Even though doing small business social media marketing may not be the first thing that comes to your mind when you think of getting new customers as a small business owner…
…it is extremely effective.
But to get the most out of it, you need to do the right things and avoid strategies that can hurt your results or even damage your brand.
That’s why in this article, I am going to show you some of the best small business social media marketing tips.
So, are you ready to see what they look like? If so, let’s dive in…
Incentivized Sharing
This is definitely one of the most powerful things that any small business whether it is local or online should try.
Here is how it works. You often see me talk about the concept of a lead magnet and offering a freebie in exchange for somebody’s contact information so that you can follow up.
Well, the truth is that you can do the same in exchange for somebody sharing your business. Here’s an example.
Let’s say that you’re a café owner and you want to get more people to visit your business and buy coffee. Well, one of the easiest things you could do is to put on every table a tiny paper telling everybody who walks in about a special new offer.
And that offer would look like this. “If you take a photo inside this café and share it on your Instagram, you’re going to get a bottle of mineral water (or another coffee) for FREE with your coffee as well. Just show it to the waitress and she is going to bring it to you right away.”
Guess what would that cause? A CHAIN REACTION.
Most people would have absolutely no problem doing that. And when they share their photo in the café and tag the place there…guess what?
Their friends will be tempted to come in. And when they see the offer, they are going to share it with their friends as well. And then they come in. And guess what?
You get the point. It is an amazing way to get a ton of new customers, and if the café is really good, they are going to keep on coming again and again.
It is a genius tactic and I highly recommend trying it out.
But make sure that you give away something that they want but isn’t costly to you. That way this will be working more than well.
If you’re doing business online, then you might want to go and do some giveaways, or when the product arrives, include a CTA card that will tell them to share the unboxing with their friends, tag your brand, and you will send them some discount code for the next purchase.
You have to get creative here, but the social media marketing principle for small businesses here is just the same.
Local Ads
You know, it is pretty interesting but almost nobody seems to do this for their small business social media marketing.
Every small business in some area is running ads in newspapers, sometimes uses billboards, or does guerilla marketing…
…but nobody actually uses targets an area using social media marketing and running ads on social (or even on the rest of the Internet, which is often even cheaper.)
They just try to do all their small business social media marketing organically.
And that is super interesting as with social media advertising you can:
- Target the right customers
- Set a clear budget
- Track data and make decisions based on it
However, when you run something like a newspaper ad, you can’t do virtually any of these things. If you run a magazine ad, you can at least pick a magazine that is only going to guarantee your dream customers are likely to read it…but it is impossible to track anything.
And on and on.
So, the real question is this. Why not try running social media ads?
Go and give it a shot. But make sure you target the right people in the right place and TEST before you go all in.
Otherwise, you are not going to get any results.
Leverage “Shopping” Features
This is something that you should definitely do. I am personally aware of only two platforms that have these features – Facebook and Instagram and they are both really amazing as they can help you make a ton of sales.
Facebook with its marketplace. And Instagram with classic Instagram shopping.
You can use all of these features to easily promote your products and services and drive traffic to the sales page.
Or even if you are going to decide to create a payment gate within Facebook, then you can sell the product and services DIRECTLY on Instagram and on Facebook.
Isn’t that crazy?
However, I would still recommend that you drive that traffic to a sales page or a funnel because at that time you are in full control. Doing it through Facebook is just too much trouble.
Alright, but that is not everything…
Build A Strong Community
This is going to be one of the main reasons why you are going to do social media marketing for your small business.
Building strong relationships with the dream customers is one of the main reasons why they are going to keep coming back again and again.
And the way you are going to do that is by showing that you really CARE.
That means you are going to share valuable content, respond to their messages, respond to their comments, and try to overdeliver all the time.
Nothing is more powerful than that.
However, that doesn’t mean you should stop promoting. However, do it within the 80/20 content rule. That means 80% of your content = value and 20% of your content = promotion.
In other words, if you post, tweet, or whatever 10 times per week, 8 of those posts are going to be valuable and 2 of them can ask them to buy something.
Got it? Amazing. This is one of the core things that you have to understand when you do small business social media marketing.
However, creating a lot of content and sharing it manually can be a tough job.
Instead, you need to schedule it.
That’s why I’ve prepared one of the best free gifts ever for you that will give you over $800.00 worth of the best Instagram marketing information and free access to arguably the best social media marketing tool in the world that will let you do that.
Click here to find out more about it right away.
You will love it.
Filip Konecny 