Need help on how to use social media to grow your business? Indeed, for any business to succeed in the modern era, first, it should build a strong social media presence.
Using social media allows businesses to:
- Improve their online presence.
- Generate more leads.
- Boost sales by getting viral.
- Retarget past clients.
- Get valuable feedback for better business engagement.
If your boss does not believe in the idea of Social Media Marketing (SMM), perhaps you should spend more time with him, convincing him that the social platform will work for his business, as it works with businesses that have already been using these platforms.
In fact, 65% of small businesses are on social media to increase leads. Also, 78% of small businesses use social platforms to drive traffic to their website, and if your business aims to build a loyal following, you must engage with your clients via the social media platforms.
According to the Social Media Examiner, 79% of small businesses use social media platforms to engage with consumers to make loyal followers out of them.
Social Media Goals for Businesses
If your business does not use social media to build its online presence, it will lag behind the competition, as your competitors are taking advantage of this platform now.
Even small local businesses that target local consumers can use social media to build awareness for their business, services and products.
The goal for any business is to attract new clients, and the first step towards reaching that goal is to let your target prospects know that you exist. The next step is to turn them into loyal clients who will give more leads as time goes by and the relationship grows.
And that is what social media platforms can offer – opportunities to engage with new faces that you can turn into clients and then loyal patrons.
Ways to persuade your boss to give social media a try
Here are strategies to make your boss say “yes” to your proposition on how to grow your business with social media.
1) Tell him the number of social media users is increasing on a daily basis.
Statista reports that social media usage is increasing year after year. In 2020, 3.6 billion people all over the world were using social media, and that number will increase to 4.41 billion in 2025.
Statista also includes data on time spent using the internet. Based on their study, internet users spend 144 minutes per day on messaging apps and social media. The increase is more than half an hour compared to the data gathered in 2015.
With these billions of people to target, it is easy to get a slice of this huge market to attract people to engage with your business on social media. However, knowing which people to target is the key to your social media marketing efforts. For that, you need to segment your market so you will not be spending money on market segments that are not interested in your products or services.
Also, before you rush to create your social media profiles, understand your target market first and the channels they use. You want to engage with your audience where you can find them.
For instance, B2B companies must use the LinkedIn social platform. That is because it is where B2B companies can get their leads. According to Hubspot, 80% of leads generated by B2B companies are generated through LinkedIn.
Is your small business targeting Generation Z? According to the same Hubspot source, you can find this market on Snapchat. 71% of these people use Snapchat at least six times per day.
2) You can encourage audience participation on social media
Besides being costly, offline marketing hardly encourages audience interaction. The rare occurrences of interaction happen only when the client goes to visit a physical store, and these can be very, very rare occasions. But this is now a thing of the past.
Today, you can devise ways to make your audience engage more with you with your posts on social media. You can encourage them to “tag a friend in the comments below” or tell them to share your post with their friends and family.
Overall, this will boost audience interaction with your business. Other marketers like to post competition that will help encourage their audience to like, share, or comment. Make sure to reward your audience with freebies in return for their participation.
Be proactive on social media with the following strategies:
Talk about your topic and its relevance to your audience
Do not only talk about yourself, your business, and your products on social media. Today, businesses should be consumer-centric.
Join Q&A sessions
Your target audience wants to know what’s on your mind about pressing issues they experience.
Share other people’s content
Share the content from influencers in your niche. In turn, they will also take the time to share your content with their followers.
Make your post visuals
Do not just use text. Use images, Infographics, videos, and other engaging types of content.
Create polls and surveys
One of the best ways to market on social media is to have varying activities to share with your audience. Polls and surveys sound interesting to some people, while others want to learn through seminars, training, and those kinds of stuff.
3) Social media marketing is cost-effective
Videos, images, and tweets are free to post on social media pages, and they stay there for an indefinite time without you costing a single dollar while your posts promote your business.
Unlike billboard and TV ads that are stopped from being shown when you stop paying the fees, your social media content stays online, working for you while reducing your marketing costs.
Targeted campaigns that reduce costs
Another thing with social media is that they allow a highly targeted campaign for their users. This way, users advertise only the demographics that they want to reach.
Also, it allows them to easily track success and adjust their marketing campaign depending on the results. Thus, using social media to promote your business is really cost-effective.
Platforms that offer cheap paid advertising services
When starting with your social media marketing, study the platforms that will work effectively and well with your budget. If your platform is Instagram, you can post your content for free and at the same time, use the platform’s paid advertising system, which is really cheap.
Depending on the paid advertising bidding model, you will pay Instagram only $0.20 to $2 per click (for the cost-per-click model) and only $6.70 per 1,000 impressions (cost per impressions model).
Other platforms also charge low rates per 1,000 impressions, including LinkedIn ($6.59), Twitter ($6.46), and YouTube ($9.68). Pinterest charges $30 per 1,000 impressions.
Use social marketing tools.
Also, there are available tools that can help you with your social media content marketing at a low price. Companies like SEM RUSH offer social media marketing tools that can cost you less than $150 per month.
Here’s the thing. For small businesses, web-based media is no longer a choice. It is a need, particularly for those who need to make every dollar stretch.
4) Social media is a prelude to user-generated content that brings a lot of benefits
You must explain to your boss the possibility of your business earning user-generated content via social media. First, explain to him “what is user-generated content.”
User-generated content is highly valuable, especially for strategizing for social media for local businesses. It is content willingly contributed by your audience to describe their relationship with your business and their assessment of your business as a whole.
