10 Ways to Improve Your Small Business Social Media Marketing

It’s a jungle out there, and it’s never easy to be one of the small dogs running in the tall grass! Still, small businesses have the best chance ever at competing with their outsized rivals.

Social media has leveled the playing field in a way that few other advances ever have. If you put an effective social media marketing strategy in place, you’ll reap many rewards including acquiring new customers and increased revenue. There are a few tenets you need to follow to get the best possible results.

Be Clear

Defining your message with precision and clarity helps you build a stellar social media marketing foundation. The concept is no different for a business than it is for a novelist. Readers (or listeners or viewers) learn to love an individual style, and they come to expect a particular type of message from entities they admire. For companies, clear messaging that’s immediately understood and recognized helps across the broad spectrum of channels to communicate with prospects and current customers. It may not always be easy to achieve this effect, but it’s worth trying! Enterprises that establish credibility in the minds of consumers do so with consistent and clear messaging. They sell more than their rivals too!

Stay Consistent

People expect a certain voice when they consume corporate content. All corporations work very hard at getting this unique point of view just right. Even if you’re just starting out, it’s important to adopt a definite style and tone when you communicate with the public. It’s easier for them to relate to a business that speaks to them in a human way. You may have to experiment a bit at the beginning to get this element perfect. However, when you finally nail the right tonality and pitch, your marketing efforts will grow significantly.

Work Daily

Did you realize that you’re not allowed to take off any days now that you’re doing social media management for a company? Well, let’s rephrase that a bit. You need to monitor social media accounts on a daily basis, even if you schedule content publishing. You don’t necessarily have to spend giant chunks of time online, but you simply cannot disappear for days or weeks at a time. Companies that neglect their social media duties for even a week or two at a time run the risk of suffering adverse consequences. You either do the work yourself, or you’ll have to appoint someone to perform your duties instead.

Create Compelling Content

Boring content gets poor results. You need to invest the time and resources in content creation that moves people. No matter how great your content is, it’s also imperative that it meets key business goals. Having a video “go viral” doesn’t mean much if it doesn’t attract sales. Compelling content has to do more than just entertaining people. Persuasion is always a paramount aspect of defining the truly successful small business marketing material.

Share On All Networks

Your customers spend time on a multitude of social platforms. You need to be able to communicate persuasively on all of them. You have to establish a presence across multiple channels and maintain high-quality engagements during your day to interactions. Getting this detail right may sound daunting because it ends up being a lot of work. That’s the reason so many businesses end up turning towards third party project managers to handle all aspects of their digital marketing.

Concentrate On Branding

Small businesses don’t usually focus on branding the way large organizations do. That’s a shame, too, because digital marketing excels in creating branded messages that resonate with consumers. Many of your followers will see your status updates time and again. You may as well put in the extra effort required to promote your brand identity. Even if sales are slow at first, your branding message will reinforce positive feelings from current customers while strengthening your market position.

Offer Incredible Customer Service

Your efforts are for naught if you can’t deliver a satisfying customer service. Nothing sinks a company’s online reputation faster than consistently providing lousy service. Every encounter somebody has with a surly customer representative will amplify across social media. You must always handle customer service issues quickly and professionally. Your social media staff should turn these potential problems over fast to qualified people for resolution.

Don’t Forget to Target Your Ideal Prospects

You can’t waste time targeting the wrong people. A key element of social media marketing success is finding the right people. Anyone who has been online for any length of time knows that untargeted messages (especially ones coming from strangers,) have no impact and don’t persuade anyone to buy. Finding the ideal prospects at the best time increases the likelihood you’ll get sales. You’ve probably heard the old saying about the need to kiss a lot of frogs before you can find a prince. That’s true, of course, but it helps to be in the right frog patch!

Don’t Obsess on the Wrong Numbers

Businesses that become overly concerned with vanity numbers aren’t using their social media profiles to their fullest benefit. Turning visitors into customers is what has to be the ultimate goal for anyone who is marketing on social networks. Anyone can get likes and shares, but that doesn’t mean they’ll translate into revenue. It’s important to configure your goals early on in the digital marketing process. Define the metrics which are most important and study how to improve your efforts at every stage. If you’re paying attention to ego-driven metrics, your focus is not where it needs to stay.

Execute Your Strategy

It’s not always easy to remain committed to a strategy, especially when you’re first starting out and you have yet to see amazing results. However, this is the precise moment when you need to bear down and stick to whatever strategy you’ve outlined. There’s nothing worse than jumping around from one plan to the next. If you jump from a strategy that was about to work and go instead to a failing one, you probably already wasted a more time than you wanted. Follow the strategies that already work well in specific industries. You may be creative with your approach, but it pays to follow winning guidelines when you’re implementing your campaigns.

There’s no question that social media management has expanded in importance and the time required to perform the task correctly. Small businesses must recognize the challenge and partner with those services that can handle the work.