‘We don’t have a choice on whether we DO social media, it is about how well we do it.’
– Erik Qualman
You may have a small business, a start-up, or a lucrative business, and social media marketing techniques are helpful for all.
For starters, social media is the best way to endorse your business to prospective clients. In today’s world, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are the best platforms to find potential clients. As soon as the youth wakes up, they get hooked to their mobile phone (or iPhone to be precise). Let’s not forget, the youth spends approximately 2 hours on social media in the entire day. Perhaps the number of hours goes up when a pandemic hits the town.
Approximately 46% of the world’s population is hooked to social media. Your competitors are two steps ahead if your social media presence is bleak.
What is the best online strategy for business?
A business strategy needs to be backed up with a strong social media marketing plan. Here’s an elaborate post that talks about the subject at a deeper level. Let’s get started!
Covering the basics of social media marketing
Before we move on to the real meat of the article, please understand what social media marketing is and how it helps small/large business owners. However, our focus would be on start-ups and small businesses.
Always remember that social media is going to benefit all kinds of businesses. You can never stop putting in efforts to grow your business, right? Hence, social media is ever-evolving and helps in the long run.
Social Media Marketing is the usage of social media platforms to drive traffic to the main website, build a brand, and enhance user engagement. |
As per 73% of marketers, social media marketing is quite effective in bringing traffic to your official website.
Think of it like this: How are the prospective buyers going to find you? Building a good-looking website is not enough. You need to put in the effort to make it discoverable.
Social media marketing advantages include:
- Attractive new clients/customers. Please remember that there are billions of people using social media. Hence, you have a broader audience. You can reach out to more people via social media posts and advertising.
- Building new relationships and strengthening existing ones via social media.
- Finding out what the clients/prospective clients think about your business/products.
- Making everyone aware of your products/services/new deals.
- You also get to find out “WHO” your target audience is. You can target certain groups. Take the example of selling women razors and targeting women from the age of 20-40 years.
- Showcasing your Brand and Product.
- The information is spread out at a speedy rate.
- Using Social media platforms does not require any specific skills, rather it can be done by the trends and how you can available your product and service to the end users. However, many essential and obvious things you need to learn. Hiring a social media expert is recommended only when you have the budget. A freelancer would do too! As a small business owner, you would want to cut down the costs anyway!
All these are the advantages of running a social media campaign.
Let’s not forget the techniques of using social media platforms and that too a cheaper way as compared to endorsing your advertisement via newspaper/television commercials/radio.
Social Media Marketing Types – What Small Business Owners Need To Know
Social media marketing techniques can be categorized in the following manner:
- Active
The active social media marketing approach involves interacting with the target audience.
You can do so via live chat, posts, holding contests, playing games, and asking customers their views about a certain topic/service/product.
- Passive
The Passive social media marketing approach involves posting articles, blogs, videos, and other forms of interaction. The goal is to garner traffic.
The key is to post updated content for the target audience. This way the audience knows about your social media presence and they stay updated with your content/offerings.
Using Criteria for Social Media Platforms –
Social media marketing techniques can be applied in several ways. Since you are aware of the different platforms, we will tell you how you can use these to promote your business.
- Twitter: You can find every celebrity or politician on Twitter. This platform allows you to share videos, 140-character posts, and articles. Besides the text, you can add the product image, video, or even a gif.
- Facebook now called Meta: Entered the scene in the year 2004. You can promote goods and services on Facebook via the SHARE option. This creates user engagement. The target audience or anyone who finds your product/services helpful can send it to their friends/colleagues.
- Instagram: Instagram has proved to be a HIT among small business owners. Top makeup artists, clothing brands, big jewellery brands, accessory brands, and even service providers can showcase their work on Instagram. The Instagram live video option allows you to indulge in active social media marketing strategies. The prospective customers can interact with you via comments or the DIRECT MESSAGE option.
Social Media Marketing Strategies to Apply
You need to work on your goals before creating your social media marketing strategy. These should be ATTAINABLE, SPECIFIC, RELEVANT, MEASURABLE, and TIME-BOUND.
The goal is to enhance your ROI. This term is used by social media marketers to judge how the cost vs. result workaround. As someone who wants your business to flourish, I would not recommend you buy followers or paid comments.
Your business shall grow – everything takes time in this world. Even Rome was not built in a day. If the goal is to create more sales, then tracking clicks would be a good idea. This helps you to grasp the idea of what people are buying or liking.
More importantly, understanding your target audience should be your goal. What do they want? What pricing would they be comfortable with?
To kick-start your business, you need to engage with the audience via contests, updated blogs/articles, quizzes, live chat, and more. The best way to be ahead of your competitors is to see what they are doing. You want to be one step ahead of them always!
Start building a social presence in every common platform and start engaging your users with your new offerings. This will help you to generate more and more followers and build your community. It can increase your revenue and help you to access this base to reach more buyers when you will be thinking of launching your new product or services.
Once you start indulging in both active and passive social media marketing techniques, you will garner the attention of your target audience.
