If you aren't leveraging social media to promote your small business, you're simply missing out. Here's 5 ways social media can help you to grow your small business.
1.Brand Awareness
Social media is so much more than just a place to share photos and updates with your friends. You can position your business and build brand awareness, or brand recognition with your audience. Using consistent, authentic branding is important and helps to build recognition among your audience. It's also a great idea to create a brand awareness strategy for your business.
Brand Awareness Strategy Tips via HubSpot
Guest Blog on other niche sites
Advertise everywhere
Choose an image or symbol that best represents you
Create a short, catchy, memorable slogan
Be personable and human in your approach
Leverage social storytelling
Make sharing easy
2. Increase Leads
If you are a business owner, you know just how important lead generation is. Social media can help you generate leads for your business -- especially targeted, quality leads.
So, how do you do this?
Understand what your customers' challenges and pain points are
Provide value in your content
Sell the solution not the "product" or "service"
Use Call-To-Actions (CTAs) in your content
Leverage targeted ads on social platforms
Implement an Inbound Marketing strategy
It's important to be consistent with your branding, posting frequency and also, be authentic in your marketing.
3. Improve Search Engine Ranking
Chances are, you have heard about Search Engine Optimization, or commonly referred to as SEO. A common misconception is that SEO depends on how great the keywords are on your website and it's only about content.
There are many SEO ranking factors and guess what? Social Media is one of them! Your social media business pages are the first place consumers may go to check out your business and understand your product and/or service offerings before heading over to your website to get a deeper understanding of your brand. More visits to your social pages will help boost your social profiles and increase your social media page ranking, which in turn helps their chances of appearing among the top ranked pages.
What is SEO and how does it work?
Just incase you are interested in learning a little more about SEO and how to increase your rankings to get more visibility organically in search engines for your business. Check out MOZ's SEO Learning Center
3. Build Trust With Your Customers
This is one of the most important factors in every relationship, especially in business. Trust. So, how does social media help build trust? First, let's start with crafting messaging that resonates and provides value to your audience. Understanding your audience and showing empathy and authenticity will speak volumes. It's also important to be consistent to all of the channels your brand is on. We're not talking about just brand consistency, you need to be consistent in your brand's voice across all outlets.
Need a few more ways to help build trust on social media? You can help cultivate a trustworthy brand by nurturing interactions on your social channels, share high quality content and always, be human in your interaction.
4. Competitor Analysis
Do you know who your competitors are? You probably have a good idea of a few, so how can you gain a competitive edge using social media for your business? Using social media, you can essentially keep an eye on your competition and even gain some inspiration for your own business. We are not talking about copying their strategies and methodologies, but using competitor analysis on social to help uncover their top content and compare social media metrics amongst the top players.
Want to learn how to do this? (Yes, of course you do!) Check out Semrush: Your One-Stop-Shop for Competitive Research
5. Boost Social Media Conversions
What is a conversion on social media? A conversion takes place when the recipient of a marketing message performs a desired action. This could mean a consumer clicked on a link to your website from a social media post. It could also mean they clicked on the CTA button that you have defined on social media ads, like "Buy now" or "Learn More".
How does social media help increase conversions?
Leverage promotions via video
Make your landing pages seamless and mobile-friendly
Include compelling calls to action
Split test your social posts
Be consistent with your branding (sound familiar?)
Let your user-generated content serve as social proof to shoppers
With over 3.6 Billion social media users in the world, it's safe to say that you have an audience on social media that is waiting to be delighted by your consistent, valuable, authentic brand messaging. If you need help with your brand's marketing strategy and leveraging social media for your business, just reach out!