Social Media Marketing for Small Businesses; A Guide to Making it Work

When you’re running a small business with a small team and a relatively small budget; it can be daunting to allocate resources towards something like social media which many business owners feel is not that important. However, in today’s day and age a solid social media marketing strategy might just be the thing that helps you scale your business to the next level.

??????????? Now this doesn’t mean that you drop everything this very second and go all in on social media. Businesses have existed long before social media and irrespective of social media they will continue to exist. Social media is simply a tool you can use to elevate your brand and (hopefully) generate more leads and improve revenue.

Why is social media marketing important?

??????????? For starters, EVERYONE is on social media; including your customers. What you need to figure out is how to reach them. According to SEO.AI; there are 2.4 billion active users on Instagram alone and despite primarily being an app; it’s desktop version is the fourth most frequented website. The reason behind telling you these stats was basically to show you what a powerful platform Instagram is and how depending on your business, you can curate content to build an audience.

??????????? You can also use these social media platforms for paid advertising. If you have a defined ICP (ideal customer persona); you already know the people who are likely to buy from you. Using paid advertising, you can make sure that your post reaches them because Instagram Ads connect with a whopping 96.6% of the platform’s active users.

How to use social media to run a small business?

??????????? Depending on how well you create your content, you can reach millions of people for free. Social media platforms are designed in such a way that users are shown content they care about. The algorithm tracks the user’s activity; like their watch-time on a reel, their likes, comments and posts they share and uses that information to recommend more content they may be interested in, which may just be your business!

??????????? Imagine you’re a small business, selling dairy products in a remote town in California. Your business is working well, and the whole town buys your products; but you know your products are so good they would sell all over the country. THIS is where social media comes in.

??????????? Instead of limiting yourself to your town, you can start creating social media content, showing how you raise your cattle, what you feed them, the cute/quirky things they do, how you deal with their sickness and lots more..

??????????? What this will do is help your audience identify with your brand and result in them wanting to buy your products in order to support you. If your products are truly as good as you think they are (which I’m sure they are) you will end up with recurring customers in places where you’ve never even been; all because of social media.

??????????? Another big part of running a social media account for a small business is engaging with your audience. Your social media account is a gateway for people to reach out to you. By responding to their messages and comments, you can develop an even more personalized connection with your audience which results in more revenue for your business.

?Best tools for social media management.

?1. Hootsuite

??????????? Hootsuite is one of the most efficient social media management tools in the market right now. It is a one-stop solution for creating, publishing and analyzing content. It has AI integration which helps ward off any creative blocks and a content library (integrated with Canva) which helps design and sort all of your photo and video assets.

??????????? You can also use it to schedule your posts in advance and based on your unique business goals, Hootsuite even recommends the best times to publish those posts.

??????????? After publishing your posts, you can go on Hootsuite’s inbox where it gathers all the notifications (from all the different platforms you’re using) into a single place, making it super simple to manage customers and to ensure you don’t miss out on any potential leads.

??????????? It also makes analytics a piece of cake. The app tracks all of your data and then delivers clear results.

??????????? Pricing: Starts at $99/month

?2. Native Platform Tools:

??????????? A third-party social media management tool is not necessary for you to succeed in your social media strategy. All platforms have their own set of tools to help you with social media management. For example, Pinterest allows you to schedule pins that you can publish later and TikTok has its own analytics section which allows you to see how your content is performing.

??????????? Similarly, Meta offers Meta Business Suite which allows you to link all of your Meta Accounts onto a single platform. Using Meta Business Suite, you can also schedule all of your posts for the future and it provides you with in-depth analytics including the locations where your content is being viewed the most.

??????????? Pricing: Free

?3. Sprout Social

??????????? Sprout is also a social media management platform which offers tools like scheduling, recommended times to post, collaborative solutions for teams and URL tracking. It integrates with all major platforms and provides comprehensive analytics.

??????????? You’re probably thinking how this varies from Hootsuite right? Don’t worry, here’s an in-depth comparison between the two.

??????????? Pricing: Starts at $199

?Should you hire an agency or do it yourself?

??????????? Now, the big question is whether you should be doing all of this yourself or should you hire an agency to do this? Well, the first thing you need to consider is do you consider time to be a more valuable resource or money?

??????????? Both are equally valuable resources, however depending on the current state of the business, business owners tend to prioritize one over the other. To make things simple for you, here’s a list of pros and cons to working with an agency:

??????????? Pros:

·???????? No need to worry about creating content.

·???????? A team of professionals who are experts in the field of marketing will be handling your profile

·???????? You can skip the learning curve and go straight to reaping results

·???????? Agencies are focused on results

·???????? You’ll be exposed to many new ideas for growing your business.

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Cons:

·???????? Working with an agency tends to be expensive

·???????? The client’s and the agency’s vision do not align.

·???????? There is a learning process for the agency to understand your business and niche

·???????? Frequent change of teams because of internal issues within the agency.

·???????? You are not always the agency’s priority.

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Having said all that, if you made it this far and are considering to work with an agency, feel free to work with us at SI Global. Our aim has always been to keep our clients happy and to ensure that every client is a priority. If you’d like to know more about our different plans go here and if you’d like to see what our clients have to say about us, go here.