All business owners want growth. The faster the better. After all, growth equals higher profits. But fast growth rarely happens automatically. There must be huge demand and very little competition for a company to take off and grow fast. In any other market environment, effective advertising and customer engagement is essential.
The U.S. Small Business Administration recommends that firms that turn over less than $5 million a year spend 7 to 8% of their gross revenue on marketing. Most business owners see the wisdom in that advice. But because that is a lot of money, they want to be extra sure that the marketing that they do is effective. They must get a good return on both their time and monetary investment.
Social media marketing is effective
So, it is not surprising that a lot of them are attracted to using social media to help them to reach out to and engage customers. They know that a significant percentage of their existing and potential clients use some form of social media, for over 2 hours per day. As well as being aware that a lot of people buy what they see while on those platforms.
Get closer to your customer using social media marketing
One of the most powerful things about social media is the fact that it allows businesses to get close to their customers. They can learn a huge amount about them from the way they respond to various ad campaigns.
As well as gain a better understanding of how their tastes and expectations are evolving. Information that is invaluable because it will keep you ahead of the competition and keep customers coming back.
There are many ways to do this, including carrying out an in-depth analysis for each post. Something we speak about more, later in the article. But it is also possible to ask your customers direct questions. That could be while having conversations in Live Chat or by creating short surveys using something like Survey Monkey. There are lots of ways to do this unobtrusively and engagingly, you will find a few examples in this short guide.
Use software to analyze the impact of every piece of social media content
There are lots of ways to analyze the impact of social media marketing. Most of the big platforms provide their own analytics, as you can see here. But it is also possible to plug the KPIs into a central piece of software to provide integrated reports. For example, you can now add some of them to your website´s Google Analytics account.
Automate some of the content creation and posting tasks
Creating content for social media and posting most days across several platforms is time-consuming, so it makes sense for firms to use tools that help them to speed up this process. One of the oldest technologies on the market is Hootsuite. As of March 2018, they had over 16 million users.
Use research tools to produce compelling content
But when it comes to content creation the first hurdle you need to overcome is coming up with ideas. Customers soon get bored and unsubscribe if all you do is post company news, discount codes, and product launch information. You must tap into some of the trends and things that interest them and write about those too. Doing so builds rapport. Demonstrating to subscribers that you understand them and, therefore, will provide them with what they want. Buzzsumo is a particularly powerful social media research tool.
Repurpose your social media content to get more out of it
Having spent so much time on creating the content, it makes sense to leverage it as much as possible. To re-use it in other marketing campaigns. For example, using successful memes for leafleting and posters. Or, sharing live tweets, reviews, and social shares on one or more of your in-store display screens. Mandoe Media’s digital signage features enable business owners to easily do this. In addition, the software that is included in their package can easily be used to create striking images, gifs, memes, and short videos. These can then be used for social media campaigns as well as being displayed on in-store screens.
Where to learn more about how social media marketing benefits businesses
As you can see, there are plenty of ways for virtually any type of business to integrate social media into their marketing efforts. But, if you are still not 100% convinced that it is worth doing, you may want to read this research paper. It confirms that social media marketing is powerful and effective. While at the same time exploding some of the myths surrounding its use and highlighting which methods are the most effective.
