Social media is a powerful platform for almost every small business out there. This is because social media can:
- Prove to be a very cost effective option to create brand awareness.
- Help a small brand reach global markets rather easily.
- Expand the customer base exponentially.
- Promote content across multiple channels in a cohesive and strong manner.
The trick really is in knowing how to use social media in order to meet business goals. There really is no doubt whatsoever that social media can help business and here is how a business owner should go about it.
Getting to know your customer
Every business plan has to start with knowing your target audience is it not? Social media can give you extremely insightful information when it comes to customer behavior. You simply have to follow the conversations that are available on various kinds of social media platforms and check how customers are interacting with not just your brand but also the competitions.
This kind of data can be generated to find out:
- Whether a specific advertising strategy will work better than the other.
- What the customer perceives as far as your brand reputation goes.
- Whether your communications are working to broaden your market reach and so on.
Brand image
Thanks to the many online tools that are available, you can ensure that your content gets pushed to all your social media channels instantly. This gives people the opportunity to interact with you across multiple platforms. The one thing that you must keep in mind here is cohesiveness when it comes to brand image.
This could be by way of:
- The headings that you choose.
- Descriptions of your products.
- The color scheme for your images.
- That timing of your posts and so on.
Cost effectiveness
Small business owners often struggle with resource crunch but with social media, they can ensure that they use their resources as smartly as possible. For instance, a business owner does not really have to produce fresh content from scratch for each social media platform.
A ‘one-time investment’ in producing original content can launch a message to multiple platforms and multiple people around the world. Of course, you can also create customized messages so that they become specific to your reader. Distributable content is one of the biggest cost saving measures for a small business owner.
Running an ad campaign
Everybody talks about the importance of being audience specific when it comes to advertisements. Here again, the use of social media can help immensely. Running target ads is possible because social media allows you to segment according to:
- Geographical locations.
- Gender and age.
- Even companies; if you are running an ad campaign on LinkedIn and job titles.
- Interests of the customers and so on.
This is extraordinary simply because you can not only release the targeted ads but also measure their performance and course correct if necessary.
While there is absolutely no doubt that social media can help small business it is also extremely important for the business owner to know that it is an ongoing exercise.
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This guest post is courtesy of Sarah Lee.
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