Marketing your small business can be hard, especially when you don’t have a massive budget for advertising.
And that’s why in this “social media marketing 101” article, I’m going to show you how to market your small business using social media even if you don’t have a penny to spend on ads.
In fact, you can reach hundreds of thousands or even millions of people. So, let’s begin…
What’s Social Media Marketing?
Social media marketing means marketing your small business using social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, and many others. You will leverage the nature of the social media platform to get more exposure and make more sales.
Alright, the definition is the easy part. Making it happen is way harder.
You need to take a lot of steps to be successful with social media marketing for small businesses:
- Pick the right platform
- Create a content strategy
- Leverage the platform’s algorithm and engage
- Sell without selling
In this article, we’re going to take a look at all of them.
Pick The Right Platform
If you want to be successful with social media marketing, the first thing that you need to do is pick the right platform.
There are many factors that you need to consider when choosing one. First, you must ask yourself if your dream customers are on that platform.
If you target an older audience, they’re obviously not going to be on TikTok.
Business owners are not going to most likely spend their time on TikTok as well. And on and on.
However, it’s the same with other platforms. You must ask yourself whether or not they are on the social media platform that you want to choose for marketing based on their demographics and psychographics. If not, hands-off! If yes, let’s move on…
Second, you must find out if the nature of the platform is in alignment with your brand. Let’s use TikTok as an example once again.
If you’re a business lawyer, you’re not going to dance in front of a camera, will you? Of course not…it’s dumb. It would most likely hurt your authority and decrease credibility.
And it is the same with all of the platforms. Understand if the nature of the platform fits your brand and if the content format is right.
Next, you must pay attention to is the organic reach on the platform. If you’re deciding about Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, Twitter, etc. then I can peacefully say that the organic reach is great!
But for example, Facebook’s organic reach is DEAD. Unless you pay to play you won’t reach a single person. It’s just not worth it to spend your time on that platform as you’re not going to get any results.
And last, you want to check additional features that the platform can offer that would help your business. For example, Instagram has Instagram Shopping. That can be a game-changer for most businesses.
LinkedIn has an option to connect with B2B professionals, hire people, create a company page, etc. All of those features can make an incredible impact and they matter.
Alright, have you decided on the platform that you’re going to use for social media marketing for your small business? Awesome!
Now, let’s move on to the next lesson of this 101 article ‘class.’
Create A Content Strategy
Once you choose the right platform, you must understand that to successfully do social media marketing for your small business you MUST consistently publish new and new content.
And no. Content is not product photos, promotional videos, etc.
Content is something that gives actual value to your dream customers. Here are 3 main value pillars for any social media:
- Education
- Entertainment
- Inspiration
Your content should always be created based on one of these content pillars. Now, is there time for promotion? YES. But promoting in every post is not going to get you a single follower, lead, and most likely not even one sale.
If you want to create a kick-ass social media content strategy for your small business, I dive into the 2 most powerful ones in my recent article.
They will literally let you turn strangers into customers and make a lot of money.
The next thing that you are going to need to decide on to successfully grow your following and get a lot of new followers is the posting frequency.
The rule of thumb is that the more you post, the better. I disagree. The more high-quality content you post, the better…if you’re not going to burnout in the process.
However, you should never go under posting 1 piece of content per day to build trust and reach new people.
The next super important part of your content strategy is to consistently improve the content based on the measurement and adjust it to the platform’s new features, or even new content formats.
Consistent improvement is the key to success, and using the new platform’s features can let you reach a ton of new people.
So, plan it in your content strategy.
Leverage The Platform’s Algorithm And Engage
As I already said, every social media platform works differently. And the way you are going to leverage the platform’s algorithm is the scale that will determine your success.
You can literally reach MILLIONS of people, or you can reach 100 people.
The best way that I can share it is through Instagram. On Instagram there are hashtags, suggested for you lists, explore page, reels explore page, location tags, etc.
The more of these pages you are going to get your post on, the more people you are going to reach.
And currently, there is a Reel feature. Reels are often showing on ALL of these things and that’s why even accounts that are beginning can go viral and literally reach hundreds of thousands to millions of people. (And it often happens.)
However, if you post a normal post, it can be only shown in location tags, hashtags, and explore pages.
And that’s what I mean.
This is on every platform! Twitter has its Retweet feature. LinkedIn shows your post to followers and connections of people who have liked it, etc.
You must understand all of these things and find out how to leverage them so that your business gets a lot of exposure.
The next thing that you must do is engage with people.
It’s called social media for a reason, and if you want to be successful there you have to build relationships with people.
Engaging with others will get your brand more exposure, strengthen its reputation, build trust, and result in making more sales.
Usually, the way you are going to do that is by commenting and replying to comments, but you also must reply to direct messages, respond to questions, or even make them participate in where your brand is going to go.
It’s super important to do it or you are going to fail.
Sell Without Selling
The biggest mistake all of the small businesses trying to do social media marketing is promoting 100% of the time.
They share product images, testimonials, sales pitches, etc.
This is a big NO on social media. You’re not going to make a single sale if you will do this. That, however, doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t sell.
That means you must use the 80/20 content principle. It means that 80% of your content should be only valuable and building relationships. The next 20% is promotion.
Once you structure what you do based on this principle, you’re going to make way more sales than ever before.
Filip Konecny 