The importance of social media marketing for small businesses in 2020
Despite large companies with considerable marketing budgets, start-ups and small businesses cannot afford costly marketing strategies. Entrepreneurs must be careful about every dollar spent on advertisements as they need an immediate ROI.
Social media has facilitated marketing, especially for small businesses’ owners. In this article, we are going to discuss different aspects of social media marketing concerning small businesses.
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Social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, etc. have more than 3 billion monthly active users in combine. So, they can provide businesses with an unparalleled audience reach. Many marketers might think that customers are inclined to buy only from well-known brands. Surprisingly, you have to know that more than half of users seek new products to try. Therefore, this is a great opportunity for you as a startup or a small business to broadcast your brand and reach new potential customers.
Many people usually prefer to interact with real sellers rather than machines and bots. It is highly recommended to appear on social media like a human being, not a vending machine. Countless frauds on the internet and social media have made people doubt whether your business is responsible or not. So, you must act like a human in your marketing via social media.
One of the most effective ways to prove your credibility is by educating people through your content. You have to appear like a reference in your niche so that people can trust in your product/service. Try to include useful information about your industry in your content and make your followers believe that you are an expert. Remember that posting a lot of commercials and advertisements can be boring for your followers and consequently leads to significant followers drop.
Content marketing is not just generating content and posting them on your social media profile. Even a well-written, highly informative content cannot reach out to enough users on social media if you ignore the significance of promotion. You have to promote your content on all your social media platforms to put it in the public eyes. You need to think of getting comments, likes, shares and generally going viral.
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Many marketers think that posting on social media will directly help SEO and increase their website’s traffic. They believe that the links in their posts on any social networking service will improve the rank of their site in the eyes of Google. But the truth is that you need a plan to match your strategies in both fields to help your small business to attract more customers. For example, you have to share your site’s content on all your social media accounts. Also, you can join social chats to increase your visibility and improve your presence. This would help your site get more traffic.
Apart from brand awareness and advertisement, social media has another unique capability of showing interest in favorite brands. This is an unprecedented ability for potential customers as they could not engage with their desired producers in the past. Generating leads is a vital stage in your marketing on social media. So, you need to learn how to persuade followers to show interest in your brand and convert these interests into sales. You can use lead generation tools like The Lead Pilots, Metadata, and Pipedrive you can use to collect leads on social media.
The number of people searching for a product or service via social media has been significantly increasing in the past decades. So, you have to focus on your social accounts and try to build sales funnel to redirect people into your website. You have to devise certain plans for each stage of sale funnel and make sure that you are targeting your audience and converting them into customers.
One of the most effective means of building brand awareness on social media is by getting influential people talking about your brand. People usually pay attention to what they say or suggest. So, you have to build a last-longing relationship with the influencers in your niche to broadcast your brand. Of course, you cannot afford to pay a celebrity with millions of followers to advertise your product/service.
The best fit for your case is Nano-influencers or organic influencers. They might have less than 5000 followers. But they are highly engaged and more importantly genuine. They will not market a product/service just for money. Instead, they will talk about your brand because of true interest. Be careful in finding suitable influencers and try to use certain tools to find niche-relevant influencers on different social media platforms. According to Social Tradia, many influencers on Instagram have a low engagement rate despite a large circle of followers.
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Identity is a crucial part of developing your business activities. You should know how to build and maintain your brand’s identity via social media. A long-lasting relationship with your audience is possible via social media. Of course, maintaining your customers is clearly more difficult as there are always strong competitors in the market.
Raising capital has always been a serious issue for small businesses and start-ups. Crowdfunding is a fantastic means of gathering plenty of small contributions from individuals to support your business or project. With an impressive audience reach, social media platforms is the best opportunity by which you can boost your crowdfunding strategy.
Try to reach out to as many potential supporters either individuals or firms as possible to gain money and boost your business. You need to convince your followers that your product/service will benefit them and encourage them to contribute to your project.
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Using social media in marketing is the most efficient means of building brand awareness. However, as a small business you cannot rely solely on the internet. In other words, you have to try some more practical ways along with social media marketing.
Experiential marketing via promotional events is a direct means of engagement you’re your potential customers. Such events require great organizing ability to draw the attention of people to your event.
Promoting your experiential marketing using your social media platforms is a great way to encourage people to join your event. Matching a face-to-face and interactive means of marketing (experiential marketing) and a remote advertising tool (social media) can work miracle.
Bear in mind that face-to-face relationships are still the best way of gaining the trust of customers, especially for small businesses. Online interactions are way easier and faster, although people like to know what behind the scene is. The ability to build long lasting relationships is the key aspect of brand events.
We have described the main features of marketing via social media for small businesses. This can help you to increase your ROI and establish a long-lasting brand identity. Of course, there are still many facets of social media marketing such as third-party apps, growth services, escrow services for social media, and analytics tools you need to take care of in order to optimize your performance day by day.