There’s no doubt that social media has become an essential for small businesses; an area where technology, creativity and strategies meet.
Social media has paved the way for small businesses to reach wider audiences, present their brand efficiently, strengthen their customer relations and increase their sales by learning the ins and outs of this realm.
Despite the many success stories there are regarding using social media as a marketing tool, other brand owners are overwhelmed by the idea. Nearly half of small businesses don’t actively use social media to promote their business—and an additional 25% say they have no plans to do so in the future.
A little knowledge and background are probably the only things needed to convince these skeptics to start utilizing social media to their business’ advantage.
Ultimately, social media serves as an avenue for
· Branding. As stated earlier, with strategic creativity you can present your company to the world to achieve targeted results.
· Grow brand awareness. Be consistent and purposeful about the stuff you are putting up online you can guarantee that people will start talking about your brand.
· Increasing your traffic. Having a social media account, whether it’s Facebook, Instagram or TikTok, linked to your website will tremendously increase traffic.
Now that we’ve covered why social media is extremely beneficial for small brand owners, it’s time to discuss how these pleasant results can be achieved.
Any marketing strategy has to start with generating brand recognition and one of the best features of social media is it can connect your brand to millions of people instantaneously. It can make people look at your brand even if they don’t know your brand yet. However, it obviously will help a lot if they do.
The use of visual elements is guaranteed to pique your target market’s interest in your brand. Make sure your logo is easy to catch on your page, but not too loud that it gets annoying. Profile photos and cover photos are also important factors involved in gaining brand recognition.
After getting more people to recognize your brand, you have to be persistent with the content you post. Why? Because you want people to continue following your business and attract potential customers at the same time.
Ever heard of social listening?
If you want to keep your customers engaged, take time to read the atmosphere on social media and get to know your target audience. What topics do they talk about? What’s the biggest trend going around at the moment? What content can match the tone and style of your audience?
Doing this can help you create relevant content that can attract attention and generate interesting conversations. In the end, your audience will feel connected to your brand which brings us to another crucial subject: customer relations.
Building a healthy vendor-seller relationship has never been easier with social media.
Once you create a social media account for your small business, consistence is key. The same way social media can quickly show your brand to a large amount of people, it can also give you their response and feedback just as fast. Make sure you answering queries and interact with customers on your page as often and as promptly as you can. By doing so, your customers will feel validated and heard.
More often than not, when the company is taking a little too long to reply on a customer’s messages, the customers lose engagement and it is definitely not good for the brand. Needless to say, keeping customers happy should be at the top of your priority list.
When you secure customer relations, you can start sharing your brand story.
This circles back to the need for building brand identity. You can use customer testaments to show that your products or services are effective and this can inspire potential clients to try them out themselves.
Aside from sharing customer testaments, you can also show advocacies or causes your business supports.
This will show people what your brand is all about and has the potential to catch the attention of people who share the same interests. Who knows, maybe in the long run it can also attract business deals?
Cleverly plan your social media content if you are aiming for long term results.
Lastly, the subject of boosting website traffic is found on the more technical side of social media. Social media channels allow for more diverse inbound traffic streams. Therefore, it’s more likely for social media to connect more customers directly to your site because these people see your business through this type of marketing.