The digital age demands businesses to be digitally active, which revolves around being visible and engaging with prospective clients. And there is nothing better than social media marketing for this. Social media for small businesses is no less than a blessing.
Not to mention, it is a social media platform where people go to discover your business after Google.
Gone are the days when people used to scroll through social media just for entertainment or to connect with their known ones. Now, people look for brands and businesses on social media. In fact, they binge-watch social media platforms to discover options to make purchases.
And this isn’t just a mere opinion; go through the below-stated facts and see it for yourself:
- Over time, the global user population actively engaging on social media has gone up and above 4 billion.
- On average, an individual spends around 3.5 hours on social media platforms every day.
- The percentage of global social media users is over 69% in the present times and is gauged to escalate further by two to three times.
- Over 55% of users are more inclined towards making a purchase from businesses they can find on social media.
- And, of course, your business has to maintain a presence on social media if you don’t want to stay behind in the digital competition.
Today, we have an abundance of social media platforms where finding prospective clients is not a hefty task but only if utilized in an optimum way.
Social media marketing strategies may be perceived as something that only big businesses or brands can go after, but no, that is not the case. In fact, social media for small businesses can fetch over-the-top results. Want to know how? Scroll down a little, and you’ll know…..
How To Strategize Social Media Marketing For Small Businesses?
Small businesses and startups can’t invest wherever they feel like due to the restricted availability of funds and other resources. In fact, many times, it becomes a biting a bullet kind of a task to handle the ins and outs of social media marketing as this road isn’t straight-cut. This implies building a smart strategy that can provide your business with the benefits of social media marketing. Not sure what it actually demands? Well, read further to know that.
1. Set Realistic Goals
To get the benefits of both worlds from your strategy of social media marketing for small businesses, it is imperative to frame a realistic plan. And that demands setting the goals/objectives that you wish to draw out of the strategy.
Setting goals gives direction and provides a baseline for your business. And believe it or not, no one can define your business goals the way you can because you know the actual picture of your business and understand all its ins and outs. So don’t delay it any further and enlist what output you exactly want to rake in if you invest in social media marketing.
Now this calls for proper research using tools and analytics, as relying upon mere guesswork won’t be a smart choice here. Plus to that, if you won’t set benchmarks in advance, there is no way you can compare the before and after pictures and decide how to modify your investment allocation in social media for small business corporations and startups. If you’re in two minds about how it would be done, then you can hire dedicated resources for your business.
Also, the goals that will be set out for social media for small business corporations and startups must be time-bounded, quantifiable, relevant, and of course, “realistic.” For instance, if you’re a newbie in the industry and have just started taking baby steps, you can’t expect a major escalation in your conversions overnight. Setting unrealistic goals will only hamper your peace, and you won’t be able to focus on what actually needs your attention.
2. Focus On Your Niche & Target Audience
Businesses have to maintain a grip over what their target audience base is interested in. Especially in the case of startups and small-scale businesses, it becomes inevitable to plan in accordance with your niche and serve the target audience accordingly.
Using social media for small business promotions liberates the companies to target a specified audience base and accordingly invest in social media campaigns.
Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter provide a plethora of options to craft a campaign specifically for an audience of a particular preference, demographic, and age.
You need to create a buyer persona to get well-versed with your target audience. Simply put, a buyer persona helps you to acknowledge the common characteristics of a particular target audience, as getting to know each and every individual of your target audience base will happen when pigs fly.
3. Pick The Right Platforms
It is crucial to pick the right platforms when formulating the strategy for social media for small business corporations. With scarce resources, it’s not a diligent choice to showcase your business over each and every platform. Rather only relevant platforms must be picked, which can actually diverge more ROI to your business’ door.
If you’ve just stepped on the ladder of social media for small businesses, then rather than expunging out recklessly, proper allocation of the budget must be done towards 1 or 2 inevitable platforms, and then gradually, you must diversify the strategy of social media marketing for small businesses and startups.
