5 STRATEGIES TO GROW YOUR SMALL BUSINESS ONLINE USING SOCIAL MEDIA IN 2019
Everyone is online. The average person will spend more than five years of their lives on social media, according to a study by influencer marketing agency Mediakix. That’s 40 minutes on YouTube, 35 minutes on Facebook, 25 minutes on Snapchat, 15 minutes on Instagram and one minute on Twitter every single day on average. You as a small business owner just cannot afford not to be there. As a small business in 2019. I will share with you five effective strategies to grow your business online with the help of social media.
1- Optimise Your Content
Tip Number One: Your content should be high-quality, unique, appealing and extremely relevant to your audience.
You’re probably scratching your head now asking yourself how can I create content like that? If you want to position your brand as a thoughtful leader in your industry your content must be fresh and relevant.
A good place to start is your competitors. Take a look at what they are doing and try to make yours better. This is where tip number one comes in. Use the 40:60 rule. Creating 40 percent of your content and curating 60 percent. That will make you focus on creating high-quality content and at the same time, you will have enough posting to create the consistency your followers are expecting of you.
Tip Number Two: Shareability. Try and focus on the content that you know will be good at sharing.
Shareable content includes informative how-to posts, positive content and trending topics about your industry as well as social causes your business is helping out in.
You can ask yourself where I can curate such content? The simple answer is again to look at your competition. See what kind of information they are sharing with their followers and which of their posts is getting the most engagement. After finding this kind of content the next step would be to schedule them and there are a lot of good content scheduling apps that you can use for free at the beginning such as buffer and Hootsuite.
2- Be Present
Being present is the easiest way you can talk to your customers. Always make sure to answer questions and reply to messages. You can easily achieve this with the help of your humble smartphone. Most if not all social media channels have an application that you can download on your smartphone that can trigger instant notifications when someone sends your page a message or comments on a post.
Try to focus on listening, monitoring and engaging with your customers online. The challenge here will be on how much time you are willing to give to focus on this activity. Consistency is very important.
3- Influential Marketing
This is what’s going to dominating the market in the next few years and it’s the cheapest way to create a big scale and go viral if you’re going to do it right.
But what is influential marketing?
It is the use of influencers to market your brand. You must probably know some influencers in your field by name that already have thousands if not millions of followers on their pages. These people are known to have a huge audience and are always creating valuable content.
You can probably imagine the benefit of these influencers adding to your brand. If they share your content, your content will be automatically visible to all their followers. If they advocate your brand, their followers are more likely to listen to them because they trust them.
So the next step is to identify how you can approach these influencers. You need to be aware that the best influencers to approach are not necessarily the ones with the most followers. Better metrics would be engagement. That means taking a closer look at the way their audience are actually engaging with their content.
After you have identified these influencers, the next step would be to directly approach them. Being honest is the best policy. Speak to them and tell them about what you would like them to do. You need to convince them why it is important for them to come on board and how they will add value to your brand. Also, you must be prepared to pay them in order to collaborate.
But how much should you pay an influencer? The price should be worth the return on investment whatever your business goals are.
4. Paid Social
Be prepared to spend money on social media marketing!
There is no free lunch. The fact is organic reach is dying. Unfortunately, social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, are paying closer attention and rewarding paid content.
This means that it is more difficult to gain a place in your potential customers’ timeline if you are only posting organically. It makes sense to start paid social marketing. You certainly don’t want to be posting on your page and find out that no one is seeing it!
But if you are going to go by the root of paid advertising it is extremely important to make sure that you are prepared. You need to prepare your page that your customers are going to land on as well as prepare your post that you are going to be paying to be shown.
The best thing about paid search is that it has extraordinary targeting tools that will enable your content to reach a defined audience that you choose. But how much of your marketing budget should you allocate to paid search?
A lot of my small business clients ask me that question all the time.
How much should we allocate for our digital marketing spend?
It is probably a good idea to start with about 20% of your marketing budget. Test and then make any necessary changes depending on the results that you get. But you must note that paid advertising needs time. You need to ensure your campaigns are running for a good amount of time so you can learn and gain insight into your targeted audience.
5- Deliver Value Offline
For any digital marketing strategy to be successful, it must incorporate the off-line world. Remember we are dealing with people. Even the savviest of them would appreciate real-life interaction. This, in turn, will create loyal customers. The best mix would be a combination of both off-line as well as an online experience.
But how can you do this kind of mix? Take for example an idea where you would send a special gift to your customer as a thank you for purchasing a product or using your service. Imagine the customers experience and how that would make them feel! It is important to make sure this is part of the customer experience so they can always remember you.
As a small business, you have seen the success stories of how big companies and organisations have used the power of social media for their benefit. The good thing about social media is that it doesn’t have to be expensive. If you create the right content and target it to your niche market, you will start seeing results.