"Social Media is a great tool that Small Businesses could leverage to connect with their customers and beat competition.
Here are some tips for creating unfair advantage over your competition on social media on a shoestring budget.
1. Listen
Understanding the pulse of your customers is central to engaging customers effectively on social media. Understanding the customer includes understanding what they like in your offering, what they do, their tastes, what they think of your competition, how they use your services, brickbats and bouquets, etc. You have to start by tuning in to your customer’s voices and listening to the conversations around your services, your competition, etc. The more you listen, the more you learn.
2. Crowdsource Content
For a small business owner, creating engaging content around his/her product, services, value to customers every day may be challenging. This requires a lot of dedicated time and effort, not to mention creativity as well. A way to make this work easier is by focussing on ways to crowdsource content from your customers for your social media posts. Examples of such include - asking customers to post selfies, running a contest where customers can participate and the content generated could be used, posting testimonials written by customers, promoting relevant news and tips around your services, etc.
3. Channels and Platforms
To figure out the relevant channels and platforms, start with spending time to find out more about your target audience. What kind of social media content do they prefer and respond to, what are their likes and dislikes, etc. This will help you select the right platforms and channels to market your product. For example, if you are using facebook, you may want to create simple contests like creating one liners and offering discounts for the best one liners to engage your customers.
4. Adapt and Amplify
Creating compelling and useful content, designed to provide value to your target audience can go a long way to increase traffic and grow your business. But while you create content, keep adapting to new situations and events around your services. For example, adapt your blog articles to create nuggets of information which can become individual posts in your facebook plan. You can then use various social media outreach strategies to amplify them to your target audience
5. Analyze and iterate
Getting your social media marketing strategy right involves a lot of learning, adaptation, evolution and iterations. For every kind of post and promotional strategy, keep analyzing its outreach strategy for desired effectiveness, reach and impact. Based on your analysis, you may need to change either the type of posts, or promotion strategy or outreach methods or continue to do what you were doing .
You dont need to hire any agency or consultants to market your business on social media channels. All you need is to spend some quality time to plan and execute the strategies outlined to create your social media presence for your small business on a shoestring budget to your target audience."
Bookmarks