So many people have started opening their own small businesses during the pandemic and post the lockdown. You may or may not have the experience to begin when it comes to the marketing bit of it. Most local businesses don’t have a clue of where they should be advertising. Some meet with success in the first few months itself while some don’t. There are many factors that contribute to the awareness and success of your local business. Some of these factors you can control while some you can’t.
The advertising and awareness of your brand are always in your hands. Social media for example. Put your trust in digital strategy consultants or a leading digital marketing agency to figure it out for you.
Why social media marketing for local businesses?
You should know… According to statista, ad spending in the Social Media Advertising segment is projected to reach US$173,988m in 2022. Also digital advertising as a segment will account for over 60% of global ad spends in 2022… That’s huge! Mobile ad spends are greater than desktop advertising for obvious reasons. And maybe as the years go by, businesses may have to shell out much less per lead as well.
As most local businesses think, social media is not something you can ignore. It is not something to do only if you have the time or are savvy with it. It is a necessity especially this year. It’s like an investment. You will reap in the future.
Here are some quick social media tips for businesses that can be followed in this order.
- Find out who is your target audience:
This might seem easy at first. But, the more you are able to describe the personality of your ultimate target person, the better. Who is he or she? What does he like to do, how does she shop? Etc… The more you know your audience, the better your social media marketing agency can accurately allocate your advertising spends too. This information is crucial to also create content or posts for social media marketing – be it Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, Youtube and the like. Therefore it’s best to be clear about the persona of your target group.
- Analyse your competitors:
Now I don’t mean that you need to start taking the help of marketing data services right away. But you can definitely start a small analysis by yourself. For example if you run a hair salon, find out the other salons in your area. What do they do? What is so unique about their services?. You can check if they are present on social media or not, the kind of content and the frequency of their engagement. Make a note of all the answers to these questions. Maybe you can even try your competitors services once in a while by walking in as a customer.
- Marketing objective:
Research shows that those who set goals end up more successful than if they didn’t. You will agree that goals are important in our personal and professional lives. But when it comes to our own small business we tend to forget about goal-setting – for ourselves and the brand. Especially when the business is doing well. This is an important tip for social media marketing too. But please don’t confuse your business objective with your marketing objective. Your business objective will mostly be increasing sales. But your marketing objective is different. So when you share a brief with your agency you need to add objectives like these… Increasing the size of your community, strengthening engagement, increasing brand loyalty and more.
- Find out which platforms will work best for your business:
You can have a presence on all social media platforms at first if you just want to test the waters. Ideally this should be taken care of by your digital strategy consultants. If your audience spends considerably more time on Instagram and than on Snapchat then you can forget about the latter. Snapchat is the place for Generation Z, since 78% of 18-to-24-year-olds use it. Instagram is highly popular among 13 to 29 year olds. It’s best to do a little bit of basic research before investing your time and energy into those platforms.
- Create a content calendar:
The fifth tip for effective social media marketing is creating the right content. What works for your competitors might not work for you. Make sure images and videos are part of our plan. According to reports, infographics are liked and shared on social media 3x more than any other type of content. As per Buffer, tweets with images receive 150 percent more retweets than tweets without images. According to an article on Buzzsumo, Facebook posts with images see 2.3X more engagement than those without images. Once you receive some interaction on your posts you will also have to respond to the positive and negative comments in an appropriate manner. See that these responses don’t seem standard, as people want to communicate with a human being when they reach out to your brand. Another aspect that must be part of your calendar but on an adhoc basis are trends. The thing about social media trends is that if you want to take advantage of them, you need to leverage them at the correct time. Otherwise you might lose out on the attention your brand could get. What are trends for?
- Measure and Improve:
And the last and the most important tip for social media marketing is measurement. Be observant. Check if the content you are posting is faring well or not. What could you have improved? Similarly your social media ad team will keep making modifications to your ads according to the responses they get. Your ads and posts can be measured using the various tools available. Take the feedback you receive and make sure to improvise as you create new content for your brand every time.
