With social media marketing becoming more prevalent, it is important for small businesses to focus on social media marketing and making every effort to improve their communication digitally. The reason? Social media has leveled the playing field for the small business owner!
For example, for decades, large companies with healthy advertising budgets have dominated the advertising field. Commercials, direct mail, etc. Today, the small business owner has the opportunity to compete with the biggest and at an affordable price through organic content marketing or owned media, as well as through pay per click (PPC) advertising through social media like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram.
Nearly 90% of marketers say that their social media marketing campaigns have increased exposure to their business. Other research shows that 74% of social networking users follow a brand because they’re interested in a product or service, and 64% of online shoppers say that a video on social media helped them to decide on a product to buy. So how are you using social media to help increase your exposure and conversion?
We thought we would share just two simple strategies designed to help small businesses improve social media marketing.
Strategy #1: Proactive vs Reactive
The first strategy to help improve social media marketing is to be proactive vs reactive. A lot of small business owners do not have the time to manage social media which in turn, becomes a very reactive strategy. Posts are shared spur of the moment and sometimes with no specific timing or consistency. To be proactive, we recommend starting with creating a proactive content marketing matrix. This matrix should include a list of social media posts, a description, and objective of that post, followed by a frequency. Think of it as a list of ideas. Once this is finished, we recommend creating an editorial calendar so that you can list out in a month in advance, the posts you want to share (tip: leave room for the spur of the moment posts that will naturally arise).
Strategy #2: Measure your data
Depending on the social media platform you are communicating on, each offers some way of viewing insights. With the insights, you can see which posts perform the best, meaning, they have the most engagement. In addition to the data available through your social media platform of choice, we also recommend using Google Analytics to see how much referral traffic is coming to your website from social media and where they are engaged the most on your website (behavior report). Most business owners monitor social media engagement as a sign of success. While this is important, just because someone is not clicking the like button or commenting below, does not mean they are not clicking a link to see more on your website. Social Media is not your endpoint. It is simply a platform for reaching people. The objective is to bring them back to home base to learn more.
The two strategies offered above have proven to increase each of our clients’ people reached, people engaged, websites sessions, website unique users, and conversions month over month. On average, we see anywhere from a 15-100% increase month over month compared to the previous period.
In conclusion, it is important to make sure you use social media the same way you would in any other in-person social gathering. This means, act the way you would in public. Be yourself. Don’t manufacture anything. Be mindful not to under communicate, but certainly don’t over communicate (robots and algorithms aside), if you are trying to use social media to beat a robot or comply with algorithms, you are already missing the point.
Looking for help growing your business on social media? We can help! Contact us today for a complimentary digital marketing assessment.