23 Feb Social Media Marketing Tips for Business Owners
When you find yourself in a place where you are suddenly leading a new venture, whether it is a B2B, B2C or non-profit venture, social media marketing done right is an essential for any small business. But trying to figure out your Social Media Strategy can be confusing and time consuming. SWM Communications is here to guide you through this crucial stage.
In order to gain visibility, you need a proper social media strategy. It is a common misconception that this simply involves setting up a channel or page. It requires a strategy that is going to position you and your business as thought leaders. It is essential to develop a plan that includes tools to manage and monitor, as well as providing targeted content that will give your audience a unique value and drive engagement. Without this you will waste time and money.
Social Media Strategy
What strategy means for you as small business owner is that you first need to know what your position is in the marketplace. We assist you in determining how your business is unique to the industry that you are serving. What that means for your social media approach is that we need to define your language and messaging strategies, determine the company’s core functions and how to set up a space where the customer can voice their opinion.
The first step in determining your social media strategy goals is to identify the digital platforms used by your target market. Facebook likes, new LinkedIn connects, increase in Twitter followers, more likes on Instagram, a new subscription on YouTube or even a new +1 on Google+. These are important metrics to measure on a weekly basis once we start executing marketing efforts. This is where it is important to have a team assist you to interpret these analytics and utilise this analysis to adapt your strategy to achieve success and reach for your digital campaign.
To determine your strategy, short/long term goals, and where you can quantify results and build a pattern you need to understand your buying cycle. For example, in a service-based business or a business with a hard to reach audience you need to understand that your sales cycle may be 6+ months long, where the buying cycle for a B2C company is highly transactional so you can track these metrics almost immediately.
Audience Profile
The next step in determining your social media strategy is to build your audience profile. Ask yourself, “Who are my target customers? What are my customers doing on their social channels?” B2C customers are drawn to peer to peer channels such as Facebook and Instagram, where a B2B customer is more likely to use LinkedIn, YouTube, and Twitter.
We determine what your customer base is doing on social media by taking the time to visit these channels and research your customers personal interests. The goal is to mine these groups to start gathering insights on which social channels are delivering the most site traffic, where your users are spending their time in social circles, what types of content is driving the highest consumption and share-ability.
With this data illustrating user social behaviours and traffic patterns we can determine:
- Which social ad platforms may make sense for your business.
- What type of content production you should invest in
- What frequency you should invest in content production
- If it is necessary to have an online manager or full community management team.