4. Say No To Only Selling, Engage With Your Audience
Marking your business’ presence over social media doesn’t just revolve around promoting your brand name alone. Though it is a major goal, you must learn to engage with the audience and share insights and knowledge. On a basic note, you must provide them with a reason to be bound to you for good at the end of the day.
There is a reason why most startups and small businesses today take up Social Media Marketing (SMM) and Social Media Optimization (SMO) services. When it comes to engaging the target audience, social media is filled with a hub of opportunities. You can organize quizzes or/and polls on Facebook and Instagram, post infographics with valuable and reliable insights, and organize live events to share your insights and resolve the audience’s problems.
Apart from that, replying to your audience’s concerns over comments is also an area that often gets neglected. But if you put a little thought into this, you’ll realize how crucial it is for social media marketing for small businesses as the person on the other end has shown interest in your business.
Twitter threads are another way to get involved with your audience. Pinterest is another platform to tap on for spreading awareness about your brand. YouTube is also not behind if you can share valuable video-based content with your audience.
This doesn’t mean that you totally have to cut the business conversations off, but if you utilize social media with just a hard-core business promotion mentality, you might not be able to develop an engaging bond with your audience.
5. Keep An Eye On The Current Trends
These days, you can never anticipate which video, image, or even statement, meme, or comedy clip will catch netizens’ attention and become a viral trend.
Nevertheless, you can always keep an eye on the ones that are trending at the very moment. If you can utilize the trending content in alignment with your services/products witfully, you can fetch an abundance of engagement on social media platforms.
You need to think from the audience’s perspective. Will you really feel like sharing a particular content in your circle, or will it excite you enough to share it on your status or story? Be it an infographic, reel, or podcast, any such thing that can be of value is worth sharing with your audience.
In fact, User-Generated Content (UGC) is a key to engaging audiences in an appealing way. This will not only help you retain your followers but will also attract new ones for you.
6. Cross-Post Between Different Platforms
Since a plethora of social media platforms are available to us today, the same post can do better on different platforms. LinkedIn, for instance, is where people come with a learning mentality, so sharing something useful and informational here can amp up your strategy of social media marketing for small businesses.
Of course, you don’t need to go for every platform. Even if you go for 2 or 3 platforms, make sure to cross-post. There have been times when businesses do share the same post on distinctive platforms, and while they don’t perform well on one platform, they outshine on others.
In an experiment conducted by Hootsuite, it has been found that typical text tweets outperformed any other kind of post and raked in the most engagement for them. Maybe your next post can turn around the social media game for you. Who knows? That’s why keep experimenting with different posts and get the optimum benefits from your strategy of social media marketing for small businesses.
7. Build & Strengthen Your Relationships
You must’ve come across the term- ‘influencer marketing.’ You can go for influencer marketing after building your brand loyalty on top social media platforms. Wondering how this can fit in the budget of a small business? Well, it actually can.
It’s important to first clear that influencer marketing doesn’t necessarily mean that you need to tie up with the renowned top-notch brands or names of the industry. You can start at your own level.
One of the major benefits of investing in influencer marketing is its cost-effectiveness in terms of both money and time since you need not manage an influencer’s account or hire personnel to do so. Today, brands opt for affiliate marketing, guest blogging, and even the age-old barter system is also in use; how food bloggers get rewarded with free food apart from cash that’s a barter trade.
Not just the strategy of social media marketing for small businesses, but this also amps up the overall search engine optimization strategy for small businesses, which is the reason they join hands with those who are considered as the brand in a particular niche.
8. Pay Attention To Regulations & Policies
Regulations and guidelines have to be taken care of with open eyes while going for social media marketing. Different platforms have different policies. For instance, Facebook doesn’t allow promoting tobacco and cigarette products, so if someone runs such ads over the platform, it may attract a penalty.
This is the reason brands must adhere to the respective policies of social media platforms they are using to promote their business and collaborate with such an influencer or partner who takes them seriously as well.
