Why Should You Use Social Media Marketing for Your Small Business?

By Gaurav Sharma

Social media marketing is a simple, yet effective, marketing tactic that every marketer should use to some extent. It is, however, especially useful for small businesses as it provides some unique benefits for them.

Social media is playing a major role for small businesses. As per a recent survey, 56% of small business owners give prioritize social media. So social media for small businesses is a great option for promoting business and generating good leads.

If you are wondering if social media marketing works for small businesses, then this post is for you. In this post, we will discuss five reasons why you should use social media marketing for your small business.

Excited to learn more?

Let’s get started.

1. It is a Budget-Friendly Marketing Tactic

If you want to promote your small business, chances are that you have a small budget. Social media marketing is one of the most cost-effective ways to promote your small business. 

All it takes is posting on social media consistently and frequently. With social media marketing, you need to invest time and effort, but not a lot of money. Even tactics like influencer marketing are fairly affordable if you partner with micro and nano-influencers.

That is what makes social media marketing one of the best marketing strategies for small businesses. Also, you can automate your social media marketing process using the best AI-based tools.

2. Social Media Helps You Build Strong Customer Relationships

Social media platforms are where consumers are active and engaged. So, if you connect with consumers on social media, you have higher chance of building lasting customer relationships. Also, you can run camping to increase loyalty for your brand because we know loyalty programs are a great way to get customers.

People like to buy from brands that they can relate to or connect with. So, you need to form those connections and build a loyal social media following.

But, how can you do that?

Well, the simplest way to do that is by understanding your target audience and posting content that will resonate with them. Social media is also all about visuals so you should consider hiring a graphic designer or animator to produce such visual content. Alternatively, you could leverage the services of a third-party company for animations.

Over time, you will be able to gain followers based on your chosen social media platform. Once you have that, you can basically run all of your business promotions on social media and expect good results.

If you need help initially, you can seek consultation to help you formulate an effective social media marketing strategy.

3. You Can Also Use it to Address Customer Concerns

Social media is not just a marketing platform for your small business; it can also be used as a customer service channel, representing a significant transformation. Some of the most successful businesses in various industries are already using social media effectively to deliver top personalized customer support. This holds particular significance for small businesses because it provides an opportunity to establish direct communication with customers and promptly attend to their concerns through push notifications. 

Additionally, features like inviting collaborators on Instagram enable businesses to expand their customer service reach by involving team members or partners in managing inquiries and providing support seamlessly.

Posting at the right time while your customers are more active is more beneficial for your social media marketing campaign and you need to find the right time of posting and leverage the best social media scheduling software to schedule your social posts.

For example, you can develop an effective Facebook marketing strategy to get more relevant engagement for high growth in your sales with the good customer base. You need to create a personalized campaign for your Facebook marketing.

As a small business, your reputation is still in the building stages and even a single harsh customer review can cause damage to it. If you want to promote your small business, you need to build and maintain a good online reputation.

Use Social Media Management platforms such as Aritic, which will help you schedule bulk messages across days or weeks. Simultaneously update multiple profiles with targeted B2B messages.

That is where social media can help you.

Wondering how?

Create an engaging digital ad and then post it to social media platforms. After all, you need to do is diligently look at all of the comments and direct messages that you get on social media and respond to them promptly. Many consumers prefer to voice their concerns through social media comments and if you don’t address them right, it might cause a lot of damage.

Not just that, people also ask questions about your brand or product on social media. If you provide them with prompt and satisfactory answers, you might just win some new customers with social chatting.

That's precisely why you need to include a section about customer service when you outline your Instagram marketing strategy or that of other social platforms. The idea is to have a plan in place to serve your customers better through your social media presence.

Barkbox, for example, is a small business that responds to almost all comments on its social media posts. This makes their customers feel like they are important and heard. And, customers who have a good experience with your brand are more likely to turn into loyal customers.

Image via Instagram

Remember, not addressing your customers’ comments is one of the biggest social media mistakes that you should avoid at all costs. 

4. It Can Help You Achieve Multiple Goals Simultaneously

Social media marketing is extremely versatile and can help you achieve multiple marketing goals simultaneously.

You can use it to create brand awareness, engage your existing customers, build an online presence, increase social traffic to your site, and win more customers. 

In fact, you can create different types of creative b2b social media content for different purposes, as part of the same promotional campaign. You can take references from the best b2b social media content tips to create engaging and viral social media content for your social posting. You can, for example, run a campaign where you:

• Use social media posts to announce a new product launch.
• Share stories to give sneak peeks or start a countdown before the launch.
• Add relevant hashtags to increase your content’s reach.
• Go live for a virtual launch event where you talk about the product.
• Provide special discounts to your followers and encourage them to tag their friends.

A campaign like this is fairly easy to create and can help you achieve multiple goals. So, use social media marketing to promote your small business and achieve all of your marketing goals. You need to write short and engaging descriptions while posting on social media and always use URL shorteners to make short URLs that help you save words.

Additionally, you can use WhatsApp marketing software to reach out to prospects to send bulk messages to your audience in an easy way and keep updated to your customers about your offers, new products launch, etc.

5. Social Media is a Great Place to Gather Insights

All marketing campaigns need to be backed by solid customer research and insights. If you don’t know your target customers well, you might as well be shooting arrows in the dark.

For any form of marketing to be successful, you need insights.

But, how can social media help with that?

Well, you can use social listening and analytics tools to gather insights into your audience. Once you understand your audience better, you can create more targeted content and reach out to them more effectively. Also, to create good content, you can use services like Essay Tigers, or Brafton where experts will tell you exactly what works best for your clients.

All major social media platforms have some form of built-in analytics feature. Here are some of the insights that you can gather from these:

• Audience demographics: age, gender, location, preferred devices, etc.
• Best times to post based on when you get the highest engagement
• Content performance data to finetune your content strategy
• And more!

You can also use social media listening tools to track and participate in all online conversations about your brand. You can track brand mentions, respond to all comments or conversations about your brand, understand consumer sentiment, etc.

Apart from this, you can leverage a chatbot to send automated responses to audiences, increase engagement, and simplify the process of contact information collection. Instagram chatbot by SendPlse, for instance, among many other things, can react to mentions of your brand in your subscribers' stories.

Overall, social media is a goldmine of valuable consumer insights that you can use to fuel your promotional campaigns.

What’s more?

There are numerous tools for social media, both free and paid, that you can use to gather these insights and improve your performance.

Conclusion

If you had any doubts about the usefulness of social media marketing for your small business, hopefully, this post has provided some clarity. 

Social media marketing is a cost-effective and versatile marketing tactic that all small businesses should adopt. So, if you have not yet invested in social media marketing, it's time that you do so.

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