Content – The Backbone of Social Media Marketing for Small Business

Social Media is NOTHING without the content that makes it interesting for its users.

Content truly is the backbone for ALL of the other activities that make up your social media plan.

And having great content can make all the difference when it comes sot having the best reach and engagement for your brand.

This helps you to build MORE loyalty and thus drive MORE sales.

If you have been marketing for a while, chances are you have content strategies in place ALREADY that includes things.

For examples, like your email newsletter, blog posts, your website, and downloadable content like eBooks.

Social content is different. It usually serves as the vehicle to GET people to those more extended pieces of content.

Or you can provide smaller, digestible bits of information that help expose your brand and your values to customer and prospects.

The Basics of Social Media Marketing Companies for Small Business

The most significant difference between social content and traditional form of content is that social content can be read and watched in the places and times that people CHOOSE.

There are three main reasons why people use social media.

Fundamentally, they want to be INFORMED, ENTERTAINED and CONNECTED.

Social media helps people to feel INFORMED by assisting them to learn new things, stay up-to-date on topics that matter to them, and discover new ideas and trends.

In fact, two-thirds of the people worldwide are getting news from social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and even Snapchat.

Social media helps people to feel entertained by assisting them to find and keep up with the entertainers, shows and performance-and share and consume fascinating articles and videos.

It is no wondering there such an emphasis on video content on social: entertainment and video is the key to keeping users engaged.

Social media helps people to feel CONNECTED by removing many of the typical barriers to communication.

This allowing people to contact anyone in their persona; or professional networks whenever, and from wherever.

According to the Pew Research Centre, there 67% of social media users say that staying in touch with current friends and family members.

This is a primary reason they use social media to reconnect with OLD friends.

Social media helps people share, comment, and take part in a global conversation that goes BEYOND just the people they are friends with.

It is up to you to determine which type of interaction your audience is looking for, and how you will provide it to them through the content you create.

Social Media Strategies – The Best Social Media Marketing Plan for Small Business

Indeed, creating a promotional plan that takes advantage of social and digital technologies will help you to shape the conversation, build loyalty, and attract new customers and partners.

Social media should not replace other inbound promotional methods like email, events or public relations.

But instead, should augment them, offering another set of marketing channel for you to explore.

Besides, there are many advantages to having a social media strategy for the small business.

It will help you expand your other marketing efforts.

So, your content had the chance to be seen by a wide audience and hopefully, the right audience.

It is also will help you to build brand awareness.

Now, gone are the days when your only way to build that same awareness was through billboards or magazine and television ads.

This is why social media is the best platform for the small business to sprout in this rat-race business world.

The Best Social Media Marketing Tips for Small Business

With social media, you can bring your brand content directly to your customers, partners, and prospects.

Now, you can be where your audience already is.

Social media is the crucial driver for word of mouth, one of the most powerful ways to connect with your audience.

In a matter of fact, Nielsen reports that 71% of consumers who have a great social media service experience with the brand that is likely to recommend it to others.

Additionally, social media helps you to attract buyers to your products and services.

And it gives you the ability to directly have conversations with those individuals at the time and place of their choosing.

It sounds like a lot of opportunities, doesn’t it?

Inbound Marketing: The Alternative of Social Media Marketing Ideas for Small Business

Social media is, in many ways, the ultimate way to do inbound marketing.

That’s because it’s a one-to-one medium, which gives you and your company the chance to market in a direct but in a very human way.

That brings us to one of the most critical parts of your social media strategy to the small business.

It’s also the same thing that sits at the heart of your inbound marketing strategy: the buyer persona.

The buyer persona helps you determine who your ideal customer is.

By understanding who you want to reach will guide you in a variety of ways.

From choosing the right social media platforms to use, to creating the best mix of content to share, to be able to target advertising to the right audience.

It is a part of strategies and maps to grow your small business in the digital platform.

Make sure you understand all the basic demographics of your buyer persona like age, gender, income, occupation, interests, motivations and objections.

But if you can, also go a few steps further and dig into their psychographics- which websites they visit, which online shops they frequent, and which social sites they like best.

In shorts, social media gives you the ability to be more personal and home in on the right type of persona for your products and services.

So, the more you know, the better you could target social audience.