9. Use Hashtags
Hashtags play a crucial role in making your brand visible on social media. But oftentimes, it becomes a little tricky to decode the actual impact of hashtags.
Chances are, it might still seem like a biting a bullet kind of a task to make a post discoverable even after using more than enough hashtags in it. Well, that’s the place where you need to be witty. Though hashtag integration is very much needed, its overuse can make your business stand in deep waters.
In fact, analytics show that using hashtags beyond a limit in posts made its reach go down. Speaking of numbers, 2 to 7 hashtags suffice the need for a post on most of the top social media platforms. However, this count may vary for every platform.
Another thing that needs attention is which phrases or keywords to use as hashtags. This is niche-specific and depends upon the nature of your business.
While hashtags can be found on social media platforms themselves (don’t just read and believe, try it; type a term in the search bar of Instagram and go to the tags section, you’ll find an abundance of related hashtags), you must not ignore the superpowers of Social Media Listening tools which can assist you in monitoring the audience’s perspectives about your business or brand and determining your strategy for social media marketing for small businesses.
10. Integrate Call to Action (CTA) Tabs
Overlooking the essence of integrating CTA tabs can hamper social media marketing for small businesses.
The primary purpose of utilizing social media for small businesses is to engage with and serve the audience. This is done in such a way that they become inclined towards your created distinctive brand name as a result of this process. And thus, integrating CTA tabs that allow the audience to share your services/products.
Many businesses have yielded over-the-top engagements with simple CTA tabs like ‘Chat Now’ and ‘Learn More.’ The bright side of utilizing social media for small business corporations is not alienated today. Reportedly, 40% of the users got diverted to business websites directly from LinkedIn, which is the reason why every small-scale corporation is raking in business from such platforms.
11. Be Consistent But Don’t Overdo- When To Post On Social Media For Small Business Corporations & Startups
Providing the utmost value to the audience is the one rule to swear by while implementing the strategy of social media marketing for small businesses and startups. The quality of your posts is what actually matters.
Though this doesn’t indicate that you don’t have to be consistent on social networks, you just need to understand the minor line between optimal use and overuse. After all, how would your audience remember you if they’ll come across your posts once in a blue moon?
At the same time, if a user’s feed is overflowing with your published content, be it in any form, they might start to lose interest in your business soon. That’s why you’ve to make this move diligently. This raises the curiosity to know the best time to post on social media platforms.
In general, Tuesday, Thursday, and Wednesday are considered as the optimum days to go for posting, that too, during the morning and evening as that is the commute time for most of the people when they actually get free to scroll over their cell phones until they arrive at their destinations.
On the other hand, e-commerce websites go for posting on social media on weekends as their sales upturn by 39% during this time.
That’s quite tactful.
Nonetheless, what audience you’re targeting is the key determinant of the best time to go for posting. This is so because most engagement on any post can be drawn through the audience connected to it directly.
Let’s say your business deals in the supply of baby food; chances are new moms will engage more with it and the best time to post for any related post is between midnight and early mornings when they can have some time to spend on their cell phones. So you’ll schedule your post accordingly at such a time.
Moreover, you’ll learn this gradually when you’ll closely monitor and analyze at what time and on what days your audience is actively engaging more. Observing their patterns and interests will further pile up the benefits of social media for small business corporations and startups.
12. Get Inspired But Don’t Copy
Social media has endless trends and design patterns. As a small business, it is the hoarding board that can get your brand name in front of your local audience.
In this race, many businesses go for copying each other, which in turn leaves the business with lower ROI and you will get perplexed wondering what exactly went wrong. That’s why it is suggested that for your business, a unique and customized social media strategy must be generated employing fresh ideas to not make you a loser in the game.
Taking inspiration for an effective strategy of social media marketing for small businesses is a natural thing, but if you employ it with your additional creativity, rewards will get multiplied to a great extent. Finding it hard, leave your social media game to Mind Mingles. We effectively manage social media for small businesses and are ready to take up your business to heights.
