Social Media has become an integral part of our day-to-day lifestyle for quite some time now. From MySpace to Facebook to Snapchat, people are clinging to their devices to stay up-to-date in this internet world.
Thanks to this evolution, marketers, and executives have a new tool to sell their businesses. Gone are the days when you can only reach your customers through television commercials, big hoardings on the roadside or a newspaper ad. In other words, the world of marketing has taken a different angle since the evolution of the internet.
Social media has evolved to be one of the greatest tools to impact and change the world. Thanks to smart social media marketing, there are many historical changes happened over the years. From the US presidential elections to instant coverage of any natural calamities, we are in the time of connecting and changing the world in the best possible way.
Social media marketing is one of the booming sectors right now. The number of social media users in the year 2018, according to Smart Insights is increased by 13% from the previous year. Meaning, now there are 3.19 billion users who are associated with at least one social media platform.
These numbers clearly define the opportunity provided to marketers to reach their customers. Many brands have already established themselves to leverage the opportunity of social media. Total 50 million local or small businesses are using Facebook Page to advertise their products and services. Moreover, out of 4 million have paid the social media giant to promote themselves.
As a matter of fact, brands do use different social platforms based on their types of products and services. These powerful statistics represent only one social media channel, which is also one of the largest, i.e. Facebook. Social media marketing includes channels like Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, etc. So imagine, there will be other businesses who are killing it on Instagram or Twitter or Pinterest and so on.
So Why Social Media Marketing for Small Business is Super Beneficial?
It is Cost Effective
Let’s face it. Mainstream media is a cut-throat market where big brands invest hugely on different platforms like newspapers, television commercials, radio, etc. Here, small to medium-sized enterprises cannot sustain themselves.
Hence, social media marketing come to their rescue. Social media puts them directly on the stage for the performance. They can target their customer directly, pitch their products and services, interact with them on a personal scale and convert them as a returning customer.
Unlike traditional advertising mediums, Social Media is easily accessible to everyone. All you need is an email id or a mobile phone number and there you go! You can have your account get started in no time and can step into the boundless possibilities for sales.
Moreover, if you can spare some amount in your advertising activities, Social Media is the perfect place to start. Unlike traditional marketing where you may go for a newspaper advertisement, here you can target which type of audience you want to target for how much amount of time period. Moreover, those couple of inches block in the newspaper does not only cost more amount but many times ignored in the mass.
In Facebook and Instagram, they have various parameters like age, gender, interests, demographics, etc. that would create a customized targeting for your particular requirements. Hence, you would be able to target only those customers who would be interested in your product and services through your social media advertisement.
For example, a trendy shoe making company would not like to invest their finance in showing their ads to baby boomers. Their ideal audience is millennial and the younger generation who are extremely relevant to their product.
Hence, social media steals the show by enabling the customer to smartly choose the budget, scheduling, audience, etc.
They Can Give a Human Touch to Every Lead
Customer experience is one of the most important factors in an enterprise’s sales. A satisfied customer will generate more customers. In today’s time, most of the consumers feel to be avoided and unheard from the big brands.
Big companies sometimes don’t have the exact understanding of what their customer is facing in after-sales service. Although small companies who are managing a considerably smaller market has the advantage of leveraging this scenario.
Smaller companies with lesser market reach have only one asset that can boost their businesses, i.e. their existing customers.
Established brands have a decent flow of new customers. But the small businesses must make sure that their current customer is satisfied and feel content after using their services. To do so, social media marketing is the ideal platform for them as it provides the channel to small business owners to connect and engage their customers directly.
Thanks to social media and one of their features called reviews, a small business can actually interact and communicate with their customers. They can acknowledge a testimonial or revert to comment on the post through active social media marketing.
Customers also sent direct messages or fill out a form to convey their messages. Hence, they expect a solution-oriented and warm conversation from the brands.
So the active social media marketing activity assures the buyer that their voice is reaching to the decision makers of the brand. It creates a psychological notion that makes a customer satisfied with the services.
Nevertheless, proper social media marketing would help in after-sales service, it requires hard work and research from the brand. Because the brands also need to understand what a particular customer is expecting and how to deliver the needs smartly. Every customer is different and so is their problem. If a particular type of response that helps a user’s question might not work at all for another user’s requirement.
This time, a smart social media marketer comes into the picture. Because, if you don’t deal smartly, your overall brand will be affected and your money will be wasted. Hence, it is a responsible yet revenue generating idea to do social media marketing for small businesses.
