can be very confusing, especially if you follow everything you are told to do and still do not get the results you wanted. Social media can be hard, but the benefits of having social media for your business can not be ignored anymore. Businesses ignoring social media are losing to their competitors.

Social media may be fun, but for most businesses is about getting leads, reaching more customers, selling more online, targeting bigger audiences, increasing sales etc.

Understand why you are on social media and remember it takes time to benefit from social media marketing. If you looking for quick results try using social media ads with a high budget.

Make your audience a top priority and not forget that social media is meant to connect people through conversations. Make time engaging with others, and you will start seeing results.