Today, each business need to be more and more social. What this means?
Small business must be close to their current and potential customers. They must help to their current and potential customers. They must talk to their current and potential customers. They must listen to them. They must implement in their business what their current or potential customers want. Simply, they must be always close to them.
The development of social media platforms and different social tools, enable today’s entrepreneurs easily to accomplish such tasks.
But, today we don’t need to ask question like do we need to build presence on social media tools. It’s the fact that businesses must be there. More important question for this year will be how small business owners can improve their social marketing efforts.
Here are ten steps that can help you in your own social marketing efforts.
1. Check All Social Marketing Platforms That You Already Use
I think that you already have experience in building the presence of your small business on different social media platforms. You probably have already published some type of vide on YouTube. You already have a presence on Twitter, business page on Facebook, Google+, your business blog…
Probably your business is already there on different social platforms. You use them to be there, to solve customer’s problems, to listen to your customers, to talk with your customers, to promote your new or existing products… Simply you as a small business owner use them as a social marketing platforms.
Now is the best time to check your previous efforts on each of the platform that you already use as a social marketing platform. Answer on the following questions:
- Do you achieve the primary goals for your presence there?
- How you use social marketing platforms to be close to your customers?
- How much you use each of the platforms?
- How much conversions you have with customers on each of the platforms?
- How much orders you receive from each of the platforms?
- Where you need to increase your focus?
- What platforms are the places where your target customers isn’t there?
2. Check If There Are New Social Marketing Platforms
I think that in last several years we can witness the birth of many different social marketing platforms.
As a small business owner, you don’t want to miss some of them. You want to try, to be there before your current and potential customers try to find you there.
In this step, you will need to check if there are some new social marketing platforms where you can start building your business presence.
3. Chose where Your Focus Will Be
I know that there are too many possibilities for your business when we talk about social media presence. But, you can’t be everywhere for everyone. You need to be focused on most important social marketing platforms if you want to succeed.
Here are some questions that you will need to answer:
- Where are your target customers?
- What’s the ideal audience that you want to reach and where are they?
- How much time and efforts you will need to succeed?
- Can you have enough time to work on all the social marketing platforms?
4. For Each Platform Chose Metrics That You Will Use
The metrics that you will use will depend on your objectives that you want to accomplish building presence on differently social marketing platform. For example, if you want to increase sales you will measure how much sales you will generate from there. Or, if you want to measure your brand recognition, you will measure a number of shares, retweets, likes…
This is an important step in your overall improvement efforts. List all measures that you will want to measure for each of the social media platforms where you will be present.
5. Use Different Type of Content
Different social marketing platforms will need different type of content. For example, on Pinterest you will need a visual content, on YouTube you will use video content, on Facebook and Twitter you will use combination of visual, video, audio and text content…
Try different type of content because you will never know what will bring you success if you don’t try something.
You can simply start by focusing on more visual content and then check it with the measures that you already setup in previous step. Then, you can change your content and again check with measures. Such a way of implementing different content strategy will tell you what work better and what need to be improved.
6. Increase Personality in Your Content
Don’t over promote. I know that you will want to use as much as possible content that will promote your business and your products and services. But, social marketing don’t work as traditional marketing.
If in traditional marketing the best results you receive if you send more promotional materials, here on social media it’s not the case. As the name of social marketing indicates, you will need to be more social, or more personal if you want to succeed in your efforts.
7. Be Yourself, Not a Copy
You can use successful examples, but you can’t succeed if you copy everything from that successful examples. Different companies, different markets, and industries, and different customers will have different behavior when it comes to social media.
Because of that you will need to try with different creative stuff and tests. The only right way will be the way that you will find with your own experiments and tests.
8. Once Weekly Check Your Metrics Against What You Do in Your Social Marketing Efforts
Now, when you already know where you will build a presence, you already have designed your metrics and different experiments that you will want to test; you can start with your social marketing campaigns.
But, it is important to continuously improve your efforts. Because of that, the best way is once weekly to check your metrics against what you do in your social marketing efforts.
9. Build Weekly Improvement Plan Based on What You Learned From Metrics
The previous step will give you important insights about what you need to do differently next week. If you want a systematic approach in your social marketing efforts, you will need to make weekly plan that can be easily implemented.
10. Implement Weekly Improvement Plan
And, the final step is to implement your weekly plans. But, you must not forget that everything is experiment and everything needs to be tested and be a part of improvement because of the received results.
I wish you a big success in your social marketing efforts.