13. Optimizing Social Media For Local SEO
Local SEO is a marvelous key for small business corporations and startups because most of their quality leads come from a local audience base. This is imperative for small business corporations and startups, whether they deal in dentistry services, real estate services, or embroidery services. Thus, it must be noted that creating Google Business Profile (GBP) listing alone won’t do much for a small-scale business, and targeting relevant local audiences is no less than oxygen to it. By running social media campaigns for small businesses, hitting this target gets as easy as child play.
14. Track The Performance
Also, it is imperative to analyze the actual performance of campaigns over social media for small businesses. This calls for comparing the set benchmarks or Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to determine what ROI this investment is generating for your business. The under-stated KPIs have to be measured to see how well your social media strategy is performing:-
- Impressions
- Link Clicks
- Number Of Followers
- Web Traffic
- Cost Per Thousand Impressions (CPM)
- Click-Through Rate (CPC)
- Reach (Unique Viewers)
- Reactions
- Shares/ Retweets (in the case of Twitter)
- Likes
- Comments
- Mentions
- Referrals
- Conversions
- Share Of Voice
- Response Rate
Analyzing the KPIs will present a clear picture before you so that you can optimize your social media marketing campaign. This will also give you an idea of where your money is burning for nothing, and you can invest it elsewhere. A plethora of paid and free tools can assist you in analyzing these metrics.
The Benefits Of Social Media Marketing For Small Business
Investing in social media for small businesses can rake in these 3 major benefits:-
Boosts Brand Awareness
Can you imagine anything better than social media platforms to shout about your brand name today? Why do you think food bloggers, apparel stores, pharmaceutical stores, and of course, digital marketing agencies go the whole nine yards to create an avant-garde social media marketing approach? This is so because the power of these platforms is not alienated to them.
Being known among the clients is in the best interest of the businesses and marking a presence on social media is imperative for this since people spend most of their time on such platforms these days.
Increased Site Traffic
Creating a brand name on social media doesn’t just improve brand visibility but also provides a way to lead prospective clients to a website or any other landing page of your choice through CTA integrations. This serves as a very useful measure as people who are actively looking for services or products similar to yours can directly visit your site and place orders on the platform as well.
Increased Business
The ultimate goal of increasing business/sales becomes much easier with social media marketing. It makes it as easy as ABC to garner new clients. Also, if they like your services/products, their engagement has the power to bring in more leads. Many business corporations go for retargeting audiences to not let their brand name slip off people’s minds. These platforms also provide insights into the analytics of data which can assist you in managing your social media targets well.
How Can Mind Mingles Help In Creating Strategy For Social Media Marketing For Small Businesses?
We have years of experience in handling social media campaigns for both our domestic and overseas clients. Till date, we’ve encountered and tackled several ups and downs and twists on this road, and we know how to exactly get a grip on the driving wheel of social media algorithms.
Our team is utmostly vigilant while creating a campaign so that it will not just upturn your business’ investment but will also shield it from falling for any penalty trap.
At Mind Mingles, we don’t recommend you to invest in social media strategy with closed eyes as we bear all the aspects and specifications of small business corporations and startups. We believe in crafting such a strategy of social media marketing for small businesses and startups that can upturn your business game with minimal investment.
We ensure creating enticing posts that will not only attract and engage new potential clients but will also retain the already existing ones.
Ready to take your business social? Call Us Today!
Gurleen Kaur is a Content Writer at Mind Mingles. She has presented her work in International Conference On Guru Nanak Dev Ji: Life, Philosophy and Legacy held at Mata Sundri College For Women and was awarded by the title of “Best Paper Presenter” under College Student Category for the same (Dated: 27th and 28th September, 2019) Has a strong grip over creating interesting, unique and informative content pieces for a wide range of niches. Firm believer that words have an impact.
