You’re Ready to Create a Social Media Strategy to Grow Your Small Business

Bluehost, web hosting specialists, surveyed 500 small business owners to assess the most pressing challenges they face in 2021. Nearly half - 44% - of those surveyed stated that securing new clients is their overarching concern.

Mask wearing and social distancing have stressed our ability to connect through face-to-face contact; a profound aspect of relationship building and instilling trust. This void must be filled with meaningful digital marketing strategies that will retain current clients and engage new prospects with your unique products and services, generating more revenue, traffic, and leads.

The pandemic greatly increased the time people spend online searching for brands, products, and services. This shift in consumer habits creates an opportunity for small business owners to re-engage current followers and create new audiences using impactful digital marketing strategies.

The Beauty of Constraints

Budgetary constraints, less staff, and uncertainty make for a daunting challenge to small businesses as they assess affordable and effective digital marketing tactics. Yet it is necessary to adopt tailored strategies that will jumpstart your business into 2021.

“… a constraint should be regarded as a stimulus for positive change—we can choose to use it as an impetus to explore something new and arrive at a breakthrough.” ~ Adam Morgan. A Beautiful Constraint: How To Transform Your Limitations Into Advantages, and Why It's Everyone's Business

Social Media Marketing

The most effective digital marketing tactics for your business begin with increasing or implementing a meaningful strategy. This begins with identifying your most valuable clients using data to pinpoint “… which customers are the most profitable for your business … with this information, you can make better decisions about who to market to and what marketing channels will be most effective.”

This data mining will enable you to articulate the segments of your existing client base, that are the most valuable and use this as a blueprint for marketing tactics that will delight and resonate with them and like audiences.

Analyze the Data and Implement Your Findings

Once you have collected all of your data, it’s time to analyze it and organize your findings. The analysis phase is crucial because it turns raw data into valuable insights that you can use to enhance your marketing strategies, products, and business decisions.

Tracking and identifying your most valuable customers can be distilled down to two marketing KPI’s (key performance indicators): 

·      Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) - how much revenue a customer generates.

·      Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC) - how much it costs to acquire a new customer.

The implementation of analytics tools such as CRM software allows businesses to track and analyze the customer journey, business costs associated with CLV and CAC, critical to your decision-making process.

Once you have uncovered the patterns and insights in your data, you can implement the findings to grow your business. 

Email Marketing

Email marketing takes first place in almost every list of digital marketing tactics. Building an email list in 2021 is more important than ever. A targeted list allows you to build a database of potential interested customers or prospects.  

Email is seen as 40 times more effective at acquiring new customers against social media such as Facebook and Twitter.

Communication via an effective email list allows you to promote information, updates, and your unique story. The reason an email list is so valuable is that (according to all the data) it is seen as more engaging than social media in terms of click-through rates and other stats. 

Note: Building your own list is more efficient and meaningful - third-party lists are not worth the money.

Targeted Content Strategy

Content marketing is more important in 2021 than ever before. Providing online content relevant to your target audience is one of the most effective channels to lure new clients to your business. Content marketing is cost-effective, requiring minimal overhead and compounding returns.

A library of useful content showcases your business in various ways, engaging current clients as well as prospects, with your value proposition and unique differentiators. Your business’ story can be conveyed using case studies, white papers, instructional articles, blogs, and interviews with industry leaders; all provide incentives to signing up for your newsletters.

Content strategies (including video and social media posts) should be pre-planned and consistently tracked with an editorial content calendar tool working in tandem with your CRM. Experts recommend planning an integrated marketing approach across your website and social media posts six months ahead of the publish date.

The implementation of a social media strategy is critical to your small business, promoting growth in these ways:

·      Boosts brand awareness

·      Increases website traffic and leads

·      Improves and instills brand recall

·      Establishes and enhances brand credibility

·      Increases engagement with current and prospective customers

·      Obtain detailed customer insights