When you search for the best small business growth strategies on a search engine, you’ll find a number of ways. Such an amazing volume of information on small business marketing available at no cost may look appealing. However, if you don’t have the time and capital to put the marketing knowledge you acquired online to profitable use, all the efforts will go to waste.
In this brief post, I will try to enlighten you with some simple and easy to implement social media marketing lessons you can apply to grow your business. And the most interesting part is that you don’t need to have a big budget before putting these social media lessons into practical use.
By reading through to the end, you may discover that the resources you have might just be enough to get you started. Let’s jump into the lessons.
Set Clear And Measurable Goals
What do you want to achieve with social media? This is the first question that needs to be answered before you leverage social media networks for your business success.
Goal setting increases the likelihood of social media success. Taking into account the importance of leads in a small business attracted at the right time, create goals that are attainable, relevant, and time-specific. Some of the smart social media goals may include:
- Driving traffic to your website
- Generation of more leads and sales
- Improving brand awareness
- Ensuring seamless communication with customers
Measurability of social media marketing goals is important to track progress towards the outcome you want. If your social media goals are not measurable, it will be harder to accomplish.
Provide Valuable Content
Content is the king. This adage is very true. Today’s consumers are smart. They are not easy to fall into the trap of direct selling by the companies. Consumers want to be educated to make smarter buying decisions. They should know what constitutes value for them.
From food to jobs, health, home, and travel, there is a lot you can do in terms of providing valuable content for your audience on social media.
According to Google, how-to videos are one of the most popular and fastest-growing search segments in recent times. People need visual guidance in their independent purchase journeys as well as other areas.
If you think that posting videos may be costly for you, think of how to start with education content or case studies created in text and image format.
Make Your Content More Visual
Did you know that the human brain processes images 60,000 times faster than words? Visual content holds great importance in learning. In recent times, visual content has started to gain traction in the social media marketing strategies as well.
Images capture attention. When you want to communicate some words that are unique to your brand, putting in an image format will help you to get a higher social media engagement rate.
To a large extent, this has a lot to do with how people react and engage with your social media content. In a Venngage, original or branded graphics perform better in terms of getting increased click rates and a higher level of engagement.
Another good idea is to have a WordPress blog with a theme that resonates with your brand and use it to build & push content that is engaging & customer-friendly. Gone are the days when you had to spend a huge amount to customize the look and feel of your business’ blog, these days, with themes to suit every kind of business no matter what industry or size of the setup, this task can be easily done by anyone.
Social Listening Is Important
Social listening is the process of monitoring social media conversations in real-time to know when your brand name or a specific relevant keyword is getting used. It also helps you identify social media conversations where the customers have used your competitors’ brand names.
You can leverage social listening to identify emerging sales opportunities where and when your target audience discusses either their needs or current pain points.
Big brands use social listening for brand reputation management to gain awareness and take proactive actions whenever their brand reputation is at stake.
There are many social listening tools you can include in your social media strategy. Some of them are Mention, Hootsuite, Buffer, and BuzzSumo. From $29 to $100, you can get started with any of these tools.
To learn more about social listening, consider using some of the best business questions and answers websites like Quora or ProProfs Discuss.
Leverage User Generated Content
According to Hootsuite, the majority of consumers are more likely to view user-generated content as authentic compared to branded content. In simple terms, these are content pieces that consumers create and share on social media for one reason or another.
The important part is that you encourage your audience, especially existing customers, to create and share unique content pieces centered around your products or services. If you do it very well, this can help to increase both engagement and quality generation for growing your small business.
Always Use A CTA
What do I want to achieve with my social media marketing strategy? Creating and sharing content isn’t enough. You have to align your strategy with the main goals you want to achieve. If things are not aligned properly, you may end up wasting your time and money.
Depending on the nature of each content piece, try inviting people to download a piece of educational content, attend a webinar, request a free quote, or get a free trial.
In addition to your main goals, the CTAs you use will help to determine if your main social media activities are contributing to your chosen goals or not. Whether you want to generate blog traffic or sell products, the call to action buttons you use will be useful for tracking progress.
Stay Consistent
Someone rightly said, “If you are persistent, you will get it. If you are consistent, you will keep it”. Consistency is one of the key differentiators of profitable and wasteful social media marketing that often ends with vanity metrics.
Now, let me ask you – can you deposit likes, comments, and shares in your bank account? You already know the answer.
In other words, consistency, not the abundance of social media marketing budget or knowledge, will propel you towards your goals more than anything else.
The role of social media in business cannot be overstated. Social media is the lifeline for your business. It is wise to create effective low-cost social media marketing campaigns that helps you target new as well as prospective customers.
This is a great way to encourage customer interaction and get their feedback on your products/services. Take the above-mentioned lessons and insights and apply them consistently and see where your business will reach in the next 3 – 12 months. Also, make sure you go through the business questions and answers on Quora or Discuss to stay updated with the latest social media trends helpful for small businesses.
