Tips For Effective Social Media Marketing For Small Businesses

If you own a small business, you may have heard that you need a digital marketing plan, but you may not have done anything about it yet. You might also have tried social media but aren’t sure if it has brought you any new customers. If either of these is true, you might want to think about these tips for using social media to market your small business.

Identify Your Goals

If you haven’t already, the first step is to figure out what your business goals are. Think about where you want your business to be in five and ten years. You can’t tell if your business is going in the right direction if you don’t have goals. Put them in writing, and create a comprehensive business plan that lays out how you are going to move toward achieving your objectives. You can make a plan based on your key performance indicator (KPI), such as whether your goal is for a client to sign up for your email list or for a customer to buy a product.

Create A Plan

The next thing to do is to make a plan for digital marketing. A lot of people have the wrong idea about how cost-effective digital marketing is. Before you spend another dollar on social media or write another blog post, you need to figure out how you want to use social media to promote your business. In general, social media can help you get more leads, build brand awareness, improve your public relations, add more influencers, or do research and development for your products. Once you know what your goals are, you can make content that will help you reach them. Alternatively, it could be better to hire a social media agency like Socialtrend to do this for you; it can be more cost-effective as you’ll get a better return.

Be Consistent

If you post often, it can help your business stand out on social media sites. This will not only make it more likely that your customers will see your posts, but it can also help bring in new customers if your posts are getting enough interaction.

You should post at least several times a week. But if you can, try to post once a day, around the same time every day. If you don’t have a team dedicated to social media, posting more than this often will take up too much of your time, so be careful.

Analyse And Repeat

Without collecting and analysing data, you can’t tell if the money you spend on social media marketing for your small business is money well spent. If your goal for digital marketing is to get more people to know about your brand, the number of people who follow your accounts may be all you need to look at. If you run a business-to-business company, you might want to track mentions. If you run a business-to-consumer company, you might want to run a contest to get more people interested in your brand. If you want to research a product on social media, you should keep an eye on engagement.

Small businesses need to be active on social media, but first they need to know how they want it to affect their business. Then, start putting your plan into action. Lastly, look at what you are doing and do more of the things that are getting you results.

Marketme

Marketme is a leading small business to small business news, marketing advice and product review website. Supporting business across the UK with sponsored article submissions and promotions to a community of over 50,000 on Twitter.