You might have noticed how many small businesses are attracting more and more customers online while others are struggling to keep their business above the water. The reason for this is that the successful businesses are using a proven business model to market their business online, and usually consists of many social media marketing initiatives.
If you are one of the businesses struggling to stay afloat, here’s a couple of tips that you can use to supercharge your small business by adding various social media marketing techniques to your digital marketing strategy. This can help you build brand authority online, leads, customers, and sales.
Understanding social media
Social media marketing is really not hard selling. It’s for businesses and individuals having conversations on various social media channels where their prospective customers and clients are hanging out. Why is this important? For a quick answer, it is a no cost way to connect with new clients or your existing client base, establish your expertise, communication, drive traffic to your online profiles and website, and to provide value.
Blogging
Even if you are utilizing all the social media channels in the world, if you can’t send your network and followers somewhere to do business with you, your efforts will be in vain. Blogs are ideal because they tend to rank higher on the search engines and blogs helps to foster a sense of community around your business.
Having a blog is a great way to dive into social media. I believe that your blog can be the heart and soul of your social media marketing initiative, and there is so much more you can do once your blog is up and running. Think of your blog as the central hub connecting all of your social media activity. Encourage your visitors to interact with you socially in as many ways as possible. Include sharing badges on your blog, buttons, commenting tools such as Disqus, and of course, a button that points to your blog RSS feed for your readers to subscribe to your blog.
Social media profiles
You really don’t need a profile on every social media channel. A good place to start is to create a profile on the popular ones, and after you have done your research on checking where your targeted audience hangs out, focus only on those. The popular ones includesTwitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and YouTube.
Relationship building
Once you have your blog and a couple of social media profiles setup – what comes next? The next step is to start using social media to build relationships with people who might become your next clients or your strategic alliances. It is really very easy to get caught up in all the technical nitty-gritty of social media, but in all essence, social media is not about the channels you are using, but about people.
Turning followers into customers
To achieve the best results with social media, you will most likely be using a varied mix of marketing tools in play at once. With any digital marketing initiative, much of your goals will center around driving targeted traffic to your website or blog so that targeted audiences can find out more about you. One of the best ways to increase the chance that someone will eventually purchase something from you is to build an email list. Build trust with your visitors and ask them to subscribe to your newsletter.
Social media marketing is only one way to drive targeted audiences to your website and blog and to start building your list. Using social media channels such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and YouTube together with other digital marketing strategies can maximize your results, and produce more traffic, more clients, more subscribe, and ultimately, more sales.