Social media marketing is one of the cheapest marketing strategies for small business owners to grow their businesses rapidly. It’s a great way to build brand awareness and relationships, attract new customers and boost sales. With more than half the world’s population using social media on a daily basis, it offers small businesses a great opportunity to engage with their target audience. With these 6 tips you can launch and market your business effectively on social media.
1. Set clear goals
Setting clear social media goals for your business gives you purpose and direction and is key to achieving success. What do you want to achieve with social media? It could be to build brand awareness, grow loyal audience, generate new leads, drive traffic to your website or even generate direct sales. For your social media marketing goals to be useful, they need to be specific, measurable and achievable and help support your overall business objectives. If you want to know more about how to set SMART social media goals, check the article ‘Social media goals’. (link to: https://bulk.ly/social-media-goals).
2. Understand your target audience
Gaining a clear understanding of who your audience is and what makes them tick is very crucial to your online success. Based on research and interviews with actual or potential customers you can build a so called ‘customer avatar or ‘buyer persona’, which is a detailed description of your ideal customer. Things like where they spend their time, what social media channels they use, what is their age and education level, what type of content they love to consume and how they make decisions. With this data, you understand your customers better and it makes it easier to create marketing messages that resonate with them.
3. Create key brand messages
How do you want your target audience to see your products and services (brand)? What makes you unique? A fundamental aspect of social media marketing is developing and communicating key brand messages that resonate with your audience groups. There is need to master the act of telling your target audience, as clearly and consistently as possible, who you are, what you offer and how your product makes life easier or better for them.
Getting the right message to the right people will greatly improve your chances of growing loyal customers, who are willing to buy your products or services.
4. Develop a solid strategy
It is difficult to reach your destination (goals) without a clear roadmap (strategy). Having a strategy for your social media will keep you focused on the things that will drive result for your business. You know what kind of content to share with your audience and how often you need to share the content.
With a social media content calendar you put your content strategy into action. It allows you to strategize all your upcoming social media content and makes it easier to constantly stick to your strategy. Your calendar should be detailed enough to contain what kind of content, who will create the content, where you plan to share it, for which audience and when the content should be published on which channels.
5. Choose the right channel for your audience
Now that you have set social media goals, understood your target audience and developed a strategy, it’s time to choose the channels that will help you connect and engage with your target audience. Where do your target customers hang out online? How old are they? What type of content do they interact with the most? Not all social media channels reach the same people or deliver the same kind of content and results. For instance, if you want to share video content and target a younger audience, you may want to consider Instagram, Snap Chat, YouTube or Facebook. If industry updates, whitepapers and business articles are more the type of content you want to share, LinkedIn and Twitter can suit you better. Keep in mind that it takes a lot of time and effort to engage on and create tailor-made content for each platform so choose the ones that are the most effective for your business.
6. Measure your social media activities
If you want to know whether your efforts are working and help reach your goals and how you can improve, you have to measure your social media activities. There are a number of ways to measure the success of your content marketing. For example, you can check social media metrics like the number of shares, mentions, comments or likes your content receives. How many people subscribe to your content? How many people view your videos or follow you on social media? Are you noticing that media, organizations or bloggers contact you for interviews or quotes? Luckily there are also some platforms and tools that can help monitor and measure your social media activities, like Google Analytics, Twitter Analytics, Facebook Insights, Hootsuite and Sprout Social. Once you can see the analytics behind your social media activities, you’ll have a much better idea of what’s working and what’s not.