Small Businesses Can Expand Their Radius of Market Coverage
One of the hustles of small business is to increase their customer reach and serve as many people as possible. Often times they desire to expand their geographical coverage to other towns or cities or countries, etc.
Such plans demand energy and resources that small businesses might not be able to afford. They might have to hire sales and advertising people to reach to achieve the objective.
Even if they are able to scale up their reach and increase their coverage area, it would become difficult to sustain those customers who live remotely and serve their queries.
In this scenario, you will face a big hit in your ROI due to poor customer satisfaction.
To cope with all the scenario, social media has come to the rescue. Due to social media, you can pitch your products virtually to anyone. Users can give feedback and share their responses over messages.
Managing every customer’s requirement in one place is almost impossible. But thanks to social media marketing, there would always be a single person who is handling and managing your customers by giving dynamic and personalized messages and solving your customer’s problem through social media marketing. It is one of the major pluses this service provides to small businesses.
Evolve As a Joint Community through Social Media Marketing
Through social media marketing, multiple small businesses can come together and provide exceptional services to both of their customers.
For example, if you are a small business, you can team up with another small business who is not your competitor, in your network and has a similar product and customer segment.
Then what you can do is put up a post saying use our coupon code and get another brand’s one of the products for free.
This way, both the brands can leverage each other customer reach and expand their consumers.
The ultimate goal of this social media marketing strategy will benefit the customers. Customers will remember the brands associated and there are strong chances they would come back.
One of the other fruitful ways small businesses can benefit their customers is announcing special discounts through social media marketing. They can say that avail 10% discount using our code posted on Twitter. This way, you can increase your social media reach and also generate more sales without going door to door advertising your products.
Get Media Coverage and Virtual Identity
As per one of the social media statistic, most people go to the internet before finalizing their purchase. If a small business has a proper social media marketing strategy in place, its social media channels would work as a constant visiting card for its customers.
Because whenever a potential customer comes to your social media page, they will instantly get to know what the brand has done so far and what are they up to these days. If social media marketing is done properly, a random visitor will have a feeling that you are taking your business seriously and showing it creatively through social channels.
These notions will engage your customers with your products and those people are highly likely to convert to your customers. In any conference or events also, your social media will come handy to showcase your products and services.
You Get Priceless Insights of Your Customers through Social Media Marketing
An engaging social media platform will give you an enhanced analysis of your customer behavior. After every social media marketing campaign, you, as a small business owner will have data that will enlighten you with your users’ characteristics and their expectations.
You can get to know which type of content customers like the most, how they are engaging and how they are responding to any of your social media activity.
For example, you ran a series of contests where users need to comment on your Facebook post or Retweet your photo. After this, you can know how customers are reacting to your contests, which type of posts make your fans click and react, etc.
Through social media marketing, such priceless insights will give you key ingredients to plan your mainstream marketing and design future updates of your services and products.
Social Media Marketing will be Your Backbone for Other Campaigns
As a brand, if you opt to other digital or mainstream marketing, social media will prove to be a driving force in a well-performed campaign.
For example, one of your viral social media posts can be used as hoarding or banner at an event. You can showcase how customers felt delighted through your services at your shop. Through social media marketing, this type of cross-channel marketing would be benefiting your business overall.
Here, a Twitter handle has provided their link in their caption which leads to the respective landing page.
Not only mainstream campaigns, another type of digital campaigns, like search engine optimization, paid search engine marketing, email marketing, PR marketing, email blasters, etc. can be crafted through a smart social media marketing.
In a Facebook post, a brand has given its website link so that its customers can instantly check out what the brand is offering. This creates an amazing user experience and credibility.
Google as a search engine observes and decides a website authority through its social media profiles. So your website will receive more organic traffic as your social media pages will give positive signals to Google that your brand provides “thought leadership” in a particular niche.
Moreover, website links shared on a social media post or social media will bring more users to your website. This way, the search engine will know that a particular web resource is getting a considerable amount of traffic from 3rd party sources and improve your search engine rankings accordingly.
Moreover, a successful social media marketing campaign that generated quite a buzz in your customers can be used in PPC marketing and emailers. You can showcase those screenshots in display advertising and email marketing. Such activities create a chain reaction and you can have other successful online campaigns as well.
The power of social media marketing has been approved by many industry-leading brands as well. You can not only target a specific type of people but create a dynamic and loyal relationship with your buyers. At the end of the day, they will have an assured that there is someplace they can always rely on to be heard thanks to effective social media marketing.