The benefits of such content include:
- It saves the business time in creating content.
- It serves as a promotional testimony of how good a business is.
- User-generated content promotes interaction and engagement.
- User-generated content generates more leads and sales.
User-generated content usually follows after establishing an online presence and creating a loyal client base. So, those two things must be established first.
When these two things are present, your loyal followers will just naturally post comments and recommendations to buy your products and share their testimonials about you and the good that your business is doing.
Work on generating more user-generated content
Some social media tips for small businesses to follow to encourage your users to generate content for you include:
Feature your clients’ reviews and feedback
Acknowledging what your clients say about you while you talk about them when promoting your business or conducting a webinar can make them feel really good about themselves.
Then, they will take more about you.
Host events
Company events are channels that allow your followers to share what they think about your products and services. Give your audience lots of chances to talk about how they engage with you and what they love about your business.
Incentivize your clients
Everyone loves discounts, free coupons, offers, etc. So, use these tokens to express appreciation and make sure you always create something unique and unexpected for your followers.
In response, your loyal fans will use actions as currency, and that means more tweets, video uploads, and photo sharing with their friends.
For this reason, check the trends that your followers follow and try to see these as opportunities to encourage them to generate more user-generated content for your business.
5) Social media allows your business to engage using multiple platforms
Social media is a multiple-channel platform. It means that you have many options on how to promote business on social media, but it might not be productive to use all these platforms at once. It can be costly and time-consuming if you do that.
Facebook is great if you are targeting lots of varieties of people by using social media to grow your business. For instance, you are selling clothes for people of different ages. Then your segmentation will have a wide range of consumers with different demographics.
The main advantage of Facebook for businesses is that its demographic variations are not limited the way LinkedIn and Twitter are limited. LinkedIn and Twitter typically cater to a specific demographic only.
Instagram is also a fast-growing platform, but it caters for the most part to the young generation. It is similar to Pinterest as it relies on videos and photos for conversation and engagement. Thus, visual-based businesses should be using Instagram and Pinterest, and some examples would be beauty, food, and art.
Social media advertising on Twitter can help businesses grow their audience, promote products, and drive traffic to their websites. With Twitter, you can build your account to gain followers and promote tweets to build engagement and boost campaign visibility.
Twitter is a platform where niche-specific conversations occur.
It is, therefore, practical for Twitter users to build their niche by following and using tweets to share trending news in the same industry.
So, you still have YouTube, Snapchat, LinkedIn, etc., to consider. Check the following stats for percentages of usage among small businesses (Source: Clutch 2018 Small Business Survey:
- Facebook – 86%
- Instagram – 48%
- YouTube – 46%
- Twitter – 44%
- LinkedIn – 31%
- Snapchat – 25%
Still, the first thing you should consider is the platform where your target market goes. How effective is the platform’s system in helping you engage with your target audience?
More compelling stats to persuade your boss from Bright Local
Here are eight relevant stats from Bright Local about how you can use social media to promote your small business:
- 30% of millennials engage with companies on social media at least once per month.
- 6 out of 10 baby boomers search for promos on social media.
- The use of social media for marketing is prevalent among B2B marketers, with 83% saying they use social media to promote brands.
- Social media is a medium where businesses can find feedback about their business. About 4 out of 10 people express their feelings about brands on social media.
- One in every four shoppers tends to be influenced by social media influencers.
- 53% of consumers following brands on social media are highly likely to become loyal patrons of the brands they follow.
- About 75% of online searchers looking for nearby stores visit a physical store that same day, and 30% of them actually make a purchase.
- Social proof that praises a company for its services influences buyers. About 50% of Americans find comments like this helpful when deciding whether to buy or not to buy.
Show your boss how to actually find your target clients on social media
Since you cannot target everyone on social media because that will be costly for your business, you ought to find a way to target only the right people, and the right people are those who need the products or services you offer.
Here are the simple steps:
Know and create the buyer persona of your business
This is also called audience segmentation. Some marketers even do hyper-segmentation to really know who truly needs their products. So, they do not spend a single dollar on uninterested consumers.
So here, you ask about your target market’s age, income, jobs, interests, hobbies, etc. Then you ask about the pain points of your audience or the issues they have because that is what you want to talk about with them. You want to talk about something interesting and helpful to your target audience.
Find out where they are
Now that you have your buyer persona, you want to know where these people hang out on social media? Are they on Facebook? Know that the Silent generation has increased their use of Facebook in recent years.
- Or are they on Twitter? Know that 64% of Twitter users are 18 to 49 years old.
- If their ages are between 18 and 34 years old, they are also probably on Instagram, too.
- Check your competitors, as they can be a bastion of helpful data to you. What kind of posts do their audiences engage with? What hashtags do they use?
Also, what keywords work for them?
Is it okay for you to also use those keywords, so you also attract traffic organically using those keywords?
Of course, you will also need the help of professional social media marketing specialists to help draft a template for your social media marketing campaigns.
Conclusion
In summary, the benefits your business can get from social media marketing include:
- Advanced targeting that saves money but reaches the right prospects
- An easy way to build credibility by highlighting product reviews and brand personality
- Working with influencers that can easily help boost sales and awareness
- Posting relatable content that can easily go viral on the internet
- Generation of user-generated content without spending a penny
- Allows fast response to complaints, so better customer service is provided
There is no question that your business should explore social media platforms to promote your products and services.
If you need help on how to get started right on social media marketing, contact Cube Creative Design, where social media marketing specialists will help design marketing campaigns that work well for your niche and brand.
