Do you know what SMM is? (Social Media Marketing)

In this technology-driven world, almost everyone is aware of one of the most powerful marketing tools – social media. These tiny apps available on everybody’s phone (which were actually meant to be used for creating a social network) are being used by every small and large business around the globe.

With around 4.7 billion active users globally, social media has become an integral part of our lives and an important part of marketing strategies for businesses. But still, there are some small business owners who don’t know what social media marketing is and how it can help grow their business.

Here in this blog, we will discuss –

What is Social Media Marketing

In the most simple terms, social media marketing is a method of promoting your products or services through different social media channels like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc.

Businesses share different types of content with their targeted audience to meet different marketing goals like creating awareness, improving customer value, generating leads, getting new customers, and sales.

But social media isn’t only about creating social media accounts and sharing posts. It is a broad concept that requires proper planning, execution, and analysis to get the desired results.

What can be social media used for

You can achieve a number of marketing goals with effective social media strategies. Have a look at them –

⥤ Increase Brand Awareness

This is one of the objectives of social media marketing for many business owners. To gain the trust of your audience you need to make sure that your customers know you exist. You can create and increase your brand awareness using social media. With different performance metrics like post reach, likes, and an increase in followers, you can analyze your brand awareness.

⥤ Grow Website Traffic

SMM is not limited to activities on social media channels, it can also improve your website traffic. By sharing useful content, you can redirect your social media followers to your website landing page using appropriate referral links. For example, below is the Pinterest post of an upholstery cleaning service provider which has a link that redirects to the website.

By using this method you can see the increased web traffic in the following graph.

⥤ Generate Leads & Revenue

Social media channels provide different tools that leverage you to generate valuable leads and revenue using social media platforms. With paid social media advertising, you can generate leads, and using tools like Facebook and Instagram stores, you can directly sell more on Instagram or Facebook.

⥤ Increase Customer Value

People spend a significant time of their day on social media. You can use this opportunity to increase your customer value by providing relevant information in the form of social media posts. For example, check out the below Twitter post where the carpet cleaning service provider is informing their audience with an infographic post.

⥤ Improve Audience Engagement

Unlike websites, you can directly communicate with your audience on social media through chats, live interaction, polls, and social media threads, which improves audience engagement. This advantage of interacting with the audience helps create trust in a business. Moreover, you can also get genuine feedback by interacting with your customers. See how brands like Gmail directly communicate with customers to listen to their queries and solve their issues.

Social Media Marketing Strategies To Amplify Your Business

➦ Define The Goals

A predefined goal is a crucial factor for every successful marketing strategy. Before you begin social media marketing, you must know what you want to achieve from it. You will require different approaches to achieve different goals. Moreover, when you have a pre-defined goal, you can easily determine the success of your marketing strategies by analyzing the desired and obtained results. You must have an S-M-A-R-T goal for your social media marketing.

➦ Prioritize Your Audience

Millions of people spend hours daily scrolling their social media. But unfortunately, you cannot target each of them. You must prioritize your audience in order to ensure your post is reaching the right person, who is your potential customer. For instance, if you own a carpet cleaning business, your social media marketing must target the homeowners or a person who decides whether to clean the carpet or not. You won’t get any results if your posts are visible to the wrong audience. Depending on your industry and products or services, you should prioritize your audience and make sure you are targeting them. Using the right hashtags can help you reach your desired audience that you can convert into customers.

➦ Select Suitable Channels

It is not necessary for you to use every social media platform or maybe it is. So depending on your targeted audience and industry trends, you need to choose suitable channels or channels where your targeted audience spends the most time. You can refer to the following social media demographics by Sproutsocial.

Apart from your audience, there are a few things that you should consider while selecting a suitable social media channel for your business. You can take into account your goals, available resources, market trends, your competitors, and budget.

Switch To Business Profile

Every social media platform provides business accounts that are designed to manage business-related activities smoothly. A business account contains several tools that can help you achieve your business goals. Unlike a personal account, you can track the performance of your content with the insights option. It helps you make necessary improvements in your strategies. Furthermore, you can set up your virtual shops on your social media accounts where your targeted audience can directly purchase your products. So if you are starting with social media marketing, do not make the mistake of using a personal social media account. And if you already have one, convert it to a business account.

