What Is Social Media Marketing?
Social Media Marketing, also referred to as SSM, utilizes social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, and even Youtube to drive engagement between your business and your customers through posting videos, images, text, and updates. It builds a level of trust between a business and its customers. Around 98% of all big and small businesses are utilizing social media platforms to build their brand image, drive customer engagement as well as sales, boost brand loyalty, and get good exposure for their company.
How Does Social Media Marketing Benefit Small Businesses?
According to a recent study posted by Duct Tape Marketing, 90% of all marketing experts strongly believe that social media marketing is essential to their day-to-day business. This is because around 87% of the general population have multiple social media accounts across different platforms, while the rest admit to having at least one account or two. When utilizing social media marketing strategies, you are essentially opening your business up to all these potential customers that may never find you any other way, even if they are close to your business establishment. Here is a list of reasons why social media is essential to startups and small business ideas;
- Social media empowers your marketing and increases your leads with organic traffic.
- Your business events can be held online without any additional expenses being put on you.
- Sell directly to loyal and long-term customers with higher margins without having to pay the middle man.
- Advertise at a lower cost and reduces your overall expenses.
- Get direct customer feedback and build customer loyalty.
- Build your online reputation by establishing your brand’s message and voice.
- Interact with other businesses and even competition.
- Extend your market reach, including international markets with more exposure from social media.
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- Increase revenue by building customer networks.
Essential Social Media Pointers For Small Businesses
Now that you are aware of the benefits of social media marketing, it is apparent that it is near impossible to get a small business off the ground without having a solid social media presence. Not only does it help on the making sales front, but it also helps a lot when you are looking to expand your business or even market your product and services. However, it is near impossible to have a successful business social media account without knowing the proper do’s and don’ts of social media marketing. Here are five tips to look out for when making a social media account for your business:
Optimize Your Business’s Social Media Presence
Optimization is a vital part of online marketing; whether it be social media marketing or any other, you need your business platforms to be fully optimized to get exposure, grow your business, and gain new customers. A handful of ways to optimize your business’s social media presence is as follows:
- When trying to grow your social media, it is important to make your presence known. The best way to do that is to create a social media posting calendar and post regularly.
- Make sure to stay active and interact with your customers as much as possible.
- Try to keep up to date on the latest trends and piggyback on them to pop up on new customers’ explore our recommended page.
- To ensure you are doing everything right, monitor your social media activity.
- Focus on what the people demand from you and create the content customers are most responsive to.
Use A Consistent Tone Of Voice To Connect With Customers
There is an old saying in the marketing world, “Consistency is the key to a successful marketing campaign.” Therefore, it is vital to keep a clear and consistent tone across all your business socials. According to a recent study posted on Customer Thermometer, 65% of all customers have admitted to being emotionally invested in a brand that makes them feel like the company cares about them. Here is a list of ways you can ensure a great connection with your customers:
- Customers expect you to understand them and their needs, so make sure you know your customer demographic.
- Your brand should have core, clear values and objectives when communicating your brand message.
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- Ensure that you can define your brand’s tone of voice and communicate it to your customer demographic.
Engage In Dialogue And Respond To Customer Feedback
Engagement is the best way to be successful on social media. Therefore, you must read up on the best practices for responding to customer feedback. However, keep in mind that the window of time you have to engage a customer is slim; hence, be sure to address feedback quickly. Here are things to keep in mind when responding to feedback, both positive and negative:
How to Respond to Positive Reviews?
- Thank your customer.
- Reinforce the positive that the review has talked about.
- Compliment the customer as well and tell them how much their loyalty means to you.
- Ask your customers to revisit your business.
- Mention other products or services your business offers.
- Share the review with your team and post it on all your socials.
How to Respond to Negative Reviews?
- Apologize and sympathize in your response to the negative review by acknowledging your customer’s concerns.
- Make sure to insert a little marketing in your response to the bad review.
- Move the conversation offline so that no fallout could harm your business.
- Keep your response simple, short and sweet.
- Stay calm and respect your customer’s opinions.
Share Content That Is Relevant, Interesting, And Unique To Your Brand
Your content should be fresh and relevant to your brand values so that your customers can relate and stay engaged with your business. Here is a list of types of content you can post on your brand’s social media:
- Blog posts
- Industry news posts
- Research posts
- In-depth how-to posts
- List-style posts
- Quick tips
- Photo updates
- Company updates
Create An Editorial Calendar For Posting On All Platforms Consistently
As aforementioned, creating a calendar aids a lot in staying consistent across all your social media platforms. Here is a step by step process on how to do just that:
- Establish your social media content marketing objectives.
- Explore all possible topics that might interest your customer demographic and strategize.
- Research your content constantly, keep it fresh and keep up to date on your analytics.
- Make sure to come up with new content ideas.
- Continuously monitor your results and optimize your social media marketing strategy accordingly.
Best Solution
Despite all this, many social media and marketing experts agree that the best way to get the maximum results from a successful social media marketing campaign is to hand it over to professionals. Indeed, you can easily get good exposure by following the essential tips; however, it is nearly impossible to make that little success last longer than a few more days. This is because customers these days have very short attention spans, and you need to keep them engaged in such ways that only a competent team of marketers can understand. Although it may cost a little initially, having a team behind your business’s social media will ensure the long-term prosperity of your business.
