What is the impact of social media marketing on small businesses?
Assuming you are new to social media marketing, and you are asking this question for your business, Cube Creative is here to help.
With social media marketing, your small business can:
- Reach a large audience base
- Increase brand awareness
- Improve audience engagement
- Collect feedback from potential and existing customers
- Connect with customers at a lower cost
- Generate credibility and authority
- Customize and personalize their approach in marketing
However, you need to do it right to ensure you get these benefits of social media marketing rather than generate negative results. This post gives you the right strategies to use and the pitfalls to avoid in marketing on social media.
But first, the basics.
Social Media Marketing for Small Business - How Does Social Media Marketing Work?
Social media marketing is a way for brands to interact with customers socially and naturally. It is typically done on big sites, such as LinkedIn or Facebook, but it can also be implemented in smaller sites built for a smaller community.
Social media is akin to a town hall, a place where people gather to catch up with one another, educate themselves, or talk about today’s breaking news.
Why is social media marketing relevant?
People do not like to receive a brochure with a sales pitch in it. It is a dull way of doing marketing.
Today, consumers want vendors to directly engage with them and show them the benefits of products and services before buying. Thanks to social media, your business has a platform to conduct these marketing activities expected by your potential customers.
So, marketers use social media as an opportunity for them to get in touch with prospects that may already be coming through the buyer’s pipeline or a chance to reach out to an audience that may not have heard about them yet.
Social media marketing is the strategy that will allow you to discuss with your target audience what matters to them and have genuine discussions about pressing issues confounding them. Social media marketing is helpful in all the stages of the buying cycle.
An inexpensive way to market your products
Social media marketing is a cost-effective way of doing marketing. Unless you go into paid advertising, marketing on social platforms is easy on the budget.
However, paid advertising has advantages not provided in free social media marketing. For instance, paid advertising allows you to get marketplace insights to understand your audience better.
But even if you use paid social advertising, you can still minimize expenses. That is due to the highly targeted nature of social media campaigns. You can segment your audience to target only the demographics that matter to your business.
With highly targeted campaigns, it will also be easy for you to track your rate of success and overhaul your targeting strategies to remove unproductive entries from your social media list of leads.
How to use social media for small business - Types of content you can leverage on social media
Some of the most common types of content you could post on social platforms are videos, polls, text, and images. Make sure that you provide content that is shareable and can elicit a response or cause your audience to react and interact.
Content that elicits audience response is content that stresses a point-of-view or throws a question. In that case, audience response usually goes hand in hand with relevance, and relevance is associated with:
- Site or blog – the website that presents the content
- Reader – the person who discovered the content
In other words, who has read the content? And where did they discover it?
A visitor to a site about cooking will not respond to a post about upholstery. But if you create content that strongly argues that chips and salsa are the best toppings for taco salad, you’ll get some reactions from your readers. Guaranteed!
Then ask them to comment or post a question, and someone will have an opinion to start a conversation. This leads us to shareable content.
Shareable content is content that spreads on the internet as audiences connect with the idea or topic presented. Then they click to share it with their followers and friends.
Usually, such content tells an emotionally relevant story with images, music, etc. The factors that make content emotionally relevant are hard to explain, but they involve certain aspects, such as:
- A person’s interest and mood
- Their physical location
- Psychological profile of target reads
- The emotional “hook” used
Emotionally relevant content evokes emotion and elicits emotional reactions, such as the following.
- This organization is a great platform for change. I will reach out to them because I am aligned with their cause.
- This film is so hilarious! I’d tell my friends to watch it, too!
- Oh my, this story is so sad. I will send the link to my dad’s FB wall.
Types of content available with paid social marketing
In some cases, content on social platforms would generate mediocre results. For instance, you realize that not many people are exposed to your content.
In that case, you would think about paid advertising options that platforms like FB, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube provide.
Most of these platforms offer different options, such as:
Image ads
If you are selling a book, you can use images taken from the book and use those images as an advertising hook on websites that sell books. You can do that via the paid subscription options available on social platforms.
Image ads can have only one or multiple attractive images with minimal text. They usually come with a CTA to encourage audience interaction.
Post or text ads
Text ads fill the gap where banner ads will not work or are prohibited. They bring many benefits, but the one that makes them a vital part of social media marketing campaigns is that they make it possible for marketers to connect with the largest audience possible.
Text ads have three parts – the headline text, a display URL, and a description text.
For the description text, use excerpts from your blog or your book. That can generate more interest from an already interested audience.
Video ads
Paid small business social media marketing also makes use of videos for advertising. For selling your book using video ads, you can feature testimonials and favorable reviews to advertise.
To get started with video ads:
- On Facebook, select Create Ads.
- Select your campaign objective. Click on Get Video Views.
- Select your schedule, budget, and audience.
- Create your ad.
- Finally, customize your copy and preview it.
The projection for digital video advertising is rosy. Video ad usage will continue to increase in the coming years, and spending will also increase.
Statista reports digital video advertising in the US was estimated at $55.34 billion in 2019 and will increase to $78.5 billion by 2023.
Want more info on creating social media content that gets shared? Click here.
More Benefits of Social Media Marketing for Your Small Business
Using social media for business comes with more advantages beyond just posting ads. Depending on the nature of your small business and the stage of business development you are in, social media allows you to:
- Create a brand or identity.
- Drive audience interest in your brand.
- Engage with content coming from other sources.
- Get content that works for you.
Social media marketing also allows you to hyper-segment your audience based on demographics, including age, gender, location, and much more.
In time, you will see an increase in the number of views of your social media pages, and by extension, of your website. You will also see the number of people buying your products and services increasing.
By that time, you will have learned many things about how social media affects business positively. You will have learned the best strategies to grow your business on social platforms, such as:
- Set quantitative and realistic goals.
- Set buyer personas.
- Strictly follow a set schedule.
- Understand your audience by engaging with them.
- Set up a calendar for social media engagement (videos, surveys, polls, competitions, and more).
- Use helpful tools offered by Ahrefs, HubSpot, Moz, Birdeye, Statista, and other leading social media marketing agencies.
- Conduct visual storytelling using instantly appealing materials like videos and images.
Social media live stream advertising
Your small business may need to target a local audience through social media. That is possible, and a strategy you can use for local targeting is live streaming.
Live-stream advertising is available on many platforms, including Facebook, Snapchat, Google Hangout, and YouTube. Instagram has also launched its live-streaming app recently.
You can live stream anything to connect with your audience in real-time, including:
- Events – meetups, concerts, conventions
- Personal endeavors – going to a club, road trip, gardening, mountain climbing
- Everyday talk – things you do at home, activities you do on a walk, shopping, playing online games, etc.
Local audiences will love to know that you are a part of the community. Your audience will feel a deep connection as you share the same experience in the same locality.
So, live stream your events or walk your audience with you when you go to a local museum, park, or zoo. More generally, you can introduce new products, do how-to presentations, or conduct interviews with famous personalities in the area.
Localized social content
Social media localization refers to adapting social media channels and local social media strategies. The goal is to create content that appeals to a specific audience.
For localized targeting via social media, consider factors associated with the particular place, such as seasons, way of life, geography, traditions, etc.
The benefits of content localization for social media for your business include:
Customer-focused approach
Today, customer focus is central to any business. Almost 90% of companies compete with customer experience as the main focus.
If your brand relates to your customers, and you can imagine what they think about when shopping, it will help you create a more positive buying experience.
Building trust
If you post articles about local events in your area, you can expect to receive higher engagement and response from the local audience. The strategy helps increase credibility and trust, as it can help demonstrate similarities in interests and values.
Demonstrate knowledge of local events and show respect for cultural values. That is one of the ways to see the social media impact on small business in the local setting.
Is Social Media Marketing the Best Strategy to Grow Your Business?
The answer to this question is a big YES. Social media marketing is the best marketing strategy, not only for your business but for all businesses, big and small.
It is one of the best strategies you can use, provided that you also use effective social media marketing strategies in the process. As social platforms are some of the go-to sites for people who want to know what is trending and what’s in-demand, social media marketing has become a necessity, not an option.
When done correctly, social marketing results in increased brand awareness and engagement with a large audience of consumers.
To get started, create company profiles on social platforms and start connecting with your audience. Obtaining “shares” and “likes” from visitors and connecting people with your material can raise your brand recognition and establish your organization’s reputation online.
Conclusion
The primary goal of social media marketing is to raise brand awareness and not to push people to buy from you. Closing deals will come much later after you have built trust and established authority among your audience.
The long wait will pay off.
Based on data gathered by Statista, the leading benefits of using social media for marketing purposes worldwide are increased exposure and increased traffic. 88% of global industry professionals say that the biggest benefit they get from using social media is increased exposure.
Therefore, there is no doubt that the strategy will also work for your business. Increasing your social media visibility is an effective way to build brand recognition. Also, consistent use of these platforms translates to higher audience engagement.
Want to know more about this topic? Contact Cube Creative Design to talk with me, our social media marketing specialist.