• Set up a Facebook Business Page
• Set up an Instagram business account
• Set up a Twitter Business Profile
• Set Up a Pinterest Business Profile
• Set Up a LinkedIn Business Page

Create Attractive Profile

Similar to your website your social media profile is the face of your business on the internet. This makes it super important to keep your social media profiles in the best condition. An attractive and appealing profile not only keeps your audience engaged but also encourages them to take helpful actions like website visits or purchases. Let’s start with the basics, the very first thing you have to look after is your profile bio. No matter which social media channel you use, your bio plays a crucial role in your profile. Make sure you add a clear profile picture (in most cases it is your logo). Secondly, add all your business information briefly. Add your website link and contact details. Add the appropriate call-to-action (CTA) tabs that redirect your visitors to the correct landing page. You can also include relevant industry-specific keywords and hashtags that help boost your searchability.

Add Branding To Your Profile

As a small business owner, you might not be aware of the difference between branding and marketing. Branding is creating a visual identity for your business in the form of logo, fonts, color pallet, and themes, that helps your customers recognize your products or services easily. By adding branding to your social media profile, your audience can easily recognize your post. Also keeping a consistent theme for your social media makes your profile look more attractive and visually appealing.

Share Helpful Content

You have to be very careful with the content you share because it can make or break your brand. Having a strong social media content strategy is necessary for you to create maximum value for your audience because the more value you provide, the higher reach you will get on your social media. There are different content formats like text, images, videos, and infographics, which you can use to include in your content strategy. Nowadays, the concept of user-generated content is on the rise; where businesses post the content created by their audiences. You can share content like how-to guides, tutorials, tips & tricks videos, and other industry-related information that can be helpful to your visitors.

Engage With Audience

Social media is a great platform to interact with your audiences. By using the features like live sessions, giveaways, polls, and contests you can take your engagement to the next level. Furthermore, the story feature is a great way to communicate with your audience. Using different stickers you can ask them and answer their questions.

People often like free and discounted products and services, you can use it as an opportunity to bring traffic to your social media. By running a social media contest, you can engage numerous potential customers and can also generate valuable leads.

Keep Analyzing

Social media platforms give you leverage to track and analyze the performance of the content you share. It helps you to determine how successful your strategies are. After all, there is no fixed formula for successful social media marketing; you have to go with the ‘trial-and-error method. You should constantly check what’s working with your audience and what’s not.

Using tools like insights you can measure the performance of your strategies based on different metrics like –
Reach – How many new users (who don’t follow you) saw your post?
Interactions – How many likes, comments, and shares your posts got.
Clicks – How many people clicked the CTA?
User Response – How users responded to your post.

Use Paid Advertising

With so much competition in almost every industry type, it becomes quite challenging for small business owners to gain organic reach. At such times paid social media advertising can help you gain traffic and engagement on your social media posts. Also, this is the best way to book clients on social media.

You can display advertisements or sponsored posts to your specific targeted audience. Paid ads help you increase brand awareness, generate leads, and attract new customers.

While running a paid social media ad, you select your marketing goal and also target a specific audience based on location, interests, age, and gender. Paid advertising is worth it helps you reach a large audience in minimum time. Moreover, Nearly half of internet users say they are likely to purchase from brands they see advertised. So as a small business owner you must consider investing in paid social media advertising.

Key Takeaways

Social media is a great platform for small business owners to market their products or services to a vast audience with minimum time and effort. There are different social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok, and Pinterest but it is not necessary for you to use all the platforms especially when you are just starting with SMM.

You can select suitable social media platforms based on your target audience, your industry trends, and your marketing objectives. Targeting a specific audience will help you get better results.

Moreover, you should use the business profile instead of the personal one, as it gives leverage to different tools that help you track and analyze the performance of your posts. Keep analyzing the post performance and make necessary changes whenever required.

Sharing engaging and valuable content for your users is the key to successful social media marketing. You can use different content formats to engage the audience. And lastly, invest in paid advertising to gain better results for your business.