Innovative Social Media Strategies for Small Businesses

Innovative Social Media Strategies for Small Businesses

Social media is a free-to-join tool. The best part is that; if you aim to use it for business purposes, chances are that audiences are readily available. And your potential prospects could be there already, waiting for you to sell to them. But, you first need to lay the proper foundation.

You need excellent planning to succeed in your small entrepreneurship using social media strategies. Creating a solid social media game plan for your business will help eliminate a lot of trial and error from your marketing efforts. Thus, you realize that the time and resource you invest offers you the best return. 

Undeniably, many small businesses are now scaling the heights of success through innovative and effective social media strategies. The latest statistics reveal that Facebook is the most popular marketing medium for small businesses. According to Statista, 66% of small enterprises in the U.S use Facebook as a form of social media marketing to gain brand popularity. 

Out of these, 52% post content daily. The statistics reveal that an average of 130 million social media users will engage with shopping posts each month. And this may cut across different brands.

To create a powerful social media presence for your small business, you must aim at the right platforms and understand who your audience is. You also need to analyze your competition and carefully determine where your team’s effort and resources will have the most significant impact. 

But remember that you don’t have to maintain a massive marketing team to handle different media platforms as a small business owner. That’s why our article talks about innovative social media strategies for small businesses. 

Here, you’ll get to discover fresh tips and insights to guide you through a successful journey as a small business owner. Let’s find out.

1. Create Effective Content Marketing that Aims at Successful Lead Generation

As a small business venturing online, you’re undoubtedly focused on both individual and community customers. This makes social media a master plan to help you link directly with an audience. It allows you to proceed further and build brand awareness and loyalty. 

Most importantly, social media is effective for successful lead generation. You can create the right content and formulate resources that will offer added customer value to your audiences and potential prospects.

You get to do this while nurturing your audience’s brand affinity. This involves enhancing an emotional connection between your brand and potential clients. 

By doing this, those who share your brand’s values will often choose your product and even recommend it to others. Knowing how to use brand affinity to connect deeper with your audience is essential.

So, whenever your users click on your content or brand offers, they actively seek your services. Perhaps they’re opting to get regular updates on your products and services. 

Since this group of people has already opted in, they’re highly likely to convert to buyers. Chances here are higher than random people seeing an advert unrelated to their needs.

2. Keep Experimenting with Various Forms of Content Marketing on Social Media

The reality is that; the social media environment keeps changing. And to remain relevant as a business startup, you must style up with your content marketing strategies.

The possibilities are that if you create interesting and engaging pieces of content marketing, your followers will like them too. 

Social media channels offer an excellent opportunity to personally get to know your target audiences. Hence, getting to know and understand their needs will help you create appropriate content and products.

As a startup, you might be on a tight budget, and cannot spend on multiple marketing activities. In this case, you need the best content marketing for startups to reach your targeted audience. It will help boost your brand’s awareness and set you apart from your competitors. 

Appropriate content marketing for small businesses is designed with strategies that build long-lasting relationships with your clients. So, it would help if you placed a deliberate effort to attract your audiences and keep them on board for their loyalty to your brand once they decide to maintain business with you.

Businesses have an added advantage with their content. Social media and video channels offer a fertile testing ground for your content marketing strategies. Hence, you can outsource marketing experts to gauge audience interest in your products and services.

By starting up conversations and soliciting feedback from your target audiences, it becomes easier to create appropriate content. 

Content marketers can employ early-stage content marketing by establishing benchmarks and helping you set the first milestones. That way, you can easily attract new customers by:

• Attracting regular visitors
• Growing mail subscriptions
• Building a social media community that cultivates customer loyalty

3. Choose Funnel-Based Marketing Goals, and Avoid Being Promotional-Only

In line with the previous point, it helps to know that there’s a high number of social media users who are ready to buy from you. But, this is possible only if you use the media channels for postings and promotions and to engage with your social media audience.

Indeed, your social media marketing goal should not simply be to blast posts and fill your pages. The platform, and audiences, too, won’t reward you for the publishing-only strategy.