There is one other crucial piece of the social media promotion puzzle: Aligning your social strategy to your business objectives,

Having business goals and objectives in place will make it easier for you to create social media goals for the small business that will transform viewers and readers into buyers.

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What is All about Social Media Software?

That goes without saying, social media is all about being quick and responsive these days.

With the progressively explosive and sustained popularity of social media, social media marketing has emerged as one of the core components of small business marketing strategies.

For your information, there are 61% of small business use social media as a part of their overall marketing strategy.

To stay relevant and competitive in the field, small business needs to invest in social media marketing software.

However, most of the small business only jump to the gun and purchase a full suite of social media management software out of the gate.

Ultimately, it only ends up using just about half of the features.

That is such a waste of resources.

And that is a big no in the business world!

What You Can Do with Automated Social Media Marketing Software

There is a common misconception about automation tools which to make social media marketing a completely hands-off process.

But, this is not the case.

While some social media automation tolls did save you the time and effort, it is not going to replace what needs to be done by a human.

Here is what actually can be done with automation tool:

• Schedule and optimise the posts for the most engagement.
• Curate content form blogs you love.
• View reports for valuable insights across multiple networks.
• Create custom responses to common customer queries with chatbots.

 

Why You Need the Best Social Media Marketing Software

1. Maintain Consistent Content

Consistency is the key to building a storing following on social media.

Business often creates accounts on the popular social media platforms namely Facebook or Twitter, yet have the trouble to achieve the consistency.

Thus, consistency is one of the most important factors in determining whether people will continue to follow the brand or not.

Likewise, the business that is strapped for time or have insufficient manpower to assign a dedicated team for social media management, and that will lead to the drop off the social media radar.

As a result, they will only reap a little or no benefit at all from the marketing on social media.

In other words, social media automation holds the solution to this problem.

2. Get Control over Your Strategy

Automation tool gives you more control over your social accounts and helps to post more content.

It depends on how you choose to use the tool.

You can control the kind of content that is shared, the time at which it is posted as well as the frequency of the posting.

Plus, you could monitor the level of engagement that you receiving and modify your strategy to get more likes, shares or retweets on social media.

Social media automation tools also help you to develop insight into the nature and extent of readership.

And that you will be able to share content in a more targeted manner.

More importantly, the automation helps you to deal with the volume.

It allows you to post more and more content on multiple accounts, more frequently with more ease.

3. Save Your Time

The biggest incentive of using social media automation is the amount of time that could help you to free up.

Rather than spending hours and hours on trying to find the content that might just get shared and brings few visitors, use tools to identify the trending topics and discover relevant content.

Utilising a centralised dashboard to schedule content advance also saves you the trouble of having to log into each account individually and post the content manually.

But note that saving the time does not mean spending any time at all on your social media accounts.

That would only be counter-productive.

While you automated some of the tasks that associated with the social media management, you will still have to keep a tab on all your accounts and respond to comments and mentions.

Top 4 Social Media Marketing Software FREE

1. Buffer

Buffer is one of the most recognised tools in the social media industry.

With it, you could schedule any types of posts across any platforms that you desire.

It even can specify patterns of posts, such as “every day or weekdays”.

Also, you can use Buffer to follow up on your posts, evaluating which ones were most effective, and why they were effective.

2. Sprout Social

Sprout Social is an all-in-one social media marketing tool that helps the manager to have better control of their efforts.

It features the multi-level access, allowing directorial control, and access form lower-level team members to better coordinate and delegate tasks.

It comes with full posting scheduling capabilities and a detailed analytic platform

It has the social listening platform to have a better understanding of how your demographic use your platform of choice.

3. Hootsuite

Moreover, Hootsuite is one of the simple yet powerful tools for the average social media marketer.

With the free version and relatively inexpensive paid options, you could use Hootsuite to schedule posts in advance on a number of different social platforms.

It also measures analytic to understand how your content is performing.

4. BuzzSumo

Other than that, BuzzSumo also is one of the best tools that excel in discovering new, fresh or popular content on the web.

With BuzzSumo, you could plug in a topic or a selection of keywords and find a breakdown of some of the most popular trending post in those categories.

It also helps you to show a list of influencers who are sharing that content as well.

Thus, it is an excellent way to learn and discover new ideas for your content marketing and social media campaigns.

