How to Utilize Social Media Marketing to Grow Your Business

As a business person, you look for various ways to grow your business. No matter what, you cannot ignore the important growth strategy of utilizing social media. Here are some nifty tips on how to leverage the cheap social media marketing strategy to improve your business, widen your audience, and increase your brand awareness. ~ Ed.

 

Social media marketing is no longer an optional marketing strategy.

It has firmly established itself as an important strategy that not only startups and small businesses find extremely beneficial, but also large and established corporations have found good use of social media exposure.

The reason is quite simple.

There are already 2 billion users of social media worldwide, and social media has become a chief communication medium among people, clients, and others. This number translates to roughly 1/3 of the world’s population.

With the potential for exposure in a diverse and expansive market, it’s no wonder why the business sector is also venturing into the social media scene in order to be ahead of the pack and become more profitable.

5 Common Ways to Utilize Social Media Marketing to Grow Your Business

There are many ways of utilizing social media marketing to help your business grow, and we are going to research on them.

Have a social media account across different platforms

You may have noticed some business advertise taglines such as “like us on Facebook”, “we’re on Facebook” and the likes. Remember that Facebook isn’t the only social media platform available.

As a wise businessperson, you know better than to limit yourself to just using Facebook to maximize your audience reach. Your strategy should be to establish a presence across different social media channels aside from Facebook: Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Snapchat.

Remember to keep your specific target audiences in mind when making different social accounts. You can make an interactive marketing video on YouTube to appeal to sophisticated and intellectual audiences.

If you have younger generations or millennials as your target audiences, opening a Facebook profile for your business is a safe bet. It has consistently remained the fastest growing social media channel.

You can use Instagram and Twitter to have your business brand make an impact through vivid imagery and catchy, product- or service-relevant tweets and posts.

Set a definite business goal that audiences can identify

Do not go rushing in to make a social media account without considering your market goals.

The top business goals of using social media as follows: lead generation (70%), building brand awareness (53%) and customer engagement (50%). Even though these are the dominant statistics for the different business goals, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ll have to follow suit.

You have to identify the unique situation of your own business and what it really needs as of the moment.

If your current business situation needs improvement in sales statistics, you can use social media marketing to formulate goals and strategies that drive sales. If you wish to improve the customer service experience of your established customers and your potential audiences, prioritize it as your business goal.

Once you have a clear set of goals in your social media campaigns, creating content to post is made easier and more convenient. Also, audiences will get to notice a more focused and goal-driven approach with the clear and concise posts that you make.

Make regular content posts to establish a strong impression

The social media platform is a cost-effective way of regularly connecting with your target audience and building a lasting impression on them. The more frequent and regular the content posts you create through social media, the better the edge you have over your competitors and potential competitions.

If your target market is the local area where your business is based and the neighboring cities and states, focus on regular content that has an appeal to audiences in a specific area. This is where the services of local or homegrown business marketing and branding specialists come in.

In Australia, for example, there are various service providers catering to small businesses and their marketing and branding strategies. Social media marketing Brisbane experts ONEOUT Creative are among the marketing experts that stand out when it comes to helping small businesses in this city make the most use of social media marketing and advertising to gain a wider audience and new customers.

That said, you can employ the services of marketing and branding experts to make regular, even daily content that is focused and appeals to your local audiences. With this, you gain a significant number of followers, with more numbers coming from new customers and audience.

Utilize relationships with social influencers

Another way for your social media marketing strategy to gain traction is through the help of social influencers. They can be celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, politicians, philanthropists and other well-known people.

Establish a relationship with these types of influencers or try to approach them with a business proposition to have them endorse your brand, products or services. Offer an attractive deal to them such as financial compensation, products or discounts for your business’ services for posting content about your brand.

A good way of applying influencer marketing to local audiences is to look for well-known persons from your locality instead of famous international personalities.

Why go for local or micro-influencers than more famous individuals? Aside from being more cost-effective, micro-influencers are more like regular people that your audience can relate to and engage with. Plus, their own followers can provide additional audience and potential customers as they will most likely support your brand.

Take Advantage of user-generated content

Before you take advantage of user-generated content, you need to first encourage an atmosphere for it in your social media account.

Let your followers post their comments, suggestions, and feedback regarding your product. This can provide a significant boost to the awareness of your product. The consumer buying decision actually has a high correlation with recommendations or endorsements of fellow consumers.

Most people trust a product recommendation coming directly from a friend and they are more likely to purchase items or services by referring to online testimonials from other users. Thus, UGC can work to your advantage when coupled with social media marketing.

You can host photo contests through Facebook or Instagram about participants using one of your products. This does not only expose your products and business to a wider audience, but it also heightens the possibility of these audiences purchasing your products.

The social network coverage of your products has become wider as people who follow the participants of the contest will see your brand being promoted, even though most of them are not part of your followers yet. This why statistics say that 81% of US shoppers would prefer to pay more for a product that has UGC than buy a similar product that is cheaper but has no reviews.

Wrapping It Up

Social media marketing is a powerful strategy that you can work to the advantage of your business, small or otherwise. It opens many opportunities to widen your audience reach and to increase awareness of your brand.

Also, you can generate high-quality leads and improve the selling power of your products and services, which convert to better sales.

These are just a few of the essential reasons why it is important to utilize social media marketing for business growth.

Over to you

What is your social media marketing strategy to help your business grow? Share your thoughts and experiences in the comments.