With the enormous growth of the internet over the last couple of decades, the internet has grown to become an integral part of everyone’s life. It has the power to shape our influence which if utilized the right way can reap wonders. Social media has played an inevitable role in shaping the future of this generation and there is no denying that social media will continue to play a greater role in shaping the identity of various brands in the industry. It would be a fool’s errand to give up on such an immense opportunity. With the proper strategy in social media marketing, small businesses can leverage the entire online crowd. Sometimes when business is starting they are low on budget and they may opt to buy instagram followers cheap $1 service and gain popularity quickly.

Let’s look at how small businesses can employ social media platforms to get the most exposure.

Careful Planning

Before you go ahead rampaging into the world of social media, you will need to consider its ups and downs if you want to succeed. It takes effort and dedication if you want favourable results. You will need to figure out your target audience and what do you want to achieve with social media marketing. These decisions will play a vital role in determining your strategy. As an example, E-commerce based businesses will benefit more on image-focused platforms such as Instagram whereas marketing or other service providing companies might benefit from platforms like LinkedIn.

illustration by Amalia Lage

Creating great contents

Keeping your audience is vital in any platform that you choose to promote on. To achieve that you will need to constantly churn out quality contents. Make sure your contents include images or videos as it makes the contents more compelling to consume. By including links to your website or products you will be able to successfully funnel traffic to your website. Not only will this increase sales for small businesses but it will also enhance brand awareness among the visitors and they will start to associate positively with your business.

Advertisement

Social media platforms can be a great option if you are looking for some paid options as well. With just a few dollars you will be given the freedom to choose the exact demographics of your audience. This will help you to target the exact set of audience that you want to; nothing more, nothing less. Facebook and Instagram are one of the best platforms that can help you to promote your businesses at a fraction of a cost. This gives you an edge over your competition.

Analytics

Social Media platforms have evolved into a robust ecosystem. Several tools on these platforms help you with keeping track of your performance. Datatracking is of great significance as this gives you an accurate chart of your performance. This also gives you invaluable insights into the psyche of the customers, use this to your advantage and arm yourself with accordingly.

Be authentic

Building a presence on social media might seem like a difficult task for small businesses given that there are already so many businesses and brands already present on different social media platforms and now it has been there for so many years. But this doesn’t mean that you go about copying them. Focus on why you are different from them and what different things you can provide to them. Be authentic and create an image online which is the same as your offline image.

Connect with people of the same inustry

In all the social media platforms, building relations are important. Whichever social media platform you are using, you need to find people working in the same industry as you are. Even try to connect with people who are ahead of you in that professional world or with people having a big business. You can see what they do on social media and learn from them. Since you both are of the same industry, what worked for them will definitely work for you as well. Just don’t copy everything as it is, but create something of your own having an essence of what you learned from them.

Connect with customers also

Apart from connecting with the industry people, connect with your customers as well. Try to create contact support on all your social media platforms. Also, create a way for the customers to give you feedback on your products or if they want to complain about something. Hearing from customers and answering them back makes them feel valuable. When you do this, you start earning customers permanently which become loyal to you. You need to have a lot of such customers in order to grow quickly.

Expand your reach

Once you have established everything in your local market, it is time to expand your reach of the audience. Try to increase your area of service gradually so as to handle the increasing work easily. You get an idea about your customers who have liked your products in the local market. Then, you can search for similar customers in other locations using targeted advertisements feature present in the social media platforms.

When you are expanding, pay close attention to your analytics numbers that whenever it is going positive or not. It may happen that the strategy that worked in your local market doesn’t work someplace else. At that time, you need to change your strategy to something else like using different advertisements. Work with different things until you find a strategy that works best there.

Increase traffic on your website or blog

Social media platforms can play an important role in increasing traffic to your website or blog. Whenever you are creating an account for your business, make sure that you fill all the details asked including the link to your website or bog. This way if anyone visits your page and then wants to go to your website, they can do so easily with just a single click. Also, people may visit your page just to search about your website or blog, so they should not go back empty-handed as they are a potential customer and every customer counts.

You can also share interesting posts or content from your website or blog on your social media encouraging your audience to click on it and go to your website or blog to read or see the full post. Offer something of value so that people would want to click on your post by themselves.

Ask your customers

This is the best thing a business can do in order to decide what to do next. The customers of businesses always have some suggestions for them. So, if you just simply ask them, what would they like you to do next, or what would they like you to change in your products, then you will get the most genuine responses. You will get to know what your audience really feels about your products.

You will get to know whether the sentiment of customers is positive or negative towards your brand and whether you can improve it. If something is wrong, you need to do a quick-thinking and react accordingly. The best thing you can do is address the problem if a lot of customers are reporting it. You can then tell them that you will be making changes in the way you do that thing. Customers love honesty so just be honest about everything. Asking for customers’ opinions always yields some benefit to the business.

There is no doubt that social media platforms can greatly benefit small businesses. Different platforms have different strategies so you will need to tailor your plan accordingly.