Small Business Social Media
Marketing Strategies
Marketing your small business on Social Media is key to becoming successful. In this article we will discuss why small businesses need social media and tips and tricks to market your business. Lastly, we will discuss the difference between advertising and marketing on social media.
Why do Small Businesses need Social Media?
There are over 3 billion people who have a social media account. Social media is the best place to grow your business. Having a social media strategy in place can help grow your company. Here are reasons why small businesses need social media:
Customer Service
67% of customers use social media platforms with questions and any problems they have. Having social media can be great for customer service and easier for both the company and the customer. Social media lessens the amount of times a user has to call your company for a quick question or concern. An example of this is through Facebook. There’s a feature where users can send a quick message through Facebook Messenger.
Improve Website Traffic
Social Media allows companies to receive more website traffic. Your social media sites are essentially just an external link that connects to your website. Users will come across your page and if they are interested, they will soon click on your website. More website clicks means there’s more revenue. Just having a social media account is like a free advertisement on the internet. Your appearance on social media also yields more search results through search engines. This is known as SEO (search engine optimization) and there are many strategies you can use to optimize your business’ presence online. SEO strategies will be discussed later in this article.
Build Brand Awareness
Before social media, the way to grow a business was through word of mouth. However social media is the digital word of mouth now. Making people aware of your company is essential and social media is the place to do it. A successful business will have a social media strategy in place to grow brand awareness. Doing so will also build trust with customers. Engaging with customers through social media will establish trust between them. That’s how you keep the loyal customers who always use your services or product.
Ads Are Easy
No need to put an ad in the newspapers anymore, it can all be done online. Ads are easier than ever through social media. For example Facebook Ads gives you the freedom to post a video, photo, or other digital post. You can target certain demographics and people in different locations. Social media is the most effective place to advertise your business because of the freedom you have. The best part is you can look at all the analytics of who is engaging with the ad and see ways you can improve.
For a list of more reasons visit 23 Benefits of Social Media for Business.
Social Media Tips and Tricks
Create a Social Media Strategy
The first and most important step is creating a social media strategy with your goals. This is essentially like a marketing plan. A social media strategy should outline what you plan to post on social media and ways to grow your business. A good social media plan consists of researching demographics, setting goals, and crafting what type of content you want to post. A well-planned strategy will be organized and easy to follow which yields growth for your business.
Create Fresh Content
The type of content you post matters. Fresh content not only receives engagements but also establishes the appearance of your brand to people. First impression matters so everything being published on social media should be engaging and high quality. Video content is known to receive 100% more engagements, so that might be the best option when first starting out. Content doesn’t have to be business related as well. You can have a weekly post schedule like “Motivation Monday”, where every Monday you post a motivational quote.
Build Trust
Your social media page should be a place people like coming back to. Based on the last point, fresh content doesn’t always have to be business related. Establishing trust between users consists of not only posting fresh content but also replying to users. Replying to customers’ questions makes them feel that they are being heard. If someone sees that a company listens to people and actually puts that in their product will make them more invested in your company.
Follow a Theme
The content you post should follow a theme. By this we mean the colors and text match in some way. No one likes posts that have no correlation in design with others. A great example of this is the Uber Facebook account. They follow the theme of white and black, each post has the same typography as well. By doing this it establishes your brand’s theme so people can recognize it easily. The Uber logo, cover, and posts all match, keep this in mind when you develop and create posts. The other aspects of following a theme can apply to the company photos on Yelp or the cover photos on LinkedIn and Facebook.
Ratings are Important
Google, Facebook, and Yelp have a rating system for businesses. Businesses with higher ratings are preferable amongst competitors because of all the good reviews people are giving. You should show off your ratings and maybe even use them as testimonials on your website or advertisement. If someone leaves a negative review, reply to it with a follow up to show people you aren’t listening to feedback. Being honest and replying to reviews builds trust. Reviews are especially important for the food industry where it can be the one thing that persuades someone to eat at your restaurant.
Social Media Advertising vs Marketing
Many people don’t understand that advertising and marketing are different, here we will explain what the difference between the two are. It’s necessary to understand the difference so you can apply these strategies for your business is the most appropriate way.
What is Marketing?
Marketing is the business practice of studying short- and long-term needs of customers. The best type of marketing is prioritizing the client first. Essentially, the point of marketing is to make your business presentable to consumers so they can later invest in your business. There’s two uses of marketing, business-to-customer (B2C) marketing, and business-to-business (B2B) marketing. There are also different types of marketing, for example digital marketing is applying marketing to electronic devices. They often use email, search engines, and websites. Social media marketing on the other hand involves social media like Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn.
What is Advertising?
On the other hand, advertising is where a company will pay to put out its message in a specific location or place. Businesses use advertising as a way to promote their services or business as a whole. By doing this, it establishes branding and corporate culture. Advertisements main goal is to boost sales. Companies have control over advertising unlike marketing where in marketing companies have to tailor their business to the consumer. Advertising prioritizes the business needs more than the consumer. There are many types of advertising, for example traditional advertising is putting an ad in a newspaper or tv commercial. However, more popular today is Online marketing where you can post an ad online. There are actually quite a few similarities and differences between marketing and advertising. Many social media platforms offer companies to put up ads. For example, Facebook integrated its own system of advertisement creation.
Which Is Most Important
Advertising can essentially be a part of marketing. Successful businesses incorporate advertising techniques and ideas in a marketing plan. Marketing can be extremely important for the medium to large businesses because they must account to people across the world. That being said marketing should be your first priority. The customers are always the priority because they can make or break a business. You need to establish trust so customers can keep coming back. Advertising is a part of marketing, but you can waste a lot of money on unnecessary ads that may be ineffective and a disaster without a proper marketing plan.
Overview
In this article we discussed why your small business needs social media, social media tips and tricks and the difference between marketing and advertising. You should create social media because it’s easier to use as customer service, increases brand awareness, and directs more traffic to your website. Great tips are that you should build trust with consumers, create fresh content, and have a social media strategy in place. Lastly, we discussed how marketing prioritizes the needs of customers and advertising is more relevant to the company needs. Marketing is more valuable to small businesses because their growth revolves around word of mouth. Marketing is the first step and advertising will come along the way.