You even could use this opportunity to identify the influencers in your industry who could help you to grow your following, visibility as well as reputation.

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What is a Social Media Marketing Strategy?

Fundamentally, social media marketing strategy is a summary of everything that you plan to do and hope to achieve in social media.

It guides your actions and let you know whether you are succeeding or failing.

Every post, like, reply and comment should serve with a purpose.

In a simple word, the more specific your strategy is, the more effective the execution will be.

You have to keep it specific and concise.

Don’t make your plan too lofty and broad that makes it unattainable or impossible to be measured.

Why Do You Need to Create Best Strategies for Social Media Marketing?

According to the research done, there is 97% of small businesses use social media to attract new customers.

But, there is 85% of business owners are not sure what social media tools to use.

Besides, the result also may reveal that there is 63% of consumers who seek businesses online are more likely to become the consumers of brands.

This demonstrated a massive potential for social media marketing to increase sales!

Social media marketing helps you to validate your brand, and it is no longer optional.

It is an essential way for companies to reach its consumers.

And when it is done correctly, tells those consumers that their brand is active and focused on the communication.

Hence, having a social media presence without an active social media marketing strategy could be just catastrophic for your business as having no plan at all.

How to Create the Best Social Media Marketing Strategies

Let’s walk you through the 5 step plan to create a winning social media strategy of your own.

Step 1: Align the Business Objectives with Social Media Marketing Goals

That’s right.

This is your first step which is creating a social media marketing strategy to establish your objectives and goals.

Without these goals, you have no way to gauge the success of your social media.

Thus, set the S.M.A.R.T Goals.

Each of your goals should include:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Attainable
• Relevant
• Time-bound

By setting the SMART framework, it helps to ensure your goals could lead to real business results, rather than just lofty ideas.

Thus, start by developing your social media marketing plan now by writing down at least three social media goals.

Make sure to regulate your social media goals as well along with your overall marketing strategy.

Step 2: Learn Everything about Your Audience

So, how are you going to learn about your audience?

It is quite easy.

You need to create audience personas.

By apprehending who your audience is and what they want to see on social is the crucial key in creating content that they will like, comment on or share.

It is also critical for planning how to convert your social media followers into customers for your business.

Creating your audience personas will allow you to think of your prospects, followers, and customers as real people with real wants and needs.

This definitely will help you think more clearly about what to offer them.

Step 3: Conduct the Research

The odds are, your competitors are already using social media – and that means you could learn from what they are already doing.

This is why you need to conduct the competitive analysis.

It allows you to understand who the competition is and what they are doing well and not so well.

Also, you will get a good sense of what to expect in your industry, which will help you to set social media targets on your own.

The analysis will also help you to find opportunities.

You might want to concentrate on the networks where your audience is underserved, rather than attempting to win the followers away from the dominant player.

Step 4: Set up Accounts & Improve Existing Profiles

As you select which social channels to use, you will also need to outline your strategy for each network.

If you can’t formulate a solid mission statement for a particular social network, you want to reconsider whether that network is worth it.

Once you have decided which networks to focus on, it is time for you to create profiles or to improve existing profile so they could align with your strategic plan.

In general, you have to make sure that you fill out all the profile fields and use keywords that people will use to search for your business.

Step 5: Test, Evaluate & Adjust Strategy

Indeed, your social media strategy is the vital document for your business, and you can’t assume you will get it right on the first try.

As you start to execute your plan and track your results, you may discover that some strategies would not work as you did anticipate.

While some are working even better than you might be expected.

Hence, re-evaluate, test and do it all again is the crucial step that you should do to gain the data.

Once the data start coming in, use it to re-evaluate your strategy frequently.

Constantly testing will allow grasping what works and what does not.

So, you could refine your strategy in no time.

 

The Checklist of Effective Social Media Marketing

This is the checklist of 8 steps social media marketing strategy to help you creating and auditing the best strategies for your social media marketing.

• What are your social media goals in 2019?
• Where will you reach your social media?
• What is your cores demographic?
• What is your core social media metrics?
• Who are your most prominent social media competitors & its’ top posts?
• What type of content will you produce?
• What are your best times to post on social?
• How will you track & analyse your efforts?

To know more information about marketing, please always visit us, Icon Marketing Strategy