Social media is an essential part of small business digital marketing strategy. It helps establish your differentiator, creates a strong and distinct brand voice, and contributes to your ability to stand out in a highly competitive landscape. Here, we share tips to develop goal-driven social media strategies to help your small business succeed.
The Importance of Social Media for Small Businesses
Social media helps small businesses reach their ideal customers to positively impact growth and your bottom line. As a result, you can:
- Build brand awareness
- Find and nurture leads
- Create a community of loyal customers
- Drive sales
- Meet your digital marketing objectives
- Create a completely customized marketing strategy
- Grow your online presence
- Provide answers to your audience
- Drive customer engagement
- Build credibility and establish authority
- Harness user-generated content
- Build your reputation as trustworthy
- Enhance real-time customer support and experience
In other words, it is a multi-purpose tool that delivers high ROI, drives growth, and creates touchpoints throughout your customer journey.
The Benefits of Social Media Strategies for Small Business
While the above list says a lot about what you can achieve with a goal-driven social media strategy, the benefits are even more specific, including:
Customer Connections
Social media is a real-time tool that allows you to remain in constant contact with your customers to answer questions, address concerns, provide a forum for customers to voice their love of your brand and collect feedback. You can also engage with customers in meaningful ways, starting conversations, embracing their comments, and reaching people on a very personal level. All of this takes place in a public forum that contributes to your digital marketing in a subtle, non-salesy way to demonstrate your commitment to your customers.
Showcase Products and Services Authentically
Social media is self-propelled, delivering actual customer testimonials that are authentic. There is no better way to showcase your products and services than to allow satisfied customers to talk for you. You can also use your social channels to deliver product information and advice quickly and simply without coming across as pushy.
Expanding Reach and Increasing Visibility
Your social presence is the easiest way to expand your reach and increase your visibility. In fact, many consumers prefer social media as their go-to first point of contact with brands. You also generate word of mouth organically to find new customers.
Gather Meaningful Data
The words and sentiments are there in black and white, providing relevant data to drive your business decisions. There is so much you can learn through social media, from pain points to brand sentiment and customer preferences to what your competitors are up to.
You Can Set and Meet Marketing Goals
Social media makes it easier to set and meet your marketing goals as a direct connection to your customers and audience. What do you want to achieve today? Whether it is brand awareness, lead generation, snooping on the competition, or driving loyalty, you set goals and use social media to meet them.
Reputation Management
Social media is one of the easiest ways to help manage your reputation. You can remain engaged with customers 24/7 by leveraging technology like chatbots and ensuring you are responding to comments, answering questions, and resolving complaints. You can also manage misinformation shared on social channels about your brand, and generally save face through instant resolutions.
Keeping Social Strategic
The main challenge for small business owners when it comes to social channels is that it’s easy to approach social posts “halfcocked.” We’ve all seen the results of poorly planned, emotional, and trigger-happy posts and how they can instantly “cancel” a brand or individual. That’s why you need to keep social strategic. You need a plan with clear goals and a focus that ensures you are adding value and meeting needs. Although social does allow you to address the subject matter in real-time, you still need an overall strategy that keeps you focused on the following:
- Overcoming and solving challenges
- The right channels to reach your most valuable segments
- Engaging content that resonates with customers and followers
- Finding opportunities
- Remaining 100% engaged
- Leveraging data and insights
- Understanding how your marketing is received and constantly finding ways to improve
Do this, and you’ll remain strategic and overcome the urge to post on a whim. You’ll always have purpose and remain focused on your goals. You’ll also remain more resilient and ready to manage what comes your way in this public forum.
Top 6 Social Media Strategies for Small Business
Although social media does not work as a one-size-fits-all all marketing tool, there are six common effective strategies every small business should consider, including:
1. Prioritize People
The very name “social media” makes it clear this digital marketing tactic is all about people. However, you’d be surprised how many small businesses fail to keep this in mind. You need to put people first, and remember you are talking to real people and need to also make it clear your posts are made by real people. As a result, you need to focus on your brand personality with a tone and voice that remains consistent and authentic. You need to be likable, trustworthy, and engaging to capture and keep your audience interested. Make your comments personal and thoughtful, make your posts valuable and relevant and focus on building connections that foster long-lasting relationships.
Remember, people are smart, a little wary of AI and quick to spot a lack of authenticity from brands. Therefore, you need to use natural, conversational lingo that is honest and personal to answer questions, apologize for blips in service, and ensure customers feel heard and valued.
You should also share information about your people to put faces to your brand:
- Create posts featuring life in your office or at events
- Highlight stories about team members and their work and life
- Celebrate your accomplishments
Also, be sure to include a crisis strategy, so you have a policy to manage controversies and deploy damage control should your brand experience a PR nightmare.
2. Converse and Share, Don’t Sell
Another big mistake small business owners make is to treat their social media as a sales channel. What customers see is a greedy brand that only cares about their bottom line. No one wants to follow a brand that does nothing but fill their feed with offers and blatant sales pitches and basically appears to be begging people to buy something.
Instead, you need to focus on posts that are actionable and educational, such as examples of how to wear a scarf, apply makeup, or set up your DIY desk. You want to answer questions that also provide advice to other followers, and instead of selling products, share brand and product updates that keep customers informed. Think smart, fun, informative, helpful solutions, actionable items, and purposeful shares so that people have a reason to follow you.
3. Be There
You can’t post every now and then and disappear for days when using social media. You need to remain consistent with posts and be there for customers so they can engage with your brand in real time. A rolling rock carries no moss, so you have to be posting consistently so your feed doesn’t become stale. This is most important when it comes to responding to comments and answering questions. You have to be there for customers and reply, preferably in real time. Setting up social notifications and tracking your @tags is essential to social media success.
4. Experiment
Don’t allow yourself to get caught in a rut, posting the same old, same old day after day. You have the freedom to get creative and step outside your comfort zone to see what it gets you. While you need to stay true to your brand, the types of content you post can vary so you can try new things. For example, throw in some short-form videos, share posts from other interesting, relevant accounts, post a link to download an exciting eBook, try an infographic that shares an easy step-by-step hack, or leverage platform features like Stories or slideshows. This allows you to find out what works best so you can avoid wasting time on content that falls flat and keep things exciting and engaging with the things that perform well. Your analytics, shares, reposts, and comments will tell you how you’re doing.
5. Think Omnichannel for Content
Don’t keep your social media separate from your digital marketing strategy. Instead, it should be part of your overall strategy and play a critical role in your marketing efforts. You want customers to feel the integration of your marketing so your brand is recognizable and customers always know who they’re dealing with. Your social media is probably your most important touch point and therefore should be your beacon of information to maximize your marketing efforts.
Omnichannel marketing should be holistic, encompassing all your efforts so that everyone knows what’s happening. Sending out an email about your latest products? Reflect that on social media. Just posted an interesting blog about a DIY project? Share the link on social media. Have a podcast interviewing a thought leader? Invite people to listen in. Have an experiential event at a local mall? Live stream it. This approach not only keeps people engaged but also reduces the effort required to keep your social channels dynamic and fresh with new information.
6. Leverage Social Media Tools
Leveraging an all-in-one social media platform makes social media manageable for small businesses. Your platform should:
- Utilize insightful social analytics and reporting
- Allow you to create a schedule for posts
- Have an at-a-glance dashboard for social listening and reputation management
- Track performance to inform your content decisions
With the right platform, you can take control of your social media strategy, leverage actionable data to improve engagement and build a results-driven social media presence with less effort and time invested.
Your small business can use social media strategies to improve your online presence, enhance your digital marketing efforts, and attract the right customers who will see value in your brand.
Transform your business on social media! Get started with a customized social media plan – contact us now!
