Table of Contents
- Why Understanding Audience Matters?
- Reasons Social Media Marketers Should Use Google Analytics
- How to Know More About Your Audience?
- Set Up Audience Report
You may also read:
Small businesses have realized that using social media for their marketing efforts provides significant benefits. Today, almost 3 billion people all over the globe use social media platforms. Imagine how your small business can beat the competition if you can develop and maintain a strong relationship with your target audience and customers through social media?
If you haven’t used social media to market your small business, why don’t you get on board? We can attest that social media is essential for companies today. Why? These statistics will prove to you the advantages of social media marketing:
A conducted survey has participated with more than 5,000 marketers, and they have given their critical insights about social media marketing. 92% of marketers strongly agree on the crucial role of marketing strategy. They have witnessed an increase in their business reputation, online visibility, and traffic through the use of social media.
These statistics tell us that if you have successful media marketing efforts, it has more potential to help your business grow.
How can you pull off successful social media marketing efforts?
Plan thoroughly on what you do with your social media platforms. Here are some of the effective ways on how small business boost social media marketing efforts:
Create the Right Social Media Accounts
When Facebook launched to the public in 2012, the power of social media began. Anything you need is in social media– connect with other people, read the news, and search for information– everything under the sun.
With these things found in social media, businesses can surely take advantage of the right networks. There are several social media platforms to select from, but what are the best suitable platforms for social media marketing?
- Facebook is the largest platform, with over 3 billion active users. It is ideal to use Facebook for large-scale and small-scale businesses that want to generate more leads and build trust among their target audience.
- Twitter is best for businesses with target audiences who are under their 50s. It is a platform known for its immediacy. Most users appreciate time-sensitive and trending topics on Twitter.
- LinkedIn is the platform best for building networks with other business owners. It is mostly used for B2B and B2C businesses to create trust, build authority, and engage audiences.
- Pinterest is a photo-sharing platform that is excellent for posting visually-enriched images about your business. It’s best to drive more sales as several Pinterest users are enticed with the pictures.
- Snapchat is an expiring content platform, yet the fastest growing social networking sites. It is an advantage for businesses by offering promotions, personalized content, and providing exclusive access. These features help build relationships with influencers to drive more traffic and build brand reputation.
With the descriptions above, you can determine which of the social media platforms is best suitable for your business. However, you do not have to limit your platform to one. You can even have it all. But, if you will use the following platforms, make sure to have an automation tool.
Set a Goal and Come Up with Strategy
Social media marketing offers several benefits for businesses that’s why being active on social platforms is a great strategy. It helps you build an online presence, engage customers, generate leads, expand audience scope, drive more sales, increase web traffic, gain feedback, and answer customer inquiries.
However, you have to set a goal to achieve these successes. You need to know what want to accomplish to build a certain approach that’s geared towards success. The goals you set are the beginning of your way to achieving the metrics you desire.
Build a team that can help you achieve your goals. Delegate roles and responsibilities to streamline the process of achieving your goals. Create with your team a social media marketing calendar to help you regulate and schedule posts. Include the following in creating your strategic calendar:
- Target audience
- Topics your audience is of interest
- Type of content you need to create
- When content will be published
- What platform the contents will be published
Use Live Video Feature
Businesses have increasingly used the live video feature to engage more with their audience. It has been observed that 80% of the target audience prefers to watch live video from a brand than to read their blogs. Moreover, more than 60% of those people who watched the live video are most likely to purchase the product or acquire the service after watching the live video.
What can you do for your live stream? There are several things you can pull off– interviews, behind-the-scenes, brand events, and more of the like. Showing these things to your audience helps increase the audience engagement ratio.
Thus, do not overlook the power of live streaming in improving your social media marketing efforts.
Take Advantage of User-Generated and Visually-Enriched Content
When you know your audience, you can easily find your way to success with social media engagement. You have the idea of what interests and needs of your audience. Create contents that have relevance to your business. Ensure its quality and prioritize visually-enriched contents.
User-generated content will gain honest feedback from customers that will help increase your brand’s reputation. It provides social proof that puts your brand into a trustworthy position.
Be Amused with the Power of Employee Advocacy
Have you heard about employee advocacy? It is one of the best strategies to increase brand awareness across social media platforms. It is given that your employees have social media profiles, and they have real followers who know them more.
You can ask your employees to share their experience with your product or services on their social media profiles to grab more audience attention and interests. Although celebrities and social media influencers can help reach more audiences, employees pose the same relevance too. They are an approachable and trusted recommendation source for potential buyers.
Use Relevant Hashtags
Social media contents go well with the use of hashtags. It helps with brand visibility, like keywords, you need to do some research to use hashtags relevant and significant to your brand and audiences. Use specific hashtags as these are the words your audience will look for.
Use the Right Tools for Automation and Schedule Postings at Right Time
Social media marketing requires you to be active and present to maintain the traffic and relationship you’ve built with your audience. It takes time and dedication to do so, but there are several automation tools available to use. You have to use the right automation tools to help you automatically publish posts and schedule posts at the right time.
Automation tools help you save time by helping you plan and schedule batches of posts at once. Moreover, it helps you monitor your networks easier and respond to message inquires quickly.
These automation tools are comprehensive, and they give detailed insights about which specific time your audiences are most active. Also, they provide an analysis of how your posts are performing so you could make further improvements.
One of the secrets to achieving success in social media posts is to know when to post. Along with your effective marketing campaign, the right time of when to post is a crucial factor. It will be unlikely to get the results you desire if your posts are not published at the right time.
Moreover, it is challenging to handle and monitor several social media platforms. So, it is helpful to schedule posts with the automation tools you’ve chosen. Even when you are busy and unavailable, you know that your content is published at the right time because of the automation tool.
Engage with the Audience
Although we have emphasized how critical content is on social media marketing, posting content is not enough. Social media is for building connections and engaging with the audience.
There are several ways you can engage with your audiences, which includes but not limited to:
- Start and participate in conversations.
- Share relevant information.
- Answer questions.
- Leave comments on posts.
- Address complaints from customers.
- Show appreciation for customers.
Let your audience know you are there. That’s how you can build relationships and gain trust among your audience. They will know what they want and need from your business through the conversation you start with them.
Final Thoughts
These are some of the simplest ways of how small businesses boost their social media marketing efforts. Achieve the metrics you need by increasing your audience engagement. Ensure that you are making your products and services highly visible to your potential and relevant buyers.