Essentially, being too promotional is one of the top reasons consumers tend to unfollow pages on social media. Thus, you must be very careful in your strategy.

Ensure you manage your business’s social media presence from the funnel perspective. You get to publish content to reach out and drive brand awareness. But it doesn’t end there.

As you get into the sales funnel, what matters most is bringing your customers closer and creating great relationships. 

4. Engage with Customers to Build Lasting Relationships on Social Media

There’s power in social networking, and your creativity determines this. Millions of people spend hours of their time every day on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram. Hence, you shouldn’t miss this opportunity. 

You can discover what they think about your brand using social media listening tools. You may also follow up on your brand mentions and take action on them. Encourage people to keep commenting on your posts. And being proactive in answering them shows that you care. 

Thank your audiences for positive mentions, and offer positive and sound responses to those who comment on anything negative. Remember, this is your chance to change your audience’s mindset about your brand and boost their experiences for the best of your services and offers.

Ultimately, you get to improve your customer lifetime value. This is a crucial metric for every business as it reflects your customer loyalty and retention level.

Some of the ways you can create significant and lasting relationships with your social media audience are by doing the following:

• Have a clear picture of your prospects’ needs, wants, core values, interests, and preferences. This allows you to be on a similar page with your potential customers.
• Offer top-notch customer support- clients will always be willing to pay more for excellent 24/7 customer support.
• Quick response time or feedback to audience’s questions and concerns
• Have personalized offers to show your prospects that you value them individually as friends, not just attacking them with endless promotional links.
• Link up with influencers. These are celebrities that can help in enhancing your brand promotion. They do this by providing you with clients that share your values. Start by finding a micro-influencer who is already your client or may like your product or services. Offer them a mutual benefit, and ask the influencer to boost your brand by focusing on its core values. This way, you can easily connect to interested audiences who will trust your brand because of the influencer’s authority.
• Formulate your brand community on platforms like Facebook or Twitter- it gives people a sense of belonging, which makes them feel valued and connected to like-minded people. Here, the audiences can quickly develop a common interest in your products and the brand values you share. Hence, you can build genuine and long-lasting customer relationships.

5. Use Social Media Sites as Sales Platforms

You can benefit tremendously once you build an engaged community on your social media platform. Ultimately, it becomes easier to make sales. Chances are that if you keep creating pieces of content that are fascinating and engaging, your fans are going to like them too. 

Indeed, developing an engaged community on social media comes with significant advantages when making sales. 

You can avoid wasting time through trial and error, figuring out which content types will lead to the most sales for your brand. Here is what you can do to turn your social media sites into sales platforms. Let’s find out below.

• Use direct messages to chat with customers. You can use apps like Shopify, which help you to engage customers further, and quickly respond to their questions 24/7 via live chat. 
• Put links to your products on your Instagram posts. The shoppable Instagram posts will make it easier for your customers to find out further about a product they like. They can go ahead to purchase it without the need ever to leave the app.
• Create TikTok shopping. Shoppers can easily switch between your post and the shoppable items. Such features are available in Shopify stores. 
• Sharing reviews on your social media channels as social proof is an excellent strategy to encourage potential shoppers to see how others benefit from your brand.  
• Showcase your user-generated content. Whenever you’re tagged on a post, perhaps pictures of your customers using your products, allow your followers to see that, too. It will boost their trust in your brand.

Key Takeaways

Social media is a valuable tool for businesses in any industry. Finding the right customers in the media directly impacts your sales and overall business growth.

As a business startup, it helps to start on the right footing. The best key to developing strong social media strategies for audiences is understanding your customers’ needs and wants. You then work on creating appropriate content marketing that helps you build relationships with the target customers, and fulfill those needs.

Start by setting your goals for social media growth right, and consider what strategies we’ve discussed to get you to the top of the ladder. 

When you do this, you’ll look back months later and be grateful that you initiated your venture through relevant social media platforms. There’s nothing as fulfilling as when your vision is now a reality.