Social Media Marketing is a way for companies or brands to interact with customers, maybe potential customers, in a social, natural way. Also, this platform is way faster in terms of reaching your customers irrespective of their educational status. This is typically done on bigger sites like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, or Twitter, but it can also be done on smaller niche sites built more around the community.

There are approximately 4.1 billion internet users, i.e. 54 percent of the global population. To put it into perspective, 2.46 billion of those people are social media users. Social media has encouraged us to share everything with the world. In terms of businesses, we have changed the way in which we communicate with our customers.

Why is social media marketing important?

Social media is like a town hall. It’s a place where people come to see their families or catch up with friends, share stories, even discuss today’s latest breaking news or educate themselves. People don’t want to be handed a flyer with your sales pitch on it; they want to discuss and engage in things that are relevant and interesting to them. So, it’s a chance for entrepreneurs to reach out to people that may not know anything about them, to engage in conversations, and have honest discussions about their products that may be beneficial to the audience.

Benefits Of Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing can serve every stage of the buying cycle. The two most important of them are:

• The first one is the awareness stage which is where customers or prospects may not know anything about your company, and you’re trying to get yourself in front of them. You try to engage in conversations with the people or find places where they’re talking about things that are related to your company. So you reach out to the potential customers and make them aware of your company.

• The second one on the other end of the spectrum is more about customer relations. It can support or turn your existing customers, the most loyal ones, into brand advocates.

Basics Of Social Media Marketing

Let’s see what are the foundation pillars for marketing on social media:

1. Strategy: Strategy is considered the major part that drives the growth of your company. It lets you analyse the relevant goals and also helps you in planning your business. The strategy encompasses everything related to planning, setting goals, analysing how to engage with the audience, and so on.

2. Planning: A large part of your success in a small business depends on how well you plan your social media campaigns. Also, before you start marketing on social media, you need to have an amazing plan. Research your current market trends, define your target audience, and identify which platform is suitable for your business. 

3. Engagement: As your business grows, the reach also eventually increases. You have a lot of things to take care of. Starting with an excellent social profile to interacting with customers on any social media platform, you will be on the edge of your marketing campaign. So having a good engagement ratio is going to help you very much.

4. Analytics: Social media is a very vast platform where you can promote any of your products. Analysing its rules can give you enough stuff to start your business. Analysing your needs from social media, tracking them, and converting them is very important.

5. Advertising: Have you ever seen any ads which pop up now and then while watching a video? These are nothing but advertisements that are up for promotions.  Always make use of Google ads, LinkedIn ads, and Instagram sponsored ads to promote your products.

Tips To Flourish Your Business On Social Media

When it comes to small business owners and entrepreneurs, they have to face many challenges with social media. So we have provided you with the best tips to bring in traffic to the website.

1. Creating Smart And Measurable Goals: This is super important because if you don’t align your social media marketing goals with your business goals, you will not know exactly what you have to post. But when you have an intelligent and measurable goal that you are trying to achieve, it makes you empowered to execute your social media and know with intentionality what content to put out.
2. Create A Social Media Toolkit: A social media toolkit allows you to create different templates for your social media, so that way is just a plug-and-play when you’re going out to execute.
3. Create Searchable Content: There are so many different pieces of searchable content that are very important. Here you get to see what people are searching for when it comes to your business. Your job on social media is to answer those questions of your potential customers who are ready to make this sale.
4. Brainstorm Your Ideas: Basically, here you are trying to make sure that you take all the ideas of your head as a small business owner and put that on paper. It doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to execute all these ideas right now. You have to recollect it so that you can be very intentional with your content.
5. Make Time For Engagement: Every single day, try to spend 15 minutes commenting on all of your different social media platforms and creating a sense of engagement online. If you do 10 likes, 10 comments, 5 shares, or 5 direct messages consistently every day on all your platforms, you will undoubtedly create a community online that will actually turn into sales at the end of the day.
6. Focus On Video Content: As humans, we are very used to the idea of movement. We like to interact, so video content will allow you to stand out. It is very underutilized right now for small business owners and entrepreneurs but can be a very beneficial tool.
7. Use Tools To Streamline The Process: Focus on what systems and tools you will use to execute your ideas. You can use all the tools and kits available to streamline the social media marketing process.
8. Venture Into Different Social Media Platforms: Last piece of advice very daunting to entrepreneurs is trying to come out of your comfort zone and venture into new platforms. Get a Facebook and an Instagram page for your business. Also, make your business profiles on LinkedIn, Pinterest, and YouTube. These are other platforms that can really help bring in traffic to websites and attract customers.

CONCLUSION

Social Media Marketing mainly refers to the process of obtaining more traffic through social media sites. Also, if you want to launch a product and can’t decide its colour, ask it on social media, and wait for the responses to come flooding back. Marketing on social media platforms is phenomenal. 

Social media has a massive opportunity to be a brand awareness and sales tool for your business. Still, it can be a great challenge for those who run small businesses and entrepreneurs. So try to think out of the box because only creativity will allow you to stand out from the competition. 80% of your marketing results come from 20% of your efforts.