How to market your business on social media

Social media is important for the success of any business’ digital marketing strategy. Regardless of this, brands are not using this tool to its full potential. Although ‘likes’, ‘followers’ and ‘shares’ are important, the credibility of a brand is distinguished by more than just its engagement and reach. Successful social media marketing requires a well-developed strategy. If you’re not sure how to market your business on social media or where to start with your social media marketing strategy, we’re here to help. We have put together the top 10 social media marketing tips for small businesses.

Social media marketing tips for small businesses

1. Create a social media plan

Before creating your social media pages or accounts, take the time to create a social media plan. This will help you establish a clear goal for what you are trying to achieve and will ensure that all your social media efforts support your specific business goals. Your social media plan should include everything you plan to do and hope to achieve on social media. This will guide your actions and let you know whether you’re succeeding or failing. The more detailed and specific the plan is, the more effective it will be.

2. Select the best platforms

With all the different social media platforms currently available, you might be tempted to set up accounts on all of them. However, the best approach would be to start with one or two platforms initially. When selecting the best platforms for your business or brand, choose platforms that make sense for the type of business you have and the audience you are trying to reach.

3. Set up your accounts properly before you create content

Take the time to set up all your accounts correctly, fill out your profile information completely and make sure that you link to relevant places. You can even create specific landing pages on your website for people who click through from your social accounts. Ensure that all your images uploaded to your profile are in the best resolution for the social media platform. Keep the target audience in mind when you set up each account. And think about whether your target audience would be interested in your page, based on what your profile or bio shows.

4. Know your audience

One of the reasons why social media is effective for a business is due to the fact that you can micro-target your audience. Firstly, it is important to establish who exactly your audience is. To form true connections and generate real results, you need to speak directly to the specific audience that’s most important to you. Social media platforms are great for connecting with customers. Being able to attract such a large audience can lead to the temptation of trying to reach as many people as possible. However, the most successful brands on social media are those that truly know their audience and speak directly to that audience through their content.

5. Grow your audience

Once you have a clear understanding of who your audience is, you can start growing your audience. The more people who see your content, the better results you’ll see. You can grow your audience in various ways. Here are a few examples:

• Have competitions on your Social Media pages – Competitions can be a great way to get new people to Like and Follow your accounts, while also keeping your current fans engaged with your Page.
• Give people a reason to follow you – Give both potential and current customers a reason to follow you on multiple platforms. You should aim to strategically use each social media platform based on its strengths and demographics, and give your target audience a good reason to connect with you on that specific platform.
• Encourage tagging – An effective strategy to engage your followers is to encourage them to tag other people who may benefit from, or enjoy a specific post. Ideally, these new people can be drawn into your brand, and turn into social media followers.
• Make use of paid ads – Opt for paid advertising to grow the volume of your followers. Ads are a great way to reach an audience that would have not otherwise have come into contact with your brand.

Incorporating the above examples into your growth strategy can prove to be beneficial in attracting and reaching new followers.

6. Create engaging content

In order to find the types of content that will generate the most engagement from your social media audience, you need to consistently post and test different types of content to see what performs well. This way, you are able to study your target audience’s response. Regardless of your top performers, you should include a mix of different content types to create a diverse and valuable social media presence for your audience that will improve your brand visibility.

7. Research and track competitors

It’s crucial to keep an eye on competitors because they could supply useful social media marketing insights. If your competitors are using a particular social media marketing channel or technique that appears to be working for them, consider doing the same, but better! Do a competitive analysis – this will help you learn what’s working and what’s not for other businesses like yours.

8. Build relationships

The ability to communicate directly with customers and followers is a unique benefit of social media marketing for businesses. Rather than asking for a sale up front, create relationships over time. In other words, build a community for your followers and customers. When people are engaging with your content on social media, make sure you respond to them. This helps with building trust, which will lead to more loyal followers. As your followers share and like your content, the social algorithms will push your content even more and you’ll gain free exposure.

Nurturing the relationships can also help you build a loyal community that will lead to ongoing sales over time. While new customer acquisition is important, don’t underestimate the importance of customer retention. So how do you build relationships beyond responding to comments on your posts? Here are a few other strategies to use:

• Connect with other small business owners or influencers in your industry.
• Share your followers’ content on your social channels.
• Use the social platforms’ built-in interactive tools.

9. Make use of paid social media advertising

Paid social media advertising is a great way to achieve awareness, sales, engagement and even website leads. Depending on your objective, the three broad types of campaign objectives will help you achieve your business goals. We’ll explain the different campaign objective types below:

• Awareness: Build brand awareness or increase reach.
• Consideration: Send traffic to your website, increase engagement, encourage app installs or video views, generate leads, or encourage people to communicate with you on Facebook Messenger, Instagram Direct Messages or WhatsApp.
• Conversion: Increase purchases or leads via your website or app, make catalogue sales, or drive foot traffic to offline stores.

So, maximize your social media efforts by including a monthly budget for paid advertising in your social media marketing plan. And given your business goals, decide which campaign objective will work best for you.

10. Measure your results

Without tracking data, you won’t be able to determine the performance of your social media marketing strategies. This also means that you won’t be able to determine how to market your business on social media on an ongoing basis. Google Analytics is a great social media marketing tool that can help you measure the most successful social media marketing strategies, as well as establish which strategies should be abandoned.

Tracking tags should be added to your social media marketing campaigns so that you can monitor them properly. In addition to that, make use of the analytics provided by each social platform to gain even more insight into which social content is performing well with your audience. It is important to measure your results on a monthly basis. This allows you to monitor social media performance and assess your social marketing strategies frequently and consistently.

Get in Touch

Businesses have a range of different problems when it comes to effective social media marketing. And it’s all too easy to make a mistake and wind up with results that are simply not satisfactory. So, we hope that this blog post gave you a better idea of how to market your business on social media. However, if you need professional help with your social media marketing or any other digital marketing services, feel free to get in touch with our team of digital marketing specialists at Launchsite Digital.