It is not easy for a startup or small business to quickly outrank the competitors and become a brand. Small business has to face a lot of in-house issues, errors and competition also. It takes a lot of time, energy and investment to manage the multiple operations at a small business.
Usually, in a small business, each employee has to fulfill multiple roles.
A small business needs to manage service, operations, payroll, sales, invoicing and fulfillment with the small number of employees.
Other people are reading: Social Media Marketing to Gain Traffic on Their Websites?
When it comes to marketing, small business feel dehydrated.
Most of the times, small businesses focus on SEO, paid search and email marketing to grow their conversion rate.
During this struggle, they almost forget the importance of social media presence.
Social media never ask you to spend hours or millions of dollars in the beginning. Also, using social media channels is not a hidden mystery.
Everyone knows that more significant impact that social media marketing can bring to any business.
8 Best Social Media Tips for Your Small Business
Here are the eight smart tips for building an active social media strategy using your existing resources and positively engage visitors and impact your small business.
Customer Personas:
Identifying user or customer personas will help you in effective content marketing. It also expands the impact of overall marketing strategies.
If you are still not aware of your target audience or customers, then it is time for you to start now.
You do not need to spend months on this.
If you are not aware of how to start, then first go to your Google Analytics dashboard.
Activate the interests section in Google Analytics and find out which group is getting maximum exposure.
If you do not have enough data then you should go to Ad planning tools like;
- Google ads display planner
- Facebook ad planning tools
If you have any specific personas, then it's okay, or else uses Facebook as tests to find out about your target audience.
Publish each post on your social media channel targeting the specific set of customers.
Understand Your Customer Journey:
When it comes to marketing, every small business understands one or few ways to generate leads, sales and engagement.
A company can use a specific social marketing platform, some campaigns or target some categories.
The only problem is that most of the businesses are not aware of the customer journey.
Knowing your customer journey can help you make the sale on the first visit.You may find it hard to get the complete story of the customer journey.
But, there is a way to find out what content is appealing to your audience and what your customers find valuable.
You can use reporting tools to collect the data.This will help you understand the steps a customer follow from his mind to the final purchase.
Tracking:
The first two steps won't be easy for you if you are not following this third step.
Without tracking, you will not be able to understand buyer personas and customer journey.
If you are reading till now, that means you are serious about your business.
Tracking and analyzing data are the two most important factors of digital marketing.Without collecting data, you will not be able to find out what is going on in your business and how customers are responding to your campaigns, products or services.
Install Google Analytics and make sure that you are tracking all the pages.Also track content on social media, emails and other sources.
Remember: The more you track and analyze the more information you have about your customers. This information worth more than a million dollars.
Agile Methods:
Use content strategies, ebooks, webinars, whitepapers, etc. to engage with your audience.
Sometimes you need to increase your investment for effective content creation.
Use smaller tests to figure out;
- What type of content is performing?
- What is the ideal frequency of posting?
- What is the best targeting option?
Small business never has much budget or time to do everything in one go.
It is ideal to go with multiple content options and find out what works best for your business.
Repurpose Content:
Do you leverage your old or existing content?
No.
Why not?
If you are in business from some time or a long time, then you may already have some quality pieces of content.
Test them on Social media.
If you are creating a new email for your subscribers', then link to old or existing pieces of content.
Using content on multiple places will bring better results. You also get more data from various channels to track and analyze.
Your evergreen content will help you every-time you want to write a new article, email or social media post.
Just make sure that the content is still relevant in today's context.
Also, repurpose the content which is already performing best at social media or search engine results.
Learn from Competitors:
If you ask me how many times a small business should post on social media. I never give a number.
I always say, "it depends."
There are so many industries, and it can never be the same for all.
The easiest way to find the answer is by tracking your competitors.
When tracking your competitors, focus on;
- How many times are they posting in a week?
- What is the best time to post?
- How many followers they have?
- What type of content do they publish?
- What type of content is performing better?
Eagle eye concept will compel you to invest more time on research and content scoring will ask you to track your competitors using excel sheet.
Find the patterns.
Plan for the long run:
If you committed to creating a brand on social media channels, then things will start happening with your business.
It is always wise to plan for the times when you will be too busy or on vacation, or you do not have times to do some other essential things, such as content creation.
It is always wise to create a content calendar and assign the job to the person and tell him when you want them to publish new content.Assigning roles will help you live your life peacefully and manage your small business with ease.
Optimization:
When professionals hear word optimization the most common things which comes in their minds are;
But there is more than just these.
You need to optimize your social media marketing also.
Test and optimize your business for everything.
- Run A/B tests for sponsored content
- Optimize content for organic reach
Final Words:
If Social media is not included in your priority list, then you are missing a lot of opportunities. Social media can be useful for your small business.
The best thing about social media is that you need not begin with massive investment.
All you need is the smart and professional social media strategies to leverage social media using;
- Existing content
- Tracking performance
- Grow your business influence
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