How to Effectively Market Your Small Business on Social Media

Today, social media marketing is no longer optional for small businesses. However, initiating your social media affairs can often be overwhelming, so here are a few valuable tips for effectively promoting your small business on social networks.

1. Define Your Marketing Goals

Before you consider developing the social media strategy for your small business, make sure you have clearly defined your marketing objectives.

Most small businesses' marketing objectives are about generating leads, building brand awareness and engaging their customers. But your marketing goals can range from providing online customer service to driving sales or other assistive services. So be sure you know what you're after before you start developing and sharing content.

Make sure you have a thorough understanding of your brand, of its values and benefits, so you can develop a clear voice. That will bring consistency and unity to all your communications. Not having a clear identity and voice will potentially lead to scattered and inconsistent messages.

2. Choose The Right Platforms For Your Small Business

There is no shortage of social media channels out there. Still, sharing your content on the right platforms and not wasting your efforts is crucial to your success. You won't want to be all over the place, but you do need an eclectic mix of social media venues. When considering the social channels, bear in mind your customers and your business. You’ll want to create a company profile on the platforms your target audience uses, so they can easily connect with you. Also, consider which sites best fit your products. For a video production company, for example, YouTube is an obvious choice.

While Facebook still leads the way for small businesses and is still the fastest growing social network, less than half of small businesses use Instagram, YouTube, and Twitter to market their brands. Meanwhile, less than one-third of owners are taking advantage of LinkedIn and Snapchat.

3. Everybody Needs a Village: Build Your Community

Instead of trying to get as many followers as possible, focus on finding prospects who are curious, loyal and engaged. Then keep them interested and interact with them daily. These people are more likely to repost your content, like your posts and become customers.

When you build a community around your brand, the people within that community will engage with each other and organically promote your content. If the budget allows you, try reaching out to some influential social media users, asking them to help you by reviewing a product or mentioning you in their communications. As it stands, Influencer marketing is the fastest-growing method for customer acquisition in the digital world.

If the budget doesn't allow you to team up with Lady Gaga, try partnering with micro-influencers to increase your product credibility. This kind of influencer won't have millions of followers, but they will post content about your brand for a few hundred dollars or even for some practical benefits.

4. Don't Over-Promote

Don't approach social media as traditional advertising. The online community has little tolerance for self-promoters who view social media as a means to free advertising. Hence, most entrepreneurs face a challenge when it comes to finding the right balance in using social media to engage and promote. You need to create content that people will enjoy, want to see, and learn from it.

Self-promotion is also welcome every once in a while. Some marketers swear by the one-in-seven rule, which says that for every one direct promotional post, six others should be content-based. In these other six posts, you could post content, comment on current events or ask a question. When it comes to the frequency of posting, here's how frequently small businesses are posting on social media.

5. Think of Friends With Benefits

Once you positioned yourself out there and made your voice heard, the most important thing is to provide value to your followers. Give them something useful, like handy information, something that makes them laugh or validate their feelings, values or lifestyle or simply entertains. Whenever you're about to share a message with your followers, think about what's in it for them. If there's no benefit for them, then don't post it at all.

With about 3 billion active users, social media is indeed a goldmine for new business. Master the affair of "friendship with benefits," and you'll be a big step closer to a successful social media marketing campaign.

6. Capitalize on Video & Storytelling

Today's consumers want to see more video. Because of this behavioural shifting, 87% of marketers are using video today. Consequently, Google introduced video on SERPs for informational and educational queries: good old "How to" and "What is" style headings - and ready to click; it will always show up at the top of the rankings for this type of queries. Visual content stands out as people browse through their social feeds, so they're more likely to view it and engage with it. Create compelling, narrative-driven videos to engage your followers.

Your small business needs to use social media to thrive and stay relevant in today’s day and age. Make sure you keep up with the latest trends and apply them thoughtfully to your online marketing strategy.

If you’re a small business trying to get started with the social affairs and feeling overwhelmed, contact Outreach Local to learn more about how to use social media for your business and stand out in a competitive